Et Tu, Crouton? The Caesar Salad Betrayal

The Caesar salad was invented in 1924 by Caesar Cardini, an Italian immigrant restaurateur, in Tijuana, Mexico. This sentence, which fits in a tweet, has caused years of intermittent warfare.

The minor edit

Well-meaning editors keep arriving at the article to fix what they assume is a typo of history. Surely it's named for Julius Caesar? Surely it's from Italy — it has romaine and parmesan? Each assumption arrives as a small, confident edit.

− invented by Caesar Cardini in Tijuana, Mexico

• invented in ancient Rome

edit summary: "correcting origin"

And each is reverted by the article's weary regulars, armed with dated citations and, one imagines, strong feelings about croutons. Skirmishes have flared over the salad's nationality, the correct dressing, and the eternal question of whether anchovies are canon or heresy.

The major consequence

The Caesar salad wars never needed an arbitration committee — just decades of patient reverting. But they earned the article a spot in Wikipedia's hall of lamest edit wars and made it a minor legend: the page where the ghost of a Roman dictator battles a Mexican border town, and the border town keeps winning.

The lesson is pure MinorEdit: the smaller the fact, the more confidently people will "fix" it. The salad, meanwhile, remains delicious and remains from Tijuana.