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This page is a short description of large-scale disputes that have occurred on Wikipedia and have shaped its evolution. The list is arranged in chronological order.
Provide inline citations to evidence of the dispute, including: permalinks to talk pages/talk page archives, RfCs, RfARBs and archived mailing list posts.
Most major disputes involve one side arguing that something should stay in Wikipedia (or in some particular place in Wikipedia) while the other side holds that it should not. There participants are usually labeled either inclusionist or deletionist, depending on how restrictive they feel Wikipedia's inclusion criteria should be.
The main debates are over Notability, Censorship, Social networking, Administrator abuse, and/or Copyright disputes. See the notes for more explanation.[1]
Following is a brief overview of some of the more notable of these disputes.
- ^ 1.Notability: Some such disputes stem from disagreement over whether a subject is notable enough to merit inclusion in an encyclopedia. Wikipedia covers many obscure topics that would never be included in a traditional encyclopedia (Wikipedia:Wiki is not paper). Some people feel that Wikipedia's notability criteria is not strong enough while others think that the very concept of notability should be scrubbed.
2.Censorship: Some disputes have had to do with censorship, or the removal of information (usually, images) that someone deems inappropriate or offensive for publication. Censorship cases have chiefly focused around sexually oriented images, such as illustrations of sexual organs, sex acts, and fetishes. A recurring theme of these disputes is whether Wikipedia should be targeted to school classrooms, and whether it is wrong to teach children about such sexual topics. But censorship debates have also occurred concerning religious topics such as Islam and Scientology (see below).
3.Social networking: These debates have been about the degree to which Wikipedia editors may use the Wikipedia system for purposes not directly connected to the encyclopedia, such as finding people with similar interests (social networking) and advocating personal political, religious, social, ethical and philosophical views.
4.Administrator abuse: These debates (which tend to be small but numerous) are about the extent of the power of administrators, their freedom of acting upon personal judgment rather than community consensus on various matters and their use of the powers granted to them by the community. Since admin actions are not undoable by ordinary users, any slightly controversial one attracts responses ranging from public outcry to legal threats, offensive rants to requests for arbitrations.
5.Copyright disputes: These debates concern the way copyrighted content should be handled in the project. The largest subclass is formed by the Wikipedia:Fair use debates about the application of the fair use clause of the United States copyright law.