This is a fascinating case study of an in depth online dispute involving a very tech savvy and high profile team.
Mathieu von Rohr in Speigel Online: "It started one night when Sojka modified the first sentence of the German-language Wikipedia article on the Danube Tower in Vienna. He changed "The Danube Tower is an observation tower" into "The Danube Tower is a television and observation tower."
Sojka, 34, an insurance agent from Lörrach, southwestern Germany, had given plenty of consideration to this step. There are few people, he says, who know as much about television towers as he does. Towers have fascinated him since he was a boy. He has literature on towers, coffee table books about towers and pictures of towers. On their honeymoon, he and his wife took a helicopter flight around his favorite -- the CN Tower in Toronto. A poster-sized photograph Sojka took of that tower hangs in their bedroom.
Who then, if not he, had the right to judge whether a 252-meter (827-foot) reinforced concrete pillar in Vienna should be described as a television tower?
The very next morning, Sojka saw he had been pulled up short. An Austrian with the username "Elisabeth59" had undone his modification and added a comment: "The Danube Tower is definitively not a television tower. It was conceived and built as an observation tower."
The move rather annoyed Sojka. He changed the article back again and wrote: "If you don't know anything, you should just keep your fingers still -- the danube tower is obviously a ttelevision tower (sic)."
Thus began one of the most absurd debates ever carried out on the German Wikipedia website. It amounted to pages and pages full of insults and corrections, reaching a length of 600,000 characters -- as much as a book. The underlying issues soon became much greater than just the Danube Tower -- it was about the truth and who has the right to enforce it."
I've seen lots of these kinds of online disputes. I've said it before, I'll say it again -- the power of technology to resolve disputes is dwarfed by the power of technology to create new disputes. Also, people are just as complicated on either side of an online conversation as they are on either side of a f2f interaction. Technology doesn't make people simple. In fact, it may empower people to be even more unreasonable.