Conflict Autopsy

Reconstruct a real dispute in a volunteer community from its public record, and explain what each party could see at the time

Due: 29 March 2027 · Weight: 25%

The brief#

Take one dispute that has already ended, and account for it so well that nobody in it comes out as the idiot.

Pick a conflict in a volunteer community that is fully documented in public: an edit war, a deletion fight, a moderator removal, a fork, a contributor’s departure. It must have a record — talk pages, modlogs, issue threads, arbitration findings — and it must be over.

Then reconstruct it. Who did what, in what order, and — this is the work — what each party could see at the moment they acted. Most online disputes are not disagreements about values. They are two people with different partial views of a history, each of whom has correctly concluded that the other is behaving badly.

The third criterion is the one students find hardest. Having explained the parties, explain the structure: the interface that did not show one of them something, the rule that was ambiguous, the norm that was never written down, the queue that was six hours behind. A dispute that could only have been caused by a bad person is usually a dispute you have not finished reading.

What you submit#

2,000 words, plus a timeline with every claim linked to its source in the record. Do not pick a dispute you were personally involved in — you will be doing that in week 4, and it does not work.

Living subjects are real people. The policies page governs how you write about them, and it is not optional here.