By contrast, the tough cases of Wikipedia are not in the big forums, but really in the trenches, when skirmishes happen in small corners of the community, away from the collective eyeballs. Here at the article level, it’s editor against editor, a clash of wills among individuals usually unfamiliar with each other, who find themselves treading in the same virtual space.
In order to attract and elicit contributions from users, Wikipedia charges visitors to "Be bold," but as a consequence it also encourages (nay, depends on) conflict. BEBOLD and SOFIXIT directives provide grist for this virtual mill. And too often, it’s not a pleasant interaction.
This is where the real latent problems of Wikipedia hide, in these contentious, hard to track disputes happening at the article level, and they create the real scourge of Wikipedia community: the edit wars.
An edit war happens when two different sides are both determined they are right, and will not yield, compromise, or arrive at consensus. In Wikipedia lore, there is no more famous example of the edit war than the curious case of Gdansk and Danzig. Even the order in which they are mentioned in this text might cause a ruckus among Wikipedians at the heart of this debate.
First, a whirlwind introduction to this subject.
