Bizarre Wikipedia Edit War on Quentin Tarantino's "Once Upon a time in Hollywood"

Wikipedia is many things for many people. Some view it as the go-to place to check some basic facts, others view it as a template for the future universal source of all knowledge, a sort of an imperfect start of a the great thing. There are some people who genuily try hard to make it so, and there are other people who fuel the so-called Wiki Wormhole with unexpected and downright weird things found in the far corners of the world and the web (AV Club even runs a column about that).

Finally, there are people who take an advantage of Wikipedia being a massive compendium of seemingly sourced information to intentionally distort and manipulate certain facts in order to orchestrate an instances of confusion and conflict.
The usual victims of such actions are articles on politics, political theory, public figures of all sorts and most of the science-related articles.
The editorial boards and active users try to keep things straight for the benefit of the public. But sometimes the trolls persist and this causes so-called "edit wars" in which the story of changes and attempts to find out the reason why becomes more prominent than the subject itself.

That's what happened this time.

Quentin Tarantino's new film "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" came out into a wide release in late July. The film garnered a positive buzz and made a splash at the box office. As any significant film release - it got a page on Wikipedia. For a while it only had an official plot synopsis and the list of cast.

But around the time the press screenings rolled out and the wide release date was coming up, it was expanded into a full-blown plot description with spoilers, et al. This things happens all the time and usually it is not a big deal.

However, things weren't that simple this time.

The big thing about "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" is that it is a historical fiction that applies a bit of artistic license over a depiction of certain historical events. In this case, it is a murder of Sharon Tate and several of her friends in 1969 by the cult leader Charles Manson and the members of his "family".

In the Tarantino's version of events, the murder never happened due to chain of events that diverted the attention of the "family" members to the film's protagonists Leonardo DiCaprio's Rick Dalton and Brad Pitt's Cliff Booth who quickly dispatched them in a gleefully gruesome fashion. And everyone lived happily ever after, because the film is a fairy tale. It is a spin on the historical event that tries to imagine what could have been if things went a little differently.

However, the Wikipedia description of the concluding section of the plot that appeared in late May after the film's Cannes premiere was drastically different from what actually happened on the screen. It retained the story point of murder plot falling apart, but it took things into much more outlandish direction.

Here's the bit in question:

The fact of that this plot description was fabricated and misleading was repeatedly pointed out by the film critics. As Andrew Woods put it: "Don’t even read it if you don’t want to know what DOESN'T happen." (great statement, by the way). 

Incorrect and downright made-up plot descriptions happen all the time, thats a part of Wikipedia's crowdsourced nature, especially for the anticipated media releases. The difference from this situation is that upon release the information gets corrected and everybody move on with their lives. 

But this time, when users tried correct the plot description, they hit the wall. Why? The thing is - Wikipedia guidelines have a line that says "it is not acceptable to delete information from an article because you think it spoils the plot". 

And so - each time users edited the bit - the fake one turned up again. It happened multiple times going into the release week. The film's "talk" page shows a fascinating story of what was going down behind the scenes. 

The initial discussions were about casting controversies, how much of the film's plot the summary should reveal and whether the editors should respect Tarantino's wishes to avoid spoilers. 

Then things took a turn sideways and started to get weird. It all started when one of the editors claimed that he saw the film at the Cannes premiere and stated that the plot description on Wikipedia was false. However, the other editors started to argue whether Cannes viewers can be considered as a verifiable sources of information. As one of the editors put it "You have once again have not explained how I, as an editor, am able to verify the plot summary". 

Despite that, multiple users requested to fix the section and the things kept rolling back to the made-up bit again and again up. It was a loop. And it went on up until the film's wide release in UK and North America in late July that put a definitive end to the debate and reinstated the real conclusion of the story to the plot description.

To be honest, this particular edit war is a great narrative in of itself. It shows the struggles of sourcing and depicting information on the web and it points out how shaky things are when the sources can't be verified and the public involvement goes out of control. 

But it overshadow the thing that started it all - falsified conclusion of the story in the plot description section. 

***

The made-up ending is interesting thing from the conceptual standpoint.

In essense, this kind of retelling is taking an artistic license on a plot point that itself took an artistic license on an actual story. And as such, it is a showcase of derivative creativity - another spin on an idea, a variation on a variation. It functions in the same context but drives the story in a different direction using the same moving parts of the plot.

If anything, this kind of spinning and slightly making things up is how people do things since the beginning of time. We do it all the time as a kids to impress others just to look cool. The made-up ending is something like that.

Deriving from the existing and experienced things is how the cognition amps up the imagination. After a while things get complicated, the line of sources and the bleedthrough of various elements mix-up more and more to the point the derivative piece becomes a thing of its own with its own distinct themes and identity.

"Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" wikipedia made-up ending is a testament to the dedication of the Tarantino's fanbase. Whether it was mean-spirited or not is beyond the debate. The fact is - it was misleading and it caused something of a fuss. 

But it shows the level of investment into the work of art similar to pro wrestling "fantasy booking". And we all should do it from time to time, just not make that much noise about it.