When asked about one's weight, most people would give an estimate. Weight can vary from time to time so one could weigh 183 one week and 187 the next week, so estimating to 185 is no big deal. But height, on the other hand, usually doesn't fluctuate much once one reaches adulthood, so how big of an impact would it be if one's height was reported differently by a factor of an inch? In the case of Yao Ming, a famous Chinese basketball player, and his Wikipedia article, it broke out into a heated edit war.
Yao Ming's Height and Weight: The Debate Over Numbers[edit]
Originally Yao Ming was listed as 7'6 and 310 lbs. Everybody had seemed to agreed to this, until a user, Zzmang, came along and made some changes to the article. He deemed the NBA articles about Yao Ming's height and weight as "unreliable" and replaced the sources with another which stated that Yao Ming was actually 7'5 and 311 lbs. Another user, Chrishomingtang, came along and undid these revisions, saying that calling the NBA unreliable is ridiculous. The two users then became locked into an edit war, undoing each others revisions repeatedly. Although there was constant reversions taking place, the debate was also taking place in the talk page, although not until the fourth reversion between the two of them. Zzmang claims that other sources that are more reputable, such as draft camp measurements and Olympic measurements, has Yao Ming as 7'5 and pulls quotes from people who say that NBA lies and stretches the numbers. Chrishomingtang argues that the NBA is reliable due to consensus and believes that Zzmang's sources and quotes are irrelevant since they are original research. More people show up who side with NBA being more reliable as well as agreeing that Zzmang's arguments are all related to original research. Eventually, due to the continuous edit war that was going on during the debate, an admin steps in and protects the page for a week. During this time, a vote on consensus was created to see whether or not NBA's articles are reliable. Results were 3:1 in favor of NBA being reliable. The edit wars stopped, and the numbers were changed back to 7'6 and 310.
Today the numbers still remain the same, and the article is not only a featured article, but semi-protected as well, perhaps to deter anonymous people from reviving this debate. This edit war shows just how far people can go over numbers that are not only an inch different in the case of height, but even a negligible pound different in weight. It was clear that nobody agreed with Zzmang, yet he still insisted that he was correct, and even accused a user of being a sock puppet. Ironically, it turns out that Zzmang's account is now blocked, due to being a sock puppet of a user named Goramon.
