Wikipedia:Historic debates
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This is an essay; it contains the advice and/or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. It is not a policy or guideline, and editors are not obliged to follow it. |
This page is a list and short description of large-scale debates and disputes that have occurred in Wikipedia and have shaped its evolution from a geeky concept to the world's largest encyclopedia. The list is arranged in chronological order. Feel free to edit and update, but use the talk page rather than edit war in the event of a dispute (in other words, keep this page off this page ;).) Where possible, provide inline citations to evidence of the dispute, including but not limited to permalinks to talk pages/talk page archives, RfCs, RfARBs and archived mailing list posts. Just like articles, controversial or potentially inflammatory statements are liable to be removed without sourcing.
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[edit] Overview
Most major disputes involve at some level one side asserting that some content should stay in Wikipedia (or in some particular place in Wikipedia) while the other side holds that it should not. Because of the fundamental nature of this dispute there is a tendency to categorise participants in a dispute as either inclusionist or exclusionist, depending on their perceptions about how restrictive Wikipedia's inclusion criteria should be (or to be more precise, how liberal Wikipedia's deletion criteria should be, for there are no inclusion criteria). The merits of such a classification is debated.
The main classes of debates are outlined below:
- Notability: Some such disputes stem from disagreement over whether a subject is notable enough to merit inclusion in an encyclopedia. Wikipedia contains articles on many obscure topics that would never be found at a traditional encyclopedia (Wikipedia:Wiki is not paper). Some people feel that Wikipedia's notability criteria is not strong enough while others think that the very concept of notability should be scrubbed.
- Censorship: Some disputes have had to do with censorship, or the removal of information (usually, images) that someone deems inappropriate or offensive for publication. Censorship cases have chiefly focused around sexually oriented images, such as illustrations of sexual organs, sex acts, and fetishes. A recurring theme of these disputes is whether Wikipedia should be targeted to school classrooms, and whether it is wrong to teach children about such sexual topics. But censorship debates have also occurred concerning religious topics such as Islam and Scientology (see below).
- Social networking: These debates have been about the degree to which Wikipedia editors may use the Wikipedia system for purposes not directly connected to the encyclopedia, such as finding people with similar interests (social networking) and advocating personal political, religious, social, ethical and philosophical views.
- Administrator abuse: These debates (which tend to be small but numerous) are about the extent of the power of administrators, their freedom of acting upon personal judgment rather than community consensus on various matters and their use of the powers granted to them by the community. Since admin actions are not undoable by ordinary users, any slightly controversial one attracts responses ranging from public outcry to legal threats, offensive rants to requests for arbitrations.
- Copyright disputes: These debates concern the way copyrighted content should be handled in the project. The largest subclass is formed by the Wikipedia:Fair use debates about the application of the fair use clause of the United States copyright law.
Analysis reveals that this common nature of disputes is inherent in the very structure of Wikipedia. Disputes always occur when something is at stake, whether that be material or ideological. Since the only thing that Wikipedia provides is information, the only stake within Wikipedia is what and how information is presented. Being the largest encyclopedia in this age of information, this is by no means a small stake, as evidenced by various political figures attempting to manipulate Wikipedia's content to their benefit. Following is a brief overview of some of the more notable of these disputes.
[edit] Schools
In 2004-05, there was a large debate about notability standards for schools. Schools that were not particularly distinguished were nominated in bulk. Long and heated debates ensued, the opposition claimed schools are inherently notable and ultimately almost all the nominations ended in no consensus. This debate sparked off many more debates concerning notability criterion in various other category of articles, but none were as large. For some time the "schools are inherently notable" argument reached some semblance of consensus at WP:SCHOOL and schools were in general not nominated for deletion. Beginning in late 2006, the pendulum seems to be swinging the other way.
[edit] Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy
The incident being a huge global controversy, it could not fail to find its way to Wikipedia. The dispute, one of the largest concerning an article in recent times, was over whether and how the cartoons themselves should be displayed in the Wikipedia article. The various opinions ranged from total removal of the picture to displaying it at the very top of the article in a large size, with everything in between. It is only very recently that the debate could be said to have died down, with the cartoon displayed. This was hailed as a defeat for the forces of censorship.
[edit] Clitoris and Autofellatio
These two debates, one shortly following the other, dealt with the presentation of photographs of sexual organs and acts. In both cases, the original disputed photographs were replaced. In the former case, a different photograph was the replacement; in the latter, a line drawing. At one point, Jimbo Wales deleted a photograph of autofellatio which was, in addition to being used in this article, being posted by trolls on other unrelated articles.
[edit] Lolicon
Another dispute concerning alleged censorship issues, it was long in the making in the form of a sexually themed manga picture of a child that was displayed at the article on Lolicon. There had long been a dispute at the article's talk page when User:Sam Korn decided to delete it without going through proper process. Naturally, a huge row erupted alleging that Wikipedia was being censored. Responses ranged from "this is not censorship" to "Wikipedia SHOULD be censored in some cases". The image was replaced with another one, though most people agree that the newer one is less representative of the typical Lolicon style.
[edit] Wikipedia:Userboxes
One of the largest disputes not concerning article contents, this one was about whether or not users can use templates to express their personal opinions on political, religious and social matters in their personal userpages. It divided almost the entire Wikipedia community into two camps, with hundreds of speedy deletions and speedy undeletions without any semblance of process or consensus.
In late December 2005, Kelly Martin speedied a number of usersboxes, which spawned two RFCs. The turning point against userboxes occured in February 2006, when some users created a pedophilia userbox. Following several deletions, undeletions, wheel warring, and blocks, the case was submitted to arbitration. The Pedophilia userbox wheel war was decided in a record four days and became the first rule against userboxes.
Under debated circumstances, a new article was added to Wikipedia:Criteria for speedy deletion that legalized the deletion of userboxes if they are "divisive and inflammatory". This was used to speedy a number of userboxes as well, which led to the creation of the Wikipedia:Deletion review/Userbox debates subpage to handle the large number of review requests. The debate on the application of T1 spawned the T1 and T2 debates.
Jimbo Wales has opposed the use of these [1] userboxes. Many users believe that the T1 was inserted indirectly by him without consensus, though he has repeatedly denied this allegation. According to Jimbo, the underlying principle involved is that "Behaving in a divisive and inflammatory way anywhere in Wikipedia is not welcome," not userboxes per se. The Wikipedia:Divisive or inflammatory behavior is a proposed policy to clarify that.
The debate was somewhat resolved with the Wikipedia:German userbox solution, which called for the migration of userboxes to userspace.
[edit] Deletion procedures
Deletion procedures have been a recurrent source of disagreement. Several editors have held that Articles for Deletion and related pages are not a very good way of handling deletion. AfD is criticized as too procedural; as too hostile to newbies; and as allowing small groups of editors to exercise disproportionate control. At times, large numbers of proposals have been created for replacement deletion systems. However, none have yet reached consensus. The most substantive change arising from these debates was the renaming multiple deletion pages to old Votes for Deletion page into Articles for Deletion, to avoid using the word "vote," as well as the renaming of Votes for Undeletion to Deletion review.
In August 2005, it was suggested on the mailing list that one option was to get rid of the current system and start from scratch. To the surprise of many, an administrator went ahead and deleted Votes for Deletion. It was promptly undeleted, but the archiving and un-archiving of so many page revisions placed so much strain on the servers that editing sitewide was briefly interrupted. (See related Signpost article.)
[edit] Meta templates
This controversy in late 2005 and early 2006 took place in the template namespace. Wikipedia:Avoid using meta-templates and Wikipedia:HiddenStructure were proposals designed to deal with the issue. It reached its climax with the Locke Cole arbitration case. The main argument was about using either the Parameter default mechanism or CSS display: hide to create conditional table cells and rows in infoboxes and similar templates. The first method used templates like {{Qif}} and ifdef (deleted on Wikipedia). The second method used common.css class hiddenstructure (not working on all browsers).
This conflict resulted in various edit wars, many templates listed for deletion, creation of the Esoteric templates category, and other disruptions. It was suggested at one point that templates should be subst to avoid server strain. It only ended with the introduction of parser functions. Pages like Qif conditionals are relics of these devastating "meta template" wars. Some bots on auto-pilot continue to subst templates for perfectly harmless templates.
[edit] Wikipedia:Attribution
In October 2006, a proposal was put forth to merge Wikipedia:Verifiability and Wikipedia:No original research into a single policy document, and to refactor Wikipedia:Reliable sources as an FAQ sub-page of this new policy. More than three hundred editors participated in the discussion over the course of four months, and the proposal was briefly enacted. In March 2007, however, Jimmy Wales entered the discussion, and restored the individual policies, arguing that they conceptually distinct and should be presented as such. A straw poll was held to measure whether the new policy was acceptable to the community, which received comments from nearly 900 editors. The discussion continued through most of 2007, but by the end of the year, Attribution had settled into a formulation which describes the principles of the verifiability and original research policies in a combined manner, but is not itself a policy or guideline.
