May 08, 2023 23:00:00

Official Wikipedia example collection of 'Fruitless Wikipedia editing battles'

Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia that anyone can edit, and there are many high-quality articles created by '

Wikipedians ' who devote their efforts to editing Wikipedia, but sometimes unproductive editing battles unfold. There was a Wikipedia entry that featured articles where such fruitless battles took place, so I picked out some interesting ones and ones that are familiar to Japanese people.

Lamest edit wars - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars

Ethnic and national conflicts
Wikipedia's list of 'fruitless edit battles' is divided into several sections, and the section on ethnic and national disputes includes discussions of the race and country of origin of famous people such as Chopin and Nikola Tesla.

Discussions that are particularly familiar to Japanese people include the editing battle over '

Liancourt Rocks ,' an English version of an article about Takeshima (known as Dokdo in Korea), over which both Japan and South Korea claim sovereignty , and the Sea of ​​Japan naming dispute, in which South Korea is calling for the Sea of ​​Japan to be changed to its own name, the East Sea.

Other topics covered in this section include the debate over Freddie Mercury's origins, such as whether he should have been an Indian rock star, Iranian, or Azerbaijani , and the specific country of origin of Niko Bellic, the protagonist of Grand Theft Auto IV, whose nationality is not revealed in the game.

By

Carl Lender

◆ Name
This section covers editorial battles over the spelling of various names of people and places. Among them are the long debate over whether Aerith Gainsborough's name in Final Fantasy VII should be spelled 'Aeris' or 'Aerith', the debate over whether Heather, the main character in the horror game Silent Hill 3, should have her full name 'Heather Morris' or 'Heather Mason', and the debate over whether Sega's game hardware Mega Drive should be named 'Sega Genesis' or 'Mega Drive'.

There were also some issues somewhat related to the previous section on 'ethnic and national conflicts,' such asthe debate over whether J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter novel series, should use British or American phonetic symbols, and the issue of the name of the Tsushima Basin.

Spelling and punctuation
Spelling issues include '

Color ' and ' Aluminum '. In addition, Brazil is spelled 'Brazil' in English, but in Portuguese, 'Bra s il' is the correct spelling, so some people insist on writing 'Brasil' even in English articles about 'Brazil'.

As for Japanese words, the question of whether to spell the character 'Holo' from the light novel ' Spice and Wolf ' as 'Holo' or 'Horo' seems to have been a major sticking point for Wikipedians overseas. Also, in a separate article entitled 'Fruitful Editing Battles Over Spelling, Uppercase/Lowercase, and Punctuation,' a five-paragraph argument was introduced that matcha should be written as 'maccha,' which is the Romanized spelling.

◆ Expression
Here, the discussions on how to express the things covered on each page are mentioned. For example, the musical group 'band' is singular in American English and plural in British English, so there are frequent problems with opening the article with 'XX (band name) is' or 'XX are'. Over this issue, two editors fought 46 times in one hour on an English article about the band Angels & Airwaves .

Other topics of heated debate include whether Cranky Kong , who appears in the Nintendo game, should be considered the 'original Donkey Kong' or 'Donkey Kong's father or grandfather,' whether the size of Final Fantasy VIII 's fanbase should be described as 'huge' or 'the same size as Final Fantasy VII's,' whether Squall Leonhart, who appears in the game, is a 'hero' or a 'protagonist,' and whetherTifa Lockhart 's breasts from Final Fantasy VII should be described as 'voluptuous.'

by

shotwhore photography

◆Fiction
This section mainly covers cases where the positioning of fictional works or characters has led to editing battles. Examples include the debate over whether Dragon Ball GT should be included in the canonical series, the debate over whether to transliterate Link in the Legend of Zelda series as 'Rinku' or 'Rinkū,' the handling of a line in the manga 'NARUTO' that pointed out that 'Minato Namikaze and Naruto look similar' before it was officially revealed that Naruto was the father of the main character, and the debate over whether Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader in the movie 'Star Wars' should be considered the same character.

◆List
Wikipedia has many

lists , but the debate surrounding them includes the 'list of virgins' that was removed from the 'Is Britney Spears a virgin?' debate because it didn't even qualify as a list, the debate over how much of the characters should be described in the ' list of My Hero Academia characters ,' and the fruitless debate over whether to add Hermione from the Harry Potter series to the 'list of cat girls/boys.'

◆Image
Debates over which images should be included on Wikipedia have ranged from which of two nearly indistinguishable images of 2020 Atlantic hurricanes is better, whether to include an image of a giant tarantula on a page aboutarachnophobia , to how to depict the invisible pink unicorn .

◆Others
Possibly one of the strangest edit battles is a discussion about Tyrannosaurus, where an anonymous user appeared to be engaged in a heated debate with himself over whether Tyrannosaurus was a predator or a scavenger, but it later emerged that it was actually two people using the same IP address.