The City With Two Names and a Thousand Angry Reverts

Some edit wars are about facts. This one was about seven hundred years of history, two nations, and which name goes in the parentheses.

The minor edit

Starting in the encyclopedia's earliest years, editors flipped the name of the Polish port city — Gdańsk to its German name Danzig and back — in the city's article, in biographies, in articles about ships, treaties, and astronomers. Each flip changed a few characters. Each flip was also, depending on whom you asked, an act of historical justice or historical vandalism.

− Danzig

• Gdańsk

edit summary: "rv — see talk"

"See talk" was doing a lot of work. The talk pages filled with walls of citations about medieval trade routes. Editors were blocked. Sockpuppets bloomed. The war spread to any article where the city's name could conceivably appear — and the city's name, it turns out, can conceivably appear almost anywhere.

The major consequence

In early 2005 the community did something Wikipedia had essentially never done before: it held a binding, structured vote on what one city should be called in different historical periods. Ten separate voting sections. Detailed ballot instructions. The result — Gdańsk for the modern era, Danzig for certain historical periods, both names cross-referenced on first mention — even came with an enforcement provision allowing editors to revert violations on sight.

The Gdańsk/Danzig vote became a landmark in how Wikipedia governs itself: proof that the community could end a war, and a warning about how much machinery it takes. The city, for its part, stayed exactly where it was.