Dokdo/Takeshima: One of Wikipedia’s Lamest Edit Wars

A new article over at OhmyNew international gives a suprisingly balanced look at the fact that the Takeshima/Dokdo islet dispute between Japan and Korea has made the list of Wikipedia’s “Lamest Edit Wars“:

Open to all for article creation and editing, the Wikipedia entry describing the tiny islands has had its contents vandalized and restored over 4,000 times, with waves of what Wikipedians call “edit wars” — when two or more parties continually edit the piece to support a particular interpretation of an issue while removing the opposing view from the text of the article.

Sometimes the battle is in real time, with edits made seconds apart.

As seen in the page’s “history,” the fight ebbs and flows, often with the news of the day. An off-the-cuff statement by a politician, for instance, can stir up a hornet’s nest of trouble in cyberspace.

The author of the article also mentions something that has bothered me for some time: the fact that users who type “Liancourt Rocks” or “Takeshima” into Wikipedia will be directed to an entry entitled “Dokdo.” In May 2006, the main article was entitled “Liancourt Rocks,” but some users won over in a vote held on Wikipedia and had the Korean term adopted as the entry’s title (the vote has since been disputed by some wikipedia users).

As the author notes in his article, while Wikipedia may have stopped allowing non-registered users from making changes to the Dokdo/Takeshima/Liancourt Rocks article, this lame edit war is far from over…