Spot the dispute

Wikipedia,the online user-edited encyclopaedia,is one of the 10 most visited websites in the world. Every day,on an average,10 per cent of Internet users visit wikipedia.org. Few know that hidden away in the labyrinthine inner workings of the site is an extraordinary set of disputes that tell us a lot about colliding cultures both national cultures Wikipedia took years to decide if the Polish-German city of Gdansk should also be known by its German name,Danzig,and has separate articles for Kashmir,Jammu and Kashmir,and the Kashmir dispute and cultures of openness and control.

The most recent is the upsurge in complaints from the psychiatric profession. The well-known Rorschach Inkblot Test which,as Wikipedia will tell you,asks you to interpret a series of inkblots first published in 1921 has been used for years by forensic psychiatrists,who have 90 years of diagnostic history to go on. They believe it is one of their most useful tools. That usefulness depends,of course,on never having seen the inkblots before and on not knowing what the correct or most common answers are. But then a Wikipedia user realised that the inkblots were in the public domain,and promptly uploaded images of the blots to illustrate the Rorschach article.

Outraged psychiatrists and some Wikipedia editors then clashed with each other on whether keeping up the images was harmful. Regular arguments about speech if you dont like it,dont listen reach their limits here: choosing to click through to the Rorschach article doesnt mean youre choosing to make the test ineffective on you. But even arguments of that power are anathema to Wikipedias culture of openness: for instance,the website stood off concerted efforts to have images of the Prophet Muhammad in art removed from his article. But here,as elsewhere,Wikipedias faultlines and attempts at resolution point to issues in the wider world that liberal society is yet to resolve.