daniwo59@aol.com wrote:
Almost 24 hours have passed since the Sarah Edmonds edit conflict/war, and I still am not sure what it was that I accidentally overwrote. Once I realized that something was overwritten, I did try to restore it, but I guess I missed something. Such is life. If I would have known, I would have put it back, but Wik did not want to even tell me what it was.
Middle name and month of birth, I think.
On the other hand, more words have been written about that silly edit war than on the article itself. I find that kind of pathetic. It is now being debated on Wikipedia:Edit conflicts.
Personally, I agree with Martin's suggested policy, though I will add that we should be working together, not debating one-upmanship or the rights of one contributor's edits to override those of another contributor. In the almost two years that i have been part of Wikipedia, there have always been edit wars--hell, I was even involved in a few--but they were always over content, not ego. I find it unfortunate that Wikipedia has come to this.
To put it in perspective, it's just one person instigating all this. I think it's inevitable that every sort of social defective will show up sooner or later - even .001% of 6 billion is a pretty big handful - but I also think the culture of the community is strong enough to deal with assaults by any individual. One of our advantages is that we can collectively write down and fine-tune policies; my impression from old history is that editors now routinely depend on policy to deal quickly and efficiently with problems that used to involve a lot of agonizing.
Stan