@faggotcitosis replied to your post “unfortunately i've been sucked into reading...”:
omg there's so many. wikipedia™ is actually such a fascinating subculture (and i say this w much respect, like they are Devoted!)
tried my best to sum it up but it's still long so. basically the fundamental value to WP is Consensus. and there's a strict rule on civility, so people must be polite to each other (or at least not engage in personal attacks. stuff like "fuck off", "idiot", etc not acceptable, let alone the usual mess you see in reddit)
and disputes can be roughly separated into content-related disputes, and conduct-related disputes. content-related disputes are basically the usual topics (gender/sex, israel/palestine, US politics) and you see a lot of it on the related talk pages (basically every WP article has a talk page where ppl discuss the article to improve it). there's also articles for deletion (AFD) where people nominate articles they think should be deleted or merged bc of xyz reason, and requested move (RM) where people ask for article titles to be changed. this can get very political as well, there was a discussion about renaming Georgia-South Ossetia border to Outline of South Ossetia because the person said there was no border and SO belonged to georgia. and this happens every day like there's >20 AFDs and >30 RMs a day
conduct-related disputes are stuff like insults, sockpuppet accounts (huge issue on WP which is wild, i thought they were things of the past), edit wars, wikihounding (stalking an editor onto different pages and reverting their edits and harassing them in RM/AFD discussions) etc. so these are taken more seriously because one of the golden rules on WP is you have to be civil. and when you report someone for conduct stuff, you take them to the administrator's noticeboard/incidents (ANI) page where an administrator will try to do dispute resolution, and sometimes people will get suspended or banned, e.g. banned from editing a specific page or topic or interacting w someone
and then when you get 10+ ANI cases around the same/similar topic, that's when someone says fuck it we're taking it to arbcom, which is the arbitration committee (read: supreme court) and they take it Very Seriously. they take about 4 cases a year (usually involving 5+ people accusing each other) and there's preliminary statements and evidence and workshops to figure out the best way to work it out (also i think researchers have studied arbcom as like. internet governance) anyway recent arbcom cases include transgender healthcare, indian military history, palestine-israel, yasuke, and industrial agriculture (haven't read this but probably about GMOs).
(and this is the current one because apparently since 2019 when leaving neverland was released, a group of editors have been coordinating off-wiki (this is bad) to manipulate coverage of the allegations, basically driving off any editor who tries to edit his WP page)
it's fascinating to me because people get really heated about stuff (and also keep in mind WP is intrinsically a hobby that attracts um. nerds and people who are very intense about things (like people will spend 8+ hours editing. i saw someone attack an admin for editing 27 hours in a row and they argued the admin wasn't in their right mind)) but also wikipedia is actually really powerful in terms of its influence? like yeah AI and LLM nowadays is definitely pushing it down but everyone reads wikipedia!! like even for the briefest things. (idk this might be biased maybe people don't read wikipedia that much. this might be a george spiders thing for me, someone who loves reading wikipedia)
so people get into crazy insane arguments with each other on what constitutes fact, what sources are reliable and aren't, whether something controversial is talked about too much or too little on the page etc and then people get so mad they do wild shit like unhinged racist rants or real life threats etc. and then they get banned for life from editing wikipedia (this sounds like a joke but people are devastated by it)
