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This page documents an official English Wikipedia policy, a widely accepted standard that should normally be followed by all editors. Any edit to this page should reflect consensus. If in doubt, consider discussing changes on the talk page.

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This page in a nutshell: If someone challenges your edits, discuss it with them and seek a compromise, or seek dispute resolution. Don't just fight over competing views and versions.

An edit war occurs when contributors, or groups of contributors, repeatedly revert each other's contributions.

Edit warring causes problems for both readers and other contributors, and makes collaboration less pleasant. Attempts to instate one version of an article at the expense of another can lead to the loss of a neutral point of view. For these reasons, contributors should not engage in edit wars, but should instead resolve disagreements through discussion, consensus-building and ultimately dispute resolution. Administrators may block contributors in reponse to persistent edit warring, to prevent further disruption.

What is edit warring?

Edit warring is not necessarily any single action; instead, it is any mindset that tolerates confrontational tactics to affect content disputes. Edit warring is the confrontational use of edits to win a content dispute. Administrators often must make a judgment call to identify edit warring when cooling disputes. Administrators currently use several measures to determine if a user is edit warring.

The most common measure of edit warring is the three-revert rule, often abbreviated 3RR. The three-revert rule usefully measures edit warring, as it posits that surpassing three reverts on any one page in under 24 hours is edit warring. While nobody should interpret the three-revert rule blindly, reaching this threshold strongly signals that serious misconduct is afoot. The 3RR metric is not an exemption for conduct that stays under the threshold. For instance, edit warring could take the form of 4+ reverts on a page in a day, or three, or one per day for a protracted period of time, or one per page across many pages, or simply a pattern of isolated blind reverts as a first resort against disagreeable edits.

Edit warring features a confrontational attitude. It is different from a bold, revert, discuss (BRD) cycle. Reverting vandalism and banned users is not edit warring; at the same time, content disputes, even egregious point of view edits and other good-faith changes do not constitute vandalism.

Edit warring is a behavior, not a simple measure of the number of reverts on a single page in a specific period of time.

What is wrong with edit warring?

Edit warring is an unproductive, repeated, combative reversion of others' edits. Wikipedia holds that an open system can produce quality, neutral encyclopedic content. This requires reasoned negotiation, patience, and a strong community spirit, each of which is undercut by antisocial behavior like incivility and edit warring. A content revert intentionally reverses changes made in good faith by another editor, rather than improving upon the edit or working with the editor to resolve the dispute; it is not to be taken lightly. Editors who edit war after proper education, warnings, and blocks on the matter degrade the community and the encyclopedia, and may lose their editing privileges indefinitely.

Dealing with edit warring

New or inexperienced users engaging in edit warring should first be informed of Wikipedia's policies and practices, and the problems with their editing approach. More experienced contributors should be reminded of the project's behavioural standards and encouraged to seek dispute resolution should discussion be insufficient to resolve the issue.

In the event that this fails, uninvolved administrators may block involved contributors, or temporarily protect affected pages. Protection is useful when the involved parties will work to resolve the conflict; blocks should be used in situations where users fail to moderate their behavior, often demonstrated by an inflexible demeanor, incivility, or past instances of edit warring. Edit warring may be reported to administrators at the edit warring noticeboard.

In exceptional cases, persistent edit warring may, as with other abuse, lead to a ban or other additional sanctions, possibly through an arbitration case.

Alternatives

Editors with combative mindsets should only revert when necessary. Before making multiple reverts, discuss the disputed changes on the other editor's user talk page or yours, and remember that it is easy to misunderstand intentions and overestimate others' aggression on the Internet. Believing that an adversary is "wrong", "POV pushing" or "uncooperative" never excuses edit warring.

Bringing wider attention to a dispute can lead to compromise. Consider getting a third opinion or starting a request for comments. Neutral editors aware of the dispute will help curb egregious edits while also building consensus about the dispute.

When these methods fail, seek informal and formal dispute resolution.

See also

• Wikipedia:Dispute resolution
• Wikipedia:Ownership of articles
• Wikipedia:Sock puppetry
• Wikipedia:Etiquette
• Wikipedia:Disruptive editing
• Wikipedia:Tendentious editing

Wikipedia content modification information:

• This page was last modified on 2 December 2008, at 18:03.

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