2005-03-05

Wikipedia as soap opera

While I'm fighting the good fight over the various Global warming related articles on Wikipedia, Miriam has been taking another approach - wiki as soap opera. It started when she followed the RFC against me, and continued in the various edit wars. I keep urging her to get an account - it takes only a few seconds - and to start posting on, say, classical music; but no; she is a lurker.

But wiki as a soap opera can provide you with hours of entertainment if you want, with the added thrill that at any time you feel like, you can participate. Soap opera is all about conflict of course, so a good place to start is Requests for arbitration. This is, as the page says, the end of the dispute resolution process, when all else has failed. One that I have an passing interest in is the case of 172, who I only know from his unwise protect of the GW page. Elsewhere he may be quite sensible, but he has certainly riled some people and it looks like his case will be accepted - ie considered for arbitration. See also the 3 reverts rule enforcement page for the full bizarre history - he ended up having a blocking war with other admins, only ended when Ed "capricious" Poor stepped in and de-sysop'ed them all. Ed gets away with lovable-but-stupid things like this because it all works out well in the end (so perhaps they aren't stupid...). I got an hours ban for sarcasm from him just recently (and M says I should have got another for this). Hmpf. The other case I've been interested in (indeed I started the RFA) is RFA:JonGwynne who (thank goodness) now appears to have gone away entirely, presumably since the case went so badly against him.

Other places to look for exciting conflict on wiki are Requests for comment where people can list pages or people they think are bad, biased or in some way in need of comment from the wider community. Browsing that recently I picked Wave-particle_duality and made some notable improvements... I think... well check the history. Why don't you pick one on the list and go and help it out?

Another way to follow strands is to pick a page - GW, or any page - and click on the "history" tag at the top, to find the list of contributors, then click on one of the users who has contributed to see their user page, then click on "user contributions" (probably in the "toolbox" in the sidebar to the left, though this can vary if you have a different "skin" selected) to see what else they have been up to. Miriam does this for the GW related pages to see if the people I am in conflict with to see if they have genuine and productive edit histories elsewhere.

And if all else fails, you can look at the Recent changes list.

1 comment:

Luboš Motl said...

Wow, the witchhunt against you was pretty extensive - it's almost like the witchhunt against Bjorn Lomborg. The only difference between these two cases is that you are a real b/witch. ;-)