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Yasseri, Spoerri, Graham and Kertèsz [1] have analysed page edits of Wikipedia entries to find the most controversial entries. Many entries in the open encyclopedia are only locally debated, for example in Romania the Universitatea Craiova football team is a hot topic! |
The researchers concentrated on finding the entries which editors scrapped about in order to find controversial subjects. This is believed to be more reliable than simply concentrating on those that have changed a lot
There are of course things that are more universally controversial and receive lots of edits. The top 10 “touchy” subjects according to the research are;
- George W Bush
- Anarchism
- The Prophet Muhammad
- World Wrestling Entertainment employees
- Global warming
- Circumcision
- The United States
- Jesus
- Race and intelligence
- Christianity
The most controversial
Millions of articles from 10 different language versions of Wikipedia were analysed. English, Spanish, Persian, Arabic and Czech editions were among those studied. Across all the languages the most controversial entries were found to be;
- Israel
- Adolf Hitler
- The Holocaust
- God
I would say no real surprises here.
Reference
[1]Yasseri T., Spoerri A., Graham M., and Kertèsz J., The most controversial topics in Wikipedia: A multilingual and geographical analysis. In: Fichman P., Hara N., editors, Global Wikipedia:International and cross-cultural issues in online collaboration. Scarecrow Press (2014). (arXiv:1305.5566v2 [physics.soc-ph] )