Wikipedia is not only the largest online encyclopaedia ever, but also a notable example of internet-based collaborative value production. However, there are many unanswered questions about the mechanisms behind the process of article formation in Wikipedia, such as emergence and resolution of editorial wars. In this work, we try to locate, quantify, and understand the features of editorial wars in details. To this end, we focus on the network of editors of certain articles, who are connected by anti-collaboration links, i.e., reverting edits. Then we introduce a measure of controversy based on the parameters of the revert network, which ranks the articles according to the “amount of conflict” in them. We observe different scenarios of edit wars with various characteristics and ways to approach to consensus, which we successfully model in the agent-based-modelling framework. Finally, we try to reveal leader/follower relationships between editors and its effects on editorial wars as well as triangular closures between triples of editors.

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