The city Gdansk (also known as Danzig) in present-day Poland lies on the mouth of the Vistula River on the south part of the Baltic Sea. Over the last few hundred years it had the unique (and as we’ll see, unfortunate) privilege of being variously ruled over by the Teutonic Knights, the Prussian Confederation, the Polish Crown, the Kingdom of Prussia, nobody at all (when it was the Free City of Danzig), the German Empire, and today’s Republic of Poland. As a result, this city has seen its classification shift over the last half dozen centuries, creating an all-out, millennium-long identity crisis.
At least this is the case for the Polish, German, and self-appointed history-minded editors in Wikipedia.
It started out innocently enough in the first year of Wikipedia’s existence, when User:H.J. created an article [[Gdansk]] on December 24, 2001:
Gdansk is a city in Poland, on the coast of Baltic Sea.
Its German name is Danzig and it was usually called by that name in English until 1945. In Latin it was called Gedanum.
It seemed like a good start.
Because Gdansk/Danzig had changed hands so many times through history, it posed a conundrum not just to writers of this article, but to writers of any other articles that referred to the city. Is it a Polish or German city? Should other articles refer to it as Gdansk or Danzig? What about people born there, were they of Polish or German ethnicity?
The article quickly gathered Poles, Germans, and anyone else who cared to chime in with their own interpretation of what was right. "Neutral" was unfortunately a casualty of the conversation, as it had broken down into a test of wills and strong points of view.
One of the most obstinate and persistent users was one User:Nico. An especially contentious editor, he held the firm belief that all German-related articles should have German names prominently mentioned. That put Gdansk (nee Danzig) and many other Polish (nee German) cities in the crosshairs. On the other side of things was User:Wik, someone quite famous in Wikipedia for not shying away from making a point and being heard. They were not the only ones involved, but they were the most vocal and the most uncompromising.
The Gdansk article had been the subject of dozens of adjustments and skirmishes, but on October 16, 2003, it began a descent into prolonged, sustained conflict. It was the beginning of perhaps the most famous "edit war" in Wikipedia history, in terms of profile, duration, number of users, and ultimately, the final remedy.
One glance at the edit history of the article shows a nasty exchange between two sides, neither willing to compromise.
In the article history for [[Gdansk]] in October 2003, the trail of usernames and "edit comments" left by Nico and Wik showed the ugly details:
16 October 2003 20:45 Nico (fmt) 21:42 Wik (rv)
- 23:07 64.175.121.242 (See "Talk")
17 October 2003
- 07:56 80.213.1539 (Revert to the last edit by Nico)
- 08:06 Wik (rv)
- 09:14 Ruhrjung m (links)
- 13:05 Nico m (Reinsert deleted paragraph)
- 14:05 Ruhrjung (shortening)
- 14:08 Ruhrjung m (link)
- 16:44 Wik
- 16:45 Wik
- 19:22 Nico (Revert to the last edit by Ruhrjung) 19:38 Wik
- 19:42 Kpjas m (some typos and one sentence added to give context)
- 19:45 Wik (rv)
- 19:51 145.254.119.100
- 20:18 Kpjas m (this edit corrects typos and adds one sentence if you don’t agree with it discuss it in Talk: don’t revert discriminately)
18 October 2003
- 16:55 Nico m (Revert to the last edit by Ruhrjung) 17:27 Wik (Revert to the last edit by Kpjas) 17:43 Nico m (Revert to the last edit by Ruhrjung) 17:51 Wik (rv)
- 19:49 Nico (Revert to the last edit by Ruhrjung) 19:54 Nico m
- 19:56 Wik (rv (are we having fun yet?)) 20:12 Nico (Revert to the last edit by Ruhrjung) 20:15 Wik (rv (someone protect this please))
- 22:40 Nico (Revert to the last edit by Ruhrjung (What do you have problems with, Wik? Why just tell us at the talk page?)) 22:42 Wik (rv (same problem as with Poznan)) 22:43 Nico (Revert to the last edit by Ruhrjung)
- 22:45 Wik (rv)
- 22:48 Nico (Revert to the last edit by Ruhrjung—if you not are willing to discuss the case you will be reverted again and again) 22:50 Wik (rv (see Talk:Poznan))
- 22:53 Nico (What about Talk:Poznan? Nothing there about Danzig. You should visit Talk:Gdansk—again reverting to Ruhrjung’s latest edit) 22:55 Wik (rv (you’re just trolling now, this is exactly the same case as Poznan, just exchange the names))
- 22:59 Nico (It’s a fact that the city also is known as Danzig to English speakers. I reinsert Ruhrjung’s note about that. You can discuss the article at Talk:Gdansk if you want, and maybe you will be able to conv) 23:00 Wik (Danzig is known as a former name, nothing else) 23:03 Nico (No, Danzig is surely the actual German, Danish, Swedish name of the city, and is actually also used by many speakers of English. Reinsert Ruhrung’s note again.)
- 23:04 Wik (the first paragraph says all there is to say about the name)
The repeated series of "revert" or "rv" edits are the telltale signatures of an edit war.
In Wikipedia, a revert means the only change is to undo the work of someone else. In essence it is a repudiation of another Wikipedian by removing that user’s particular contribution from Wikipedia. Reverts have their place, to undo vandalism or to correct a small mistake by someone else. But a revert duel can be a bitter spectacle.
Wikipedia’s edit war guidelines admonishes revert warriors, "This is generally considered a useless practice. Please don’t do it."45
If no one can talk the warring parties out of an ongoing dispute, an administrator usually has to step in to protect the article from all editing until the situation cools off. In extreme cases, one or more "warriors" could even be blocked temporarily from editing anything in Wikipedia.
Not long after this edit war broke out, Wikipedia administrators stepped in to protect the article and to avoid this rapid reverting between versions. However, the problem with protection is that it doesn’t solve the root cause, it just prevents further flipping of the article. Once an administrator thinks the warring has cooled down, the article can be unprotected, but in the case of Gdansk/Danzig, the situation did not stabilize.
Outbreaks of edit warring would occur again on October 28, November 18, and November 30 of 2003, and spill into 2004, on January 21, January 31, and February 3.
Users with names such as User:PolishPoliticians, User:Gdansk, and User:Emax would join the fray, stoking more debate and keeping the issue simmering for months on end. It was widely known in the Wikipedia community that the Gdansk/ Danzig debate was a festering wound, but if there was no party to reconcile the differences, it would keep going on.
As 2004 was beginning, Wikipedia was making big strides and becoming widely recognized by the mainstream public, having been written up in Discover magazine, Popular Science, The Wall Street Journal, and the San Jose Mercury News. As Wikipedia passed the 200,000 article mark in February 2004, it was still accelerating in terms of article and community growth.
While the community celebrated the external recognition and accomplishments, it knew internally there were trouble spots, like Gdansk/Danzig, where contentious edit wars were cropping up more and more and creating angst and burnout.
Wikipedia experimented with some ways to quickly defuse situations. One measure was something called Quickpolls, an ad hoc "night court" for the community to quickly decide, in twenty-four hours, how to discipline problem users. It was made specifically for four types of cases:
1. someone violates the three revert guideline
2. a sysop repeatedly misuses a sysop capability
3. a signed in user goes on a "rampage" of some type—puts insults on several user (not user talk) pages, vandalizes several articles, etc.
4. a signed in user confesses to deliberate trolling
It did not go particularly well during the trial period. Immediately, User:Gdansk was the target of one Quickpoll, initiated with the message:
User has been involved with Polish and German related articles, engaging in near-vandalism for months. Recommend a 24-hour ban.
Hephaestos|§
After a unanimous 12-0 vote in favor of the proposal, User:Gdansk was blocked from editing for twenty-four hours.
In a community that prided itself on assuming good faith and thoughtful consensus, Quickpolls made an unusual public spectacle of these cases, creating a virtual village mob. Add to that the belief within wiki culture that VotingIsEvil, and it was clear this brand of instant justice was not getting widespread approval.
Besides, all the proposed disciplinary measures being voted on were mostly something an administrator could do on his or her own, without needing a chorus of support from Quickpoll voters. With no one enthusiastic to carry on the experiment beyond a month, the trial period expired in June 2004. Another method would have to resolve edit wars.
There was one thing from the Quickpolls experiment that had some popular support. The three revert rule, which prevented someone from constantly flipping back the edits of another, would come back in another way.
By August of that year, the community was growing so weary of contentious edit wars that the three revert rule (3RR) was proposed as a stand-alone policy to act as an "electric fence":
An editor must not perform more than three reverts, in whole or in part, on a single page within a 24-hour period.
Violating this would allow an individual administrator to block the problem user for twenty-four hours on sight. The proposal had the backing of Jimmy Wales himself:
I am personally endorsing and promoting this proposal, because I think that revert warring has become an absurd drain on us, and it has not worked for it to be a mere guideline of politeness, nor has it proved effective for the [arbitration committee] to consider every single case of this. Violation of the 3RR is widely considered to be a problem in the community, even by those who are the worst violators.46
Wales’s endorsement carried lots of weight in the community. On November 28, 2004, the three revert rule passed a community poll, 159 to 28, in favor. And the acronym-happy community quickly adopted the new nickname for it: 3RR.
Some saw this as a betrayal of Wikipedia’s original values of not having strict punitive rules and processes. Wikipedia had started out with the assumption that ultimately human beings should be reasoned with and not punished with a "three strikes" type policy.
"Setting this up allows too much power in the hands of admins who have their own agenda to enforce. In the case of a war between a contributor and an admin it gives the admin a ‘big stick’ with which to enforce his/her viewpoint," wrote one User:KeyStroke.
User:VeryVerily worried that once hard numbers were established, people could "game" the system. "A vandal need only make their edit four times. People can create sockpuppets, and in my experience have done so. Bad users can gang up on good."
Sock puppets are multiple fake accounts created by one user to impersonate many different users. While not inherently bad, if used to gain an advantage in matters related to voting or reverting, they can pose a massive disruption. It is among the worst problems in Wikipedia, and quite hard to track down.
Nevertheless, edit warring was so widely recognized as a growing problem, most Wikipedians welcomed the ability to stop an edit war in its tracks, even if it meant shutting a user out for twenty-four hours. Jimmy’s input was important—if the founder was endorsing such a measure, it was probably something worth passing.
When 3RR was established as official policy, it would have implications for the Gdansk case. With "infinite war" no longer a possibility, the folks involved with the debate could not depend on exhaustively reverting to make their point. The involved parties would have to sit down at the table and figure out a long-term resolution, lest they be blocked every few days from editing for violating 3RR.
So Gdansk was ready to be a landmark case, setting a precedent for all other Polish-German articles. The community was looking in earnest to find out how this would play out.
In February 2005, User:Chris 73, an ethnic German editor living in Japan, traipsed into the debate, by reverting the Gdansk-oriented edits by User:Emax. After a few exchanges, he expressed his frustration:
My problem with Emax is that he seems to be unable to compromise. . . .
We either have the option to have factual[ly] incorrect articles or to have edit wars.
Tired of the bickering, Chris 73 decided to solve the problem once and for all.
He spent the next twenty-four hours crafting a vote proposal meticulously specifying every single time period that had been debated and disputed in Gdansk/Danzig’s history. Being bold, he put up an excruciatingly detailed poll of ten different criteria, declaring:
This page is a vote to decide the usage of the name of Gdansk/Danzig. This is a source of edit wars on dozens of articles mentioning the city on Wikipedia. There is a lengthy discussion on Talk:Gdansk and its archives, listing nearly every argument imaginable. Numerous previous attempts to reach a consensus have been unsuccessful, hence requiring a vote to end dozens of disputes and edit wars. Due to the complexity of the problem, there are six periods to vote for, plus three additional clauses.
Reading like an official ballot that would make any bureaucratic international standards committee proud, Chris 73′s proposal listed all the alternatives:
1. VOTE: Period before 1308
2. VOTE: Period from 1308 to 1454
3. VOTE: Period from 1454 to 1466
4. VOTE: Period from 1466 to 1793
5. VOTE: Period from 1793 to 1945
6. VOTE: Period after 1945
7. VOTE: Bibliographies
8. VOTE: Cross-Naming Gdansk/Danzig
9. VOTE: Cross-Naming General
10. VOTE: Enforcement
Each of the ten items allowed voters to fill in their preference—Gdansk or Danzig. Many of these spawned vigorous debate, most of it rehashed from previous fights. But at least they were being aired in the same forum and they were held to something they were unaccustomed to—a time limit. Wikipedia’s usual "eventualism" was going to be trumped by a hard deadline and a systematic breakdown of the conflict into tinier, more manageable issues.
In two weeks of voting, 80 people cast 657 votes. After exchanging more than 8,000 words of debate, a decision was reached.
And finally, when the results were tallied and the resolutions emerged, there was much rejoicing by Wikipedians. After nearly two years of bickering, the community finally had hard guidelines that would become the law on anything related to German-Polish issues related to the city. Word went out throughout Wikipedia:
For Gdansk, use the name Danzig between 1308 and 1945
For Gdansk, use the name Gdansk before 1308 and after 1945 In biographies of clearly German persons, the name should be used in the form Danzig (Gdansk) and later Danzig exclusively
In biographies of clearly Polish persons, the name should be used in the form Gdansk (Danzig) and later Gdansk exclusively.
For Gdansk and other locations that share a history between Germany and Poland, the first reference of one name in an article should also include a reference to other names, e.g. Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland) or Gdansk (Danzig). An English language reference that primarily uses this name should be provided on the talk page if a dispute arises.
As a result, a common paragraph could be finalized in the Gdansk article without fear of reverting, to what we see today:
Once the city became a part of the Kingdom of Prussia in 1792 following the partitions of Poland it became more frequently populated by new German settlers. It remained in the hands of the German Empire until 1919. The German name Danzig was used by the German population until the end of World War II although among Poles it was known by its Polish name. The city’s Latin name may be given as any of Gedania, Gedanum, or Dantiscum; the variety of Latin names reflects the influence of the Polish, Kashubian, and German names.
Former English versions of its name include Dantzig (borrowed from Dutch), Dantsic, and Dantzic.47
Thus ended the famous Gdansk/Danzig war in Wikipedia. As heartening as this outcome was, it was incredibly inefficient. It took years of bickering, bad feelings, and countless wasted hours to arrive at something historians had figured out a long time ago. So while this showcased a community able to resolve a problem, it would likely drive away academics and scholars unaccustomed to Wikipedia’s contentious work process.
This point has not gone unnoticed. Even those who join Wikipedia as enthusiastic contributors quickly see the unsavory agonistic side of the community.
Prominent Internet historian Jason Scott lamented this working aspect of Wikipedia during a public speech, highlighting the ominous side of a culture where "anyone can edit." Scott is no Luddite. As a veteran of electronic bulletin board systems and online culture, his criticism had resonance even among people who are fans of Wikipedia:
Jimbo [Wales] holds this up as the great aspect of Wikipedia, is that everybody gets to get their hands in it and that we’re all working together, but they don’t realize, we kill each other! We kill each other every day! Over Nintendo games, over shit! Over the fact that someone parked in the wrong space. Wikipedia holds up the dark mirror of what humanity is, to itself.
The full range of Wikipedia criticisms is addressed in later topics, but the point Scott makes highlights a hidden side of the Wikipedia process.
Most people encounter Wikipedia’s articles as a useful, if not always reliable, end product. But because Wikipedia encourages confrontation and challenge as a necessary part of converging on the truth, there are many user casualties along the way for those who decide to try to edit.
At least this is the case with the English Wikipedia. With the role of English as a world language, the site gets an inordinately larger number of visitors than any other language version. That’s why the Gdansk/Danzig conflict had passionate ethnic Polish, ethnic German, and other editors from around the world arguing vehemently.
Not only does English Wikipedia serve as the universal mixing bowl, bound together by language, it also has the highest profile in Google searches. That makes the stakes even higher for someone to want to "win" an edit war, so that user’s viewpoint reaches the most people on the Internet.
It is as if the biblical Tower of Babel has been reassembled at Wikipedia.org, with the top of the Google rankings as the ultimate goal.
Though what is more intriguing about Wikipedia is not the English version most people see via Google, but the smaller language editions that reflect entirely different cultural norms. These are not simply direct translations or clones of English Wikipedia. They have robust grassroot cultures that surprise even seasoned Wikipedians.
Whether it’s issues of American/British English, Chinese dialects, Native American languages, German standards for article inclusion, the identity of Japanese editors, or the merits of a controversial "Montenegrin" language, there is no shortage of colorful differences across the languages of Wikipedia. When you look at the emergence of these community cultures, it’s fascinating to see how they came about.
