Breaking news! - Earlier I pointed out a trivial example of conflicting editorial views on history within Wikipedia. Recently, someone resolved the conflict by completely deleting the entire sentence:
Smaller scale conflict occurred in North America with the USA finally reacting to years of British assaults on US shipping, but the conflict ended inconclusively.
The poster gave the following reason:
I edited a line about the war of 1812, because it isn’t actually relevant to the Napoleonic Wars.
Some people will disagree with this line of reasoning and so the attempt to resolve the conflict has actually created a new conflict. Luckily there is a mostly reasonable discussion of the problem on the talk page and I suspect we haven’t head the last of this ongoing drama.
Wikipedia’s detractors like to point to this type of conflict as an example of the problems with community driven content, but to me it is a beautiful thing. Here you see a small group of regular people who, in the process of creating a summary of the Napoleonic Wars, are interacting and learning in a deep, personal and permanent way. At the same time they are creating something that is pretty good, and it is useful to many, many other people.
Entries (RSS)