Last Stop For Wikipedia's Feuding Editors -- Online High Court

Wikipedia has its own internal "Supreme Court," which adjudicates disputes, takes appeals, and even issues injunctions [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled]. The cases it hears are as petty as you'd expect. Fascinating story by WSJ: Wikipedia, the vast online crowdsourced encyclopedia, has a high court. It is a panel called the Arbitration Committee, largely unknown to anyone other than Wiki aficionados, which hears disputes that arise after all other means of conflict resolution have failed. The 15 elected jurists on the English-language Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee -- among them a former staffer for presidential candidate John Kerry, an information-technology consultant in a tiny British village and a retired college librarian -- have clerks, write binding decisions and hear appeals. They even issue preliminary injunctions. Founded in 2001, Wikipedia operates largely through community consensus. All editors are volunteers, and anyone can write and edit its millions of articles. In online forums, editors debate content, sources and style, and typically manage to broker peace by talking -- or rather, typing -- it out. But every so often, tempers flare, necessitating a more stringent brand of justice. In 2003, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales created the committee, known as ArbCom, as the final stop in the site's dispute-resolution process. "There are things that wouldn't start an argument anywhere else that can still start an argument on Wikipedia," says Ira Matetsky, a Manhattan litigator and the unpaid panel's longest-serving current member. Among them: capitalization rules and whether individual television episodes deserve encyclopedia entries.