  Wikipedia is a prime example of today's value production in a collaborative
environment. Using this example, we model the emergence, persistence and
resolution of severe conflicts during collaboration by coupling opinion
formation with article editing in a bounded confidence dynamics. The complex
social behavior involved in editing articles is implemented as a minimal model
with two basic elements; (i) individuals interact directly to share information
and convince each other, and (ii) they edit a common medium to establish their
own opinions. Opinions of the editors and that represented by the article are
characterised by a scalar variable. When the pool of editors is fixed, three
regimes can be distinguished: (a) a stable mainstream article opinion is
continuously contested by editors with extremist views and there is slow
convergence towards consensus, (b) the article oscillates between editors with
extremist views, reaching consensus relatively fast at one of the extremes, and
(c) the extremist editors are converted very fast to the mainstream opinion and
the article has an erratic evolution. When editors are renewed with a certain
rate, a dynamical transition occurs between different kinds of edit wars, which
qualitatively reflect the dynamics of conflicts as observed in real Wikipedia
data.
