Wikipedia:Lamest edit wars/Meta pages
 | 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.
Meta pages
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What April Fool's jokes should be mentioned on the Main Page, if any? This protected page, editable only by admins, normally goes unedited for days – all content is included from templates, so there is no need to edit the Main Page directly. On April 1, 2005, it racked up more than 60 revisions of varying seriousness before finally being reverted to a days-old version. This does not even include all revisions of the templates the Main Page includes. (edit history)
Once upon a time, editors felt the need to give an example of an inappropriate article title. "The weather in London" was chosen. And then, over a long period of time, people created and admins deleted various entries for The weather in London (normally, either a redirect to London#Climate or some variation on the words "bloody cold, let me tell you"). At one point, a soft redirect explaining the historical situation was created, but that has since been replaced by a hard link to London#Climate. What made this so lame? Well, the above arguments led to one of the longest page deletion logs for any page on this site.
There was a flurry of activity in late 2011 when an enthusiastic user noted that the often abbreviated form of "Wikipedia:Articles for deletion" should be WP:Afd and not WP:AfD as had previously been the case. A bold maneuver quickly descended into arguments from both sides, culminating in the rather sage advice For fu*k's sake, leave it alone and a proposal to ban anyone else having the gall to carry on the discussion. The closing administrator perhaps summed up popular opinion by stating "I have intently analysed every word of the impassioned arguments presented in this section, both for and against, and have discovered that this discussion is pointless, and furthermore, that we all have better things to do than try to change a long-standing abbreviation that has presented absolutely no problems to anyone ever."
Regular dispute spurts over the wording having to do with the placement of footnotes: after or before punctuation? Do we or do we not recommend any one? Should we be consistent between articles? At one point spread to several related policy and style pages.
Should the rule to be ignored be singular, or plural? Will working with others be permitted by this policy? And can (or should) this rule itself be ignored? Many editors, including a few administrators, spent well over a month trying to decide these critical answers. And then, a few months later, spent well over a month doing it again. See protection log and the story of a change to IAR.
Another edit war about this page (circa 2006) was whether it should be kept to the one-sentence version from Larry Sanger, or be several paragraphs, including explanations and conditions of the policy.[1]
Can users remove themselves from the list? If so, should they have their names replaced with User:Place holder? Culminated with User:^demon blocking himself for 3RR after reporting himself on ANI and the page being nominated for deletion. The MFD ended in no consensus after 99 KB of debate.
A minor two-word change to the guideline sparks an edit war over whether words in quotes should very rarely be linked or should never be linked. Reactions to these two words involve gratuitous personal attacks and spread to several related pages in a forest fire, including pages explaining how "binding" the manual of style is supposed to be in the first place.
Mother of all notability disputes, edit wars have erupted over wording of the guideline, whether parts are/were significantly disputed or not, and even – once it had been demoted from a guideline – whether it should be tagged as "essay", "historical", "proposed", or "failed".
An edit war which focuses on which image should be used to describe "dick". Matter on hand include WP:BLP, WP:censor along with a US president, a US vice president and 1960 politics. But that wasn't enough. No, a further edit war, as lame as it was slow, continued, with each side fiercely picking a new picture for the page and defending it to the death! Thrust! Parry! Riposte quinte! Remise! Counter-attack! Finally, the issue became so serious, so unbelievably important, that the only resort was a request for comment. Normally this would be seen as overkill for a humor page, but only by fools and knaves, blind to just how important this page truly is. And with that request for comment came ... a DEATH-BLOW!
What will the future bring, for a vital issue such as this, the choice of which picture is the funniest/least funny/most educational/least educational/best pun/worst pun on a humour page? One might think that only arbitration can decide, but thankfully this seems to have been averted, with the most recent image change sticking without any arguments.
Wik's nominations of nine Wikipedia:Wikicops were moved; the wikicops page itself got in a move war about a week later and ended back at Wikipedia:Administrators. [1]
What is the correct wording to indicate that an RfC may be followed by an arbitration request? Is it "Although not formally required before proceeding to arbitration, many RfCs are steps towards it", or is it "Many, though by no means all, arbitration cases are preceded by a user-conduct RFC"? Three-way revert war that has lasted two weeks and 50+ edits so far.
A simple redirect to an RFC page that was deleted and recreated numerous times.
The meta-irony of an edit war over the presence of {{disputedtag}} on the page, amounting effectively to a dispute over whether there was a dispute, could be topped only by the version without the tag being protected with the protecting admin then adding {{pp-dispute}}. There has more recently been a dispute over whether or not spoilers are even necessary, which has been resolved for the most part, yet it continues to smolder to this very day.
Pretty much anything to do with non-admin rollback
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Including this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, and this page. Users creating more pages than they've had laid. More proposals than a Vegas wedding chapel. More polls than Super Tuesday. Polls about the proposals, one of which garnered nearly 500 responses. A poll about that poll. After disputes about consensus status (including edit wars over which pages should have what tags indicating their consensus status), another poll was started, edit warred over, and then locked. A draft of the next poll was started, edit warred over, and then locked. A poll about having polls. Big red warnings about polls (soon reverted). Some heated discussions and locked-page edit reverting over a picture of a cat (shown at right). Some minor admin edit warring over the perm-protected watchlist message. Propaganda-like editing at the bulletin board – even Jimbo gets involved. An ArbCom case. Pronouncements from Wikipedia's co-creator and the current Foundation chair, including contradictory suggestions.
What should the "other" section be called? Other pranks? General tomfoolery? General Jerryfoolery? Something incredibly long? The Bee Movie script? Should it be an SCP? Should it contain generation VIII Pokémon made out of synthetic elements? Should egg be part of a balanced breakfast? Should it have a hint of crab rave? Eventually, users just settled on "The section title of the article that people kept edit warring over" foolery. This edit war has been dubbed The Great April Fools' Day Edit War by some, with hundreds of different titles by the end of the day, leaving us to have to make a whole page documenting the mania, which you can see here.
Once again, the Tomfoolery/Jerryfoolery debate occurred, and the ensuring chaos enveloped the ENTIRE April Fools page. The Communist Manifesto got posted. Someone posted hundreds of digits of pi. People began listing the names of pokemon. "Pre-April 1st" became "Pre-March 32nd", then "Pre-February 61st", and so on. The page got rotated 45 degrees. It got to the point where there had to be a genuine request for page protection because things had gotten too insane. All this happened in the first three hours of April 1st. And out of this came: The Great April Fools Edit War Part II: Electric Boogaloo. This war was so absurd that there had to be an RfC over conduct on April Fools' Day, with consensus being that these edit wars are to no longer be tolerated.