Wikipedia is currently in an edit war over the definition of recession

My Eyes Glaze Over.<p>People have customarily defined recession a certain way, i.e.&#x27;2 quarters of negative growth&#x27;. If there were historically any <i>other</i> way of defining it, it would be totally reasonable to cite that now. But inventing a new way now can&#x27;t be anything but a dodge.

I&#x27;d say it&#x27;s less about the definition than who gets to write the lead line, on the basis that that&#x27;s as far as many people will go in using a link or screenshot to win internet arguments.<p>I have no strong feelings either way about the wording. The lead of an article is generally a place to introduce a concept and explain why it matters in a few sentences, but the &#x27;2 quarters of negative growth&#x27; heuristic for measuring (rather than defining) a recession is so widespread that it&#x27;s not really an object of controversy.<p>Had the person who changed it offered that their aim was economy and clarity I doubt much argument would have broken out, though editing for style is best done at a low point of the news cycle around any given topic. But responding to the lukewarm reception of the rewrite with accusations of narrative warfare, censorship, and so on look a little forced, to put it mildly.

Not much of a surprise. We&#x27;ve spent the last two years redefining words, most with the tacit approval of even the majority of the crowd here, so why would it stop now?

Official Definition:<p>When arguments about whether or not we are in a recession get so frequent and heated that they are annoying, we are in a recession.<p>When people accept their fate and stop talking about it, the recession has ended.

I dont know what kind of people I expected wikipedia editors to be, but this Soibangla person is pretty much it. Big reddit moderator energy about them.

Failing to foresee the imminent collision with an iceberg, the 2 captains are arguing about the definition of words &quot;iceberg&quot; and &quot;collision&quot;, cheering the sailors, who by now have split into two camps and have started fighting each other.

By the time I&#x27;m dead in 2070 we&#x27;ll have two dictionaries, one for the left and one for the right.<p>At least we&#x27;ll have flying cars.

Wow, I tried to predict what I&#x27;d see but I didn&#x27;t expect it to be such a funny mix of professor archetype vs. student archetype right off the bat.<p>The general situation is also kind of amusing because if you want to really contribute to the solution of a one-word problem (not their job, I know, but), it&#x27;s usually very helpful to start by listing as many definitions of that one word as you can. Especially if there&#x27;s disagreement over the correct definition.<p>And then the super secret trick next move is to never throw any of the definitions away, but rather to identify the leverage points of each separate definition.<p>And poof, where you once had a disagreement, you now have a bunch of discrete tools with identified advantages, and hopefully the smarts to use &#x27;em!<p>(I also get that the WP community can also be extremely singular in its honing-in approach to problem solving. In general, a really common introvert curse is always being too focused on one conclusion, one question, one process, etc.)

A weird little section in the talk page:<p>&gt; What&#x27;s the deal with there being a million edits on this page in one day? &gt; Articles get edited a lot, for all kinds of reasons… The fact that a page is being edited doesn&#x27;t itself mean something crazy is going on. It usually means someone is replacing a colon with a semicolon.<p>Maybe in principle, but 1 million edits?? That’s like 12 a second. Not impossibly large, but it feels disingenuous to claim “something crazy” isn’t going on. I doubt many other pages get edited 12 times a second for 24hr straight.

Intro to article reads<p>&gt; <i>Although the definition of a recession varies between different countries and scholars, two consecutive quarters of decline in a country&#x27;s real gross domestic product is commonly used as a practical definition of a recession.[3][4][5] In the United States, a recession is defined by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) as &quot;a significant decline in economic activity spread across the market, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales&quot;.[6] In the United Kingdom and other countries, it is defined as a negative economic growth for two consecutive quarters</i><p>Nothing significant in many hours on history <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;w&#x2F;index.php?title=Recession&amp;action=history" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;w&#x2F;index.php?title=Recession&amp;action=...</a><p>Despite breathlessness around &quot;redefine&quot; and such nonsense, nothing going on

&quot;Recession&quot; is backward looking and doesn&#x27;t mean &quot;everyone in poverty,&quot; so there&#x27;s way too much energy being used to fight this meaningless war of optics.<p>Look at the savings rate, look at various metrics of inflation and purchasing power, or look at the stability&#x2F;volatility of the market.

I don&#x27;t think many people still give a shit. During the &quot;good times&quot; people were already suffocating in medical&#x2F;school dept, underpaid and burned out.

Wikipedia should allow diversity and decentralization of an entry. Allowing multiple views of an entry would do wonders to people&#x27;s pursuit of truth instead of misleading people of just one view presented from an entry.