tepples wrote:
They wanted me to keep the lockdown inherent in iOS and game consoles out of the "Crippleware" article because they were unsatisfied with the reliability of the sources.
A sensitive, controversial, or potentially slanderous topic like "crippleware" requires appropriately thorough scrutiny of its sources. Making edits to a page like that probably warrants some discussion.
People get into all sorts of edit wars over controversial topics, or sometimes just stupid matters of opinion. If it's a topic people care about, usually there will be enough people to speak for either side to reach a good consensus and resolution. Sometmes it takes a bit of time. Sometimes making an important change means you need to stick around and explain it to others.
Like, you could go to a page and add an obviously true fact to it. Often it is obviously true to you, but not to others. If you just dropped it on the page with no citation, there's no way for anyone else to check your facts. If you can cite a source, they can look it up and see where it came from. Sometimes people add things taken out of context, and when the source is examined, the true meaning becomes clear. The safest approach to take with uncited material is to just delete it. I imagine that a lot of people have this experience, trying to add something (which is obvious to them, but not to everyone) but just expecting everyone else to take it as true because you said so. When it gets deleted, if you never go back and talk to anybody about it, maybe your attitude becomes "oh, Wikipedia is a bunch of stuck up jerks. I tried to improve it with this obviously true thing but they just deleted it."
There's also the common experince of "I created a Wikipedia article about my band but they deleted it and said we weren't famous enough. Who do they think they are? We played a sold out crowd last Friday." That one goes under
Conflict of Interest /
Notability, which is a bit different issue than
Verifiability.
There is also this:
Wikipedia's Lamest Edit WarsThese are atypical, but I'm sure they get talked about more than the time someone corrected a fact about Contra and everyone was happy.