Recently, I was reading through Miss Guadeloupe’s article on Wikipedia to check about the next beauty pageant, and I noticed some elements were wrong. 5 minutes later, somebody changed it. Then, the previous editor changed the content again. That made me go to check if the content is the same on Wikipedia, but in English or Spanish, and… there was the same fight again.

Have you seen the content changing on Wikipedia like this? Maybe yes, or maybe no, but this is what I want to talk about in this article. 

Usually, I love going to Wikipedia and just reading a random article to develop my knowledge. I’ll write Cancún, from there, I’ll click on Quintana Roo, and from Quintana Roo I will go to the Caste War of Yucatán. I could spend hours on Wikipedia like this, but I never paid attention to the so-called edit wars before I came across the obvious examples. Then I started searching everywhere for past edit wars, and you will not believe what I discovered.

For instance, some articles may completely change, from one language to another. Depending on who writes or which side tells the story. If there is a war between two countries (for example, Venezuela and China), the version in English can be neutral, but the versions in Mandarin and in Spanish can be different from each other, even the opposite. One side will claim to be great, and that has done the good things, and it was the other side that has done bad. Meanwhile, the other side, portrayed in one language as “the bad guys” will say exactly the opposite: we are good, they are bad.

I went deeper and deeper into the topic. One of the longest edit wars was about yogurt. From 2003 to 2012, people were fighting about misspellings on the English Wikipedia. Can you imagine? Some British editors were fighting against the Americans, simply to have the one and only proper way to write the word yogurt. Or yoghurt. I am not sure how to write this word as well. Consensus was established in 2012 to title the article yogurt, and to note variant spellings in the article’s lead sentence.

Let me give you another edit war: a fight in the English Wikipedia (again) about the name of a Polish city, Gdańsk. Germans used to call it Danzig during the time when Poland disappeared from the world’s map. There was a fight going on between Poland and Germany on how to spell it. For 3 years. They made a consensus with a vote, over 2 weeks. The decision was to use Gdańsk as the official name on Wikipedia, BUT for the period when Poland simply did not exist, starting from 1795 to 1918, the name used will be Danzig. And of course, on the German wikipedia, they use Danzig, while on the Polish wikipedia it is Gdańsk.

Here are just a few examples of wikiwars but if you are interested in the topic you can research more on your own. That’s a part of Wikipedia that people might not know about, and it should be talked about more, considering that very often the information found on Wikipedia is taken for granted by many.

Terry Ruart-Toi

Sources: 
Wikipedia – List of edit wars on Wikipedia