Word.ws English Dictionary

wheel war

wheel war noun: a conflict in which users of a given computer system or (later) wiki who have administrative privileges try to lock each other out of the system or repeatedly attempt to reverse each other’s administrative actions.

Noun

wheel war (plural wheel wars)

  1. (slang) A conflict in which users of a given computer system or (later) wiki who have administrative privileges try to lock each other out of the system or repeatedly attempt to reverse each other’s administrative actions.
    • WHEEL WARS. A period during which student wheels hack each other by attempting to log each other out of the system, delete each other’s files, or otherwise wreak havoc—usually at the expense of the lesser users. A battle of Titans (heh heh).[1983, Guy L. Steele Jr., Donald R. Woods, Raphael A. Finkel, Mark R. Crispin, Richard M. Stallman, Geoffrey S. Goodfellow, The Hacker’s Dictionary: A Guide to the Computer Underground, New York...
    • Wikipedia policy prohibits “wheel wars”—cases in which a Wikipedia administrator repeatedly undoes the action of another—just as it prohibits edit wars.2008, Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, →ISBN, page 290

Forms of wheel war

pluralwheel wars

Origin of wheel war

From wheel (“superuser on certain systems”) + war.

Questions about wheel war

What does wheel war mean?
Wheel war means a conflict in which users of a given computer system or (later) wiki who have administrative privileges try to lock each other out of the system or repeatedly attempt to reverse each other’s administrative actions.
What part of speech is wheel war?
Wheel war is a noun.
What is the plural of wheel war?
The plural of wheel war is wheel wars.

Words near wheel war in the dictionary

  1. wheel tree
  2. wheel trees
  3. wheel truck
  4. wheel urchin
  5. wheel urchins
  6. wheel war
  7. wheel wars
  8. wheel wash
  9. wheel washes
  10. wheel well
  11. wheel wells

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: wheel war (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-wheel war.wav.

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