Wikipedia:Lamest edit wars/Numbers and statistics
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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.
Was he 7'1" (216 cm)? 7'4" (224 cm)? 6'10" (208 cm)? Was his height even consistent during his entire career? Is this in reference to his actual height or the height which promoters billed him at? Did his actual height decrease in his final years due to the effects of acromegaly or due to back surgery? He was tall, just leave it at that.
Is the city's climate subtropical or continental? Are there a couple snowstorms a year, or several? Do some winters bring less than an inch of snow, or only a trace? How often does it get below 10 °F (−12 °C) or, for that matter, 5 °F (−15 °C), or even 0 °F (−18 °C)? Is January's average low 29 or 23 °F (−2 or −5 °C)? And just which weather station most accurately describes Baltimore's climate? These seemingly easily verifiable facts have been the subject of a slow-motion edit war for many months, with occasional language-parsing jockeying for position (for example, "However, winter warm fronts can bring brief periods of springlike weather, while Arctic fronts drop temperatures into the teens" vs. "However, winter warm fronts can bring periods of springlike weather, while Arctic fronts can briefly drop temperatures into the teens") continuing to this day.
Never mind what the airport's web site says, our nationalist pride is more important! Let's crank up those numbers! (Also seen on Toronto Pearson International Airport, Kochi, and many others.)
Let's inflate the earnings of our films, and deflate the earnings of everyone else's. But wait, they're doing the same thing. Can anyone tell the real story? (See the histories for individual films, such as Paglu, Shotru, Khokababu, etc.)
Listed at 5'3" (160 cm), admits to being taller. Is he really 5'5" (165 cm)? Or 5'6" (168 cm)? Is an uncited claim valid for the latter? Sockpuppeting follows over a matter of one inch.
Every so often, tempers flare up over the bot-created "demographic statistics" added to the encyclopedia back in the Dark Ages (2002, to be exact) and the "Wikipedia = The Story of Everybody, Somebody, Anybody and Nobody" stance adopted by many editors towards actually fixing these entries when the information is not exactly useful to readers. For instance, do we need to know the median income in this town has been $66,250? Is it original research to write "3" instead of "50% of 6"? In response to the sentence "For every 100 females there were 88.9 males", one editor's eloquent statement says it all: "there are SEVENTEEN PEOPLE IN THE VILLAGE, for fuck's sake"! And that's based on the 2000 Census; imagine how much more anachronistic and awkward these "statistics" would be were they to be based on Chicken's 2010 Census population of seven! Speaking of which, see also Prudhoe Bay, Alaska: while nowhere near as lame, edit warring dragged on in that article for years for pretty much the exact same reason. Ironically, settling the issue in that case resulted in effective abandonment of the article prior to the 2010 Census, in which the community's population mysteriously soared from just five in the year 2000, to 2,174. And if all this didn't drive home the point enough, here's what one editor had to say about Port Clarence, Alaska back in 2005: "What's the point of saying there are 2000 males for every 100 females, if there's only 21 people in all? Why not just tell the truth – there is one woman, 20 men?" Sadly, no known edit wars ensued from that statement. We have learned two things, however: Alaska has a number of underpopulated communities, and the manner in which many underpopulated communities are portrayed on Wikipedia is truly lame. But can they be called underpopulated if Alaska as a whole is sparsely populated?
It is widely acknowledged that Larry was a Category 5 storm on the Australian tropical cyclone scale (the one that matters with respect to Larry) ... but what about the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale? Was it a Category 3? Category 4? Category 5 perhaps? Soon after Larry made landfall in Queensland, Australia, edit warring broke out and the talk page became filled with personal attacks and egos.
Is it 120 km (75 mi) or 160 km (99 mi) in diameter? Even 900 km (560 mi)? How shall they word that? Is the hyperdrive class three or four? Who really cares? George Lucas apparently doesn't. Sure, HE's not the one stuck with the life-or-death decision of picking the right caliber torpedo to blow it up. But to a Rebel pilot, it's very important! This is war, after all.
Before it became a featured article in July 2014, for four and a half years tempers flared over this article. Not surprising, considering all the controversial topics in play: their disputed status between the UK and Argentina, their naming as Falkland or Malvinas, coastal, fishing, and mineral rights, a reasonably recent war, et cetera, et cetera. But who would have guessed that the most controversial issue would be whether to list distances with miles first and kilometres second, or vice versa?
August 2005 edit war asking: who finished third in the 1930 FIFA World Cup? The United States? Yugoslavia? For a year before the Football World Cup 2006, and persisting after, this subject gives involved users something to pass the time.
The infobox lists the four top scorers with five goals each: Forlán, Müller, Sneijder, Villa. Or was it Müller, Villa, Sneijder, Forlán? List in alphabetical order, or in order of FIFA's Golden Boot award where assists and playing time are tie-breakers? The fight continues more than a year after the players went home. Couldn't one of them just have scored another goal and saved us the trouble?
How big is that hard disk drive, exactly? Discussion on this point took over 160,000 bytes (or over 156 kibibytes), with the page being locked for days at a time [1] [2] while this was resolved. Not that you can now figure out how a hard drive works from this article, in spite of all the editorial effort expended.
Is the 45th POTUS Donald Trump, 6'3" (191 cm) or 6'2" (188 cm)? Should it be noted that his height is disputed? A long-running dispute that has been occurring since the 2016 election has involved several registered users and IPs. Unfortunately, it seems that this debate over one inch is not going to be settled soon, and only his hairdresser knows for sure. In December 2019 it received the crowning glory of edit war lameness: media attention, as Gizmodo pronounced it "The Dumbest Wikipedia Edit War of The Dumbest Decade".
Should 4G be included when referring to LTE even though it technically does not meet 4G requirements?
Here's a penny for your thoughts: should our given retail price for this video game console, US$399.99, be rounded to the nearest dollar and listed as $400, despite being technically incorrect and sources stating otherwise? A smaller dispute also erupted over which prices should be displayed, at all.
Is he 5'2" (157 cm)? 5'3" (160 cm)? 5'5" (165 cm)? Did he debut at 5'4" (163 cm) and later grow to be 5'5" (165 cm)? Is he actually 5'6" (168 cm)? Should the official WWE website be taken as accurate despite its common practice of increasing heights and weights for entertainment purposes? What about heights as they appear in video games? This edit war, which was strongly contested due to the many conflicting sources, led to the bizarre compromise of listing his height at 5'4½" (163.8 cm) with the text "We have come to a compromise between 5'2" [157 cm] and 5'5" [165 cm]." thus throwing out all sources and making a claim based on middle ground rather than accuracy ... which, as of 9 February 2008, has been supplanted by 5'6" (168 cm) again.
Are they 8–12 years old? 9–12? 10–12? 8–13? Even 17 years old? Webster says something different from Oxford. American Dictionary says otherwise. And what is the deal with people typing in all caps?
Is the Bee Gees recording 120 beats per minute, 103, 104 or something else? Should we also mention the Queen song "Another One Bites the Dust" for the same reason? Don't rely on Wikipedia to do CPR properly.
Street Fighter character articles
[edit]Drawn-out revert wars over the correct heights and weights of fictional characters such as Ken Masters and Balrog are ultimately solved by leaving the statistics off entirely. Should the full names of characters be used, or the abbreviations? Let's not get into the Vega/M. Bison/Balrog naming mess.
Is Kurt Angle the first champion, or is Christian Cage? When the NWA World Heavyweight Championship was withdrawn from TNA by the NWA, did TNA recognize the physical title as the TNA World Title, or did Angle win nothing when he took the belt from Cage? Is Angle in his first, or second title reign? And a discussion on various wrestling writers and webmasters and whose opinion is better than the other's there, too.
7500. Four simple numbers that got an add/remove/add/remove/consensus-add/remove-anyway/ADD edit war ongoing, in slow-motion and, perhaps, still ongoing on this page. What caused all the "squawk"ing? The fact that 7500 is the emergency code you put in a transponder when your aircraft has been hijacked. Although the code is public information provided by the Federal Aviation Administration and available in any student pilot's manual to be grabbed off the shelf, IP editors keep removing it from the article. Because, apparently, would-be hijackers use Wikipedia as their only source of information on aircraft, and would recognise the code when the pilot entered it, whereas it could be entered without recognition otherwise, or so the IPs claim. One even left an edit summary saying "Deleted reference to hijack code for secutity [sic] reasons. (Yes – I know it's available other places ...)". Consensus keeps the code on the page, joined (after yet another well-meaning IP removed the code) by an admin admonishment in an editnotice.
Was the attendance of the event in question 78,000 or 93,178 – or is it really 75,500? Is Dave Meltzer an unreliable source because he is personally anti-McMahon? Is McMahon an unreliable source because he is pro-McMahon? Should Meltzer be considered a reporter because he freelances for the LA Times and Sports Illustrated, or as a self-published hack who runs a tabloid? Either way, this has led to a lot of tears and an eight-month-long edit war.
And because all wrestling feuds deserve a disappointing rematch, a nearly identical dispute erupted regarding the true attendance for this WWE event, which may or may not have set the all-time record for a particular sports arena that had existed for four years. The debate included insults, blocks, and an editor arguing that Dave Meltzer is not a reliable source for Dave Meltzer. Also included was the question of whether a statistic ending in 7 can be trusted. It ended with the WWE's claim being left alone for now, until the next exciting installment of Editmaaaaania!
Just how tall is this famous Chinese basketball player?