Wikipedia as Battleground

Occasionally, Wikipedia is unfortunately used as a battleground for people, who come in and do all sorts of antisocial things - page blankings, revert wars, personal insults. Some of the time, hordes of new people stampede onto the site in response to a posting on an email list or web forum saying that the wikipedia page on $TOPIC has found its way onto the Articles for Deletion section. Usually this involves lots of anonymous voting to keep the article. Since this tactic is frowned upon in the first place, and that anonymous users or users who create an account just to contribute to the discussion/vote aren't considered without some other overriding reason, the following conflict usually involves lots of reverts and bannination as the immature users take to vandalising the personal pages of users, or other articles.

These are normal, and in scope are only localized. There are far stranger occurrances, like one in which the followers of a particular individual pronounced a 'judgement and fine' against the wiki.

Far, far worse is when a group of people start an edit war over particular details, and start using the wikipedia page to attack each other. The conflict starts there, but soon spills over onto the rest of the net. Biased crap soon starts flooding the net, as reputations are 'attacked'. Recently, this has happened on the PodCasting article, where two people claiming to have created the concept are warring over edits to the article. Their supporters were drawn in, and the poor wikipedia administrators were left no choice but to start in with bans due to uncivil attacks.

I speak from experience: these can get quite personal - I've been threatened with many harsh things for daring to try to talk reason into several fanatics.

I wonder what it says about wikipedia's popularity if people are willing to threaten death to others for making edits they disagree with....