Edit Wars Reveal The Most Controversial Topics on Wikipedia

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/517101/edit-wars-reveal-the-10-most-controversial-topics-on-wikipedia/

by dariusm5 • 13 years ago

71 27 13 years ago

acheron2• 13 years ago

Mostly not surprising other than the list of WWE employees...?

There was a "famous" flame and revert war in Wikipedia's early days over the city of Gdansk/Danzig. A Wikipedia archive page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/20...

wiredfool• 13 years ago

Yes. One of these things is not like the others.

michael_nielsen• 13 years ago

Or consider this list of the _lamest_ edit wars:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars

Everything from edit wars over fictional waterfowl to the correct size of the Death Star in Star Wars. Read at your own risk.

Osmium• 13 years ago

I actually find lame edit wars kinda heartening. It suggests that the people running wikipedia have principles regardless of the topic; that it doesn't matter if it's silly; that if you want to talk about it, it should be done right.

chongli• 13 years ago

people running wikipedia have principles

Sure, if you want to call ego a principle. Or whatever you want to call the emotion that leads to tunnel-vision; to thinking about what you're going to say next without even hearing the other side.

InclinedPlane• 13 years ago

When the strength of a principle is expended in meaningless battles over minutiae the principle is weakened greatly.

More importantly, there is no such thing as a perfectly self-consistent set of ethical or moral rules. There will always be gray areas and areas of extreme complexity. It's far more valuable to know when to make exceptions and how to uphold the spirit of a principle independent of absurdly rigid rules.

acheron2• 13 years ago

This is a fantastic list. Thank you for the link. I may have seen it before but had long forgotten about it.

ErrantX• 13 years ago

The "best", and one of the longest, rages over capitalisation of the letter T in The Beatles.

Seriously.

cleaver• 13 years ago

I'm disappointed in Scientology.

Cynddl• 13 years ago

I am not sure that the edit wars reveal correctly the controversial topics. Edit wars also show pages where contributors are more beginners, like perhaps 'List of World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. employees'. Lots of new contributors don't understand the rules and try to push their edits by editing a few time a page.

The paper takes into account the weight of an editor – "The weight of an editor x is defined as the number of edits N performed by him or her" – without distinction between small and large edits for instance. Is it really a relevant metric?

devindotcom• 13 years ago

If you read the methods, they discount things like senior editors removing changes made by junior editors. The "controversy" they define as when editors repeatedly undo each other's additions.

kriro• 13 years ago

The German list is a bit odd, particularly #1. I guess there's some edit war over the war since there are quite a few German speaking folks from all over the Balkan living in Germany, Austria etc....

* Croatia

* Scientology

* 9/11 conspir acy theories

* Fraternities

* Homeopathy

* Adolf Hitler

* Jesus

* Hugo Chávez

* Minimum wage

* Rudolf Steiner

Interesting that Chile is #1 for es, Opus Dei #3

wf• 13 years ago

Link to the PDF being referenced: http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1305/1305.5566.pdf

My favorite is the top result in Hungary: Gypsy Crime.

dkarl2• 13 years ago

I thought it was bizarre to even have a page called "Gypsy Crime," but then I checked and discovered that this page exists:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_crime

It's a redirect showing the article "Race and crime in the United States," but "Black_crime" is sitting right there in the address bar.

dsuth• 13 years ago

Its nice that you're feeling PC, but do you really want to contend that there's no link between skin colour and crime in the US? I thought that was a fairly massive social issue over there, well-deserving of a wikipedia page.

hkmurakami• 13 years ago

I'd really like to see this kind of analysis in the non-western wikipedia sites. From the little I know, some languages have very different focuses on wikipedia compared to the west.

IIRC Japan has massive info and edits into pop culture, celebrities and manga/anime, and comparatively little in areas like politics, history and science.

(one of the longest lasting edit wars there is with respect to the lead singer of the band *l'arc en ciel's (hyde) height, which by urban legend is said to be 156cm, which in netslang is now a unit of measurement where 1 hyde = 156cm)

belorn• 13 years ago

I would really like to so a correlation between the quality of a article, and how much edit warring that been done. Looking at the list, some of the corresponding articles have even been marked as GA (like #1 with most edit wars).

pekk• 13 years ago

This isn't about the most controversial topics, it's about which ones are tactically up for grabs. Many very controversial topics have a well-ensconced dogmatic view on Wikipedia (just not outside).

alxndr• 13 years ago

1. George W Bush

2. Anarchism

3. Muhammad

4. List of World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. employees

deskglass• 13 years ago

Here is the list for all the languages: http://i.imgur.com/fMGvxHJ.png

Source Article: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/14472718/wikipedia%20con...

Edit Wars Reveal The Most Controversial Topics on Wikipedia

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