Wikipedia editors got locked in a dispute several months ago about the biographical summary boxes that sit atop some pages of the online encyclopedia. The tiff quickly turned heated.

“Your grammar is frankly awful,” said one editor while discussing filmmaker Stanley Kubrick’s box. “This is just another throwaway, unreliable, unattributed pile of stinking horseshit,” said another editor during a dispute about actor Cary Grant’s box.

Foul language flew. The arguments spiraled out of control. So another editor brought the matter to the online encyclopedia’s top jurists.

“Let’s call it the Wikipedia Supreme Court,” says Alan Sohn, a longtime Wikipedia editor who wasn’t involved in the dust-up. “There are cases or situations that are equivalents of Brown v. Board of Education.”

Wikipedia, the vast online crowdsourced encyclopedia, has a high court. It is a panel called the Arbitration Committee, largely unknown to anyone other than Wiki aficionados, which hears disputes that arise after all other means of conflict resolution have failed. The 15 elected jurists on the English-language Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee—among them a former staffer for presidential candidate John Kerry, an information-technology consultant in a tiny British village and a retired college librarian—have clerks, write binding decisions and hear appeals. They even issue preliminary injunctions.