Wikipedia:Lamest edit wars/Lists
 | This page contains material that is kept because it is considered humorous. Such material is not meant to be taken seriously. |
PLEASE include two or three edit history links about the lame edit war. It would be also useful to list the date the edit war was added.
Edit war over how a table should be formatted, which led to 46 reverts (23RR for both users) over the course of 14 hours.
Edit war over whether a large, colorful list of truckers' hat styles worn by this fictional character should be included. Leads to page protection, allegations of admin abuse and sockpuppetry.
Edit warring over whether or not the list of South Korea's achievements in the World Cup should or should not merge the consecutive years when South Korea did not enter (and the same for when it didn't qualify).
Such a list was created in April 2008. Led to dispute over what locations should be listed, whether they should be only major cities, small towns too, and suburbs of major cities. Then the list was proposed for deletion. Survived the first AfD, then died on the second. Arguments against were that it was a directory, impossible to maintain, and that one day, as Google's goal is, would include the whole world. Made better sense when the service existed only in the United States. Now it's a redirect to the Google Street View article. Easy, right? Apparently not.
List of multiracial people
[edit]Are people who are White and Multiethnic considered Multiracial? It doesn't matter anymore, as the article was deleted.
In January 2020, an edit war about whether the list of characters should also include short descriptions happened then was seemingly resolved. However, from May of 2020 to August of that same year, it picked up again, and because the edits fueling the war happened monthly instead of daily, the 3RR could not stop the edit war. What makes these wars particularly lame is that both the January and August wars caused the main instigators of both sides to flood the article's talk page (mainly in January) and dispute resolution noticeboard (in August) with blatantly uncivil behavior. Some examples include but are not limited to name-calling, stalking, and accusations.
List of numbers that are always odd
[edit]The number 3 was being considered as possibly being not odd. Page protection was needed to halt the heated debate. User:Wik's correction of a misspelling of hypochondriacs was re-reverted no less than three times. Supposedly as a means to illustrate the ludicrousness of the subject, various examples such as "the atomic numbers of gold and silver, but not their sum" and "the number of days in a year (except leap years)" were added to the list. Later in the edit war, no less than two thousand five hundred numbers of debated oddness (every second integer from 1 to 4999) were added and removed, four hundred ninety eight of them repeatedly before the edit war was solved by the article's deletion after a VfD vote. An ancient mirror website still had a version available, though, so it's been rescued for posterity: User:ConMan/List of numbers that are always odd
List of virgins
[edit]Dispute about whether or not Britney Spears belonged on the list, eventually resolved in a definitive manner: maintenance of the list proved impossible and it was later deleted.
Should the list have a pink background? Yes, this really happened.
Should Wii Points be included? Should they be in the main tables, or discussed in the header? Should there be one table or several, broken out by console? What should the default sort order of the list be? All these issues came to a head at once, resulting in a huge revert war.
Should the band's genre be rock, pop, dance, emo, big beat, techno, punk, dance, techno, jazz, electronica, alternative, indie, etc. ...? Four talk pages of debating, arguing, and "discussion" later: and we have arrived on the conclusion of rock and dance (for the time being) and a disabling of editing by new or unregistered users.
Dispute over whether or not "alternative gatherings" should be included in the list of gatherings, leading to failed mediation, protections, blocks, and finally one party walking away from the whole project. Don't you want to know when your local subculture is gathering in a copse of trees?
Should this group devoted to high-power model rocketry and related legal advocacy, the subject of a New York Times article headlined "A Cult of Backyard Rocketeers Keeps the Solid Fuel Burning", therefore be included in List of groups referred to as cults? The debate raged in February 2007 and again in May 2007, apparently because its inclusion makes some sort of point about the list simply being a disguised non-NPOV list of cults. Two key combatants in this battle have dragged their bad blood to a third editor's talk page, where accusations fly regarding editing each other's comments.
Should the article Beer style include a link to the Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP)? A months-long revert war ensues over a single link.
Highest-valued currency unit
[edit]Is the Bitcoin a currency? Should the fact that it is worth more than any other currency swing it either way? Going on-and-off since 2011, this debate that has led to most of the talk page being filled with ad hominem attacks, dozens of reverts (with both sides claiming vandalism), and two protection locks so far. Just be glad that Kuwaiti patriots, upset that the Bitcoin is beating their dinar, haven't found this page yet. The article was merged to List of circulating currencies but a short edit war started over whether it should be in the destination article. The redirect was eventually deleted on 7 August 2020.
What badgers are notable enough to earn inclusion? For over a year, there were inclusions immediately reversed, additions of maintenance templates, and rather fiery discussions regarding "badgerness" (including the phrase "the character is non-trivial and is a badger deliberately, for badger reasons"). The involved could be considered mad as a badger, or if another digging mammal is allowed, making mountains out of molehills.
Is Hermione Granger a catgirl? She temporarily develops cat features following an incident in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, but does this mean that she qualifies as a quote-unquote "catgirl"? She is added to the list towards the end of June 2021, and nearly every single edit to the page through October is either removing or re-inserting her entry. No one attempts to justify either position; the talk page goes unused and there is not an edit summary to be seen. One brave editor attempts to begin a discussion on the talk page, but receives no response. Eventually the page is protected and a formal RfC is opened to address the issue.