Wikipedia:Lamest edit wars/Templates

PLEASE include two or three edit history links about the lame edit war. It would be also useful to list the date the edit war was added.

Templates

Userboxes

Even little boxes like these are not immune to lame edit wars.

Template:User admins ignoring policy

A userbox reading "This user is pissed about admins ignoring policy" (the word "pissed" was later changed to "annoyed"). Surprisingly enough, the userbox was speedily deleted by admins... ignoring policy. See the first, second, and third Templates for Deletion votes. During its third DRV, support waned just enough and the userbox remains deleted.

Template:User Asperger

Should the font size for this userbox be 10pt or 14pt? 3rr violations, page protection, and vitriol spilling onto multiple talk pages ensue. Nobody is surprised. And then end result of the fight? – to make the text 12pt.

Template:User United Kingdom

A rather heated debate over changing the text of this user box from "This user comes from the United Kingdom." to "This user lives in the United Kingdom." This all arose from an argument over what took precedence; the text the user box said "This user comes from the United Kingdom." or the category it was grouped with Category:Wikipedians in the United Kingdom. It only got resolved by a straw poll vote and the changing of the text.

Colors

Jeanne Marie Spicuzza

Week-long edit war over whether there should be five pastel-colored boxes saying the article needs cleanup (and perhaps a sixth saying there are too many pastel-colored boxes) or just one, with little or no effort made from either side to improve the article itself. Led to a thread on WP:ANI and the article being protected.

Reggie Jackson, et al.: (Others include Joe Girardi, Dave Winfield, Rickey Henderson, and Jeff Nelson (baseball player).)

What should the (barely noticeable, and ultimately superfluous) color be of the infobox for baseball players: the last team they were on, or the team they played the most often for? This terribly important convention was the subject of several reports at WP:ANI [1] [2] [3] [4], multiple page protections[5], rampant sockpuppetry [6], [7], multiple 3RR blocks over several months, and several dozen reversions of a page within a few hours [8]. As administrators were called in for assistance, everyone agreed the situation was truly, very very lame.

Other templates

Jack Vance

Revert warring over the inclusion of the Wikipedia Biography Project template at the top of the talk page. Many breathless proclamations that this picture (previously part of the Wikipedia Biography Project template) was RACIST OMG and a direct attack on author Jack Vance.

John Vanbrugh

Should Template:Infobox Biography be used in this article? Is it ugly or not? Are the place and date of his birth and death important enough to be highlighted in a big box? Does a box which repeats information that is already in the article offer any substantial advantage? Do the wishes of those who wrote most of this featured article count for anything? Multi-sided edit war over these issues.

Laurence Olivier

An administrator full-protected Laurence Olivier, a featured article, for one week, in order to end an edit-war. There had indeed been some edit-warring. However, the edit-war did not concern the content of the article. The edit-war did not even concern whether or not there should be an infobox on the article. Rather, the edit-war concerned whether the article should contain two sentences of hidden text (i.e., text that shows in the edit window but is not visible to readers), advising against adding an infobox without gaining a consensus.[9]

Template:2010 FIFA World Cup Group C

On June 12, 2010, England and the United States started the group C play with a 1-1 draw. FIFA seemed naively unbothered by this - perhaps under the assumption that the results of the remaining games against Algeria and Slovenia would determine who would advance. Wikipedia, in accordance with its core mission of providing real-time goal-by-goal updates to major sporting events, couldn't wait that long. Should England be awarded second place, above the thin green line separating advancing teams from eliminated teams? [10] Or does USA have the tiebreaker? [11] Maybe both should be above the green line, [12] or between two green lines. [13] An ANI thread resulted in full protection until the next group match.

Template:Castes and Tribes of the Punjab

92RR in five hours between two users.[14] After about 10 reverts, the war settles into an edit summary-less back and forth. See here.

Template:Civility

Conflict began when an editor tried to add a new essay to this template. Another user suggested that the essay was only tangentially related to civility and removed it. Amid a sea of blue links to wise essays on the value of civility, an edit war broke out over the new link's inclusion. More parties joined the fray, making 12 reverts in two days over the essay's inclusion. Editors then took to the talk page and began hurling profanity at each other as they discussed whether the essay contained valuable advice about civility. After two full protections of the template and multiple blocks, the matter appears to have been resolved.

Template:Crash series

Two editors contribute more than thirty reverts in two hours over whether Spyro is a part of the Crash Bandicoot universe or not. Tempers flare in Edit Summaries, but Talkpage contributions are mysteriously left unsigned.

Template:Cyprus-stub

Not two editors, but two ethnic groups of editors clashed on whether this stub template's icon should be a map, a flag, some other Cypriot symbol, or a combination of the three. This raged throughout a large number of Wikipedia's pages, including user talk pages, WikiProject Stub sorting, various Greece-, Turkey-, and Cyprus-related talk pages, and – of course – this template's talk page, where much of the evidence still resides.

Template:Luxembourgian political parties

An EU flag is added to the template's header. Another editor reverts it as a Eurocrat POV. No, the tiny little flag is a statement of fact, and you're the POV pusher. No, you! Vandal! Vandal! Somehow, despite the 5-alarm urgency of this three-day edit war, Luxembourg's political system fails to fall apart or be in any way affected by the existence of an EU flag on its template. (Other small European countries are also involved.)

Template:WikiProject Computer science

58kb of talk page debate plus a user block over how to copyedit a two line statement.