The 10 Most Controversial Topics on Wikipedia
Wikipedia, the encyclopedia that anybody can edit, is one of the more extraordinary collective efforts of the crowd. Wikipedia's own estimate is that it has some 77,000 contributors working on more than 22 million articles in 285 languages. The largest edition — its English Wiki — alone offers more than 4 million articles.
So it's not surprising that disputes arise over the wording of these articles. Indeed, the controversy can sometimes reach warlike proportions with one editor changing the wording and another immediately changing it back again.
These edit wars can be used to identify controversial topics, but it's interesting to note how controversy varies across languages and cultures. Given its unique position that straddles multiple languages and cultures, Wikipedia is in the perfect position to provide some answers.
Taha Yasseri at the University of Oxford in the UK and his team of researchers have ranked the most controversial topics in 10 different languages according to the intensity of the editing wars they generate.
The result is a fascinating insight into the way conflicts emerge in different languages and how they are resolved. Yasseri and his fellow researchers also reveal the controversies that are common across language groups and how they vary around the world.
Most of Wikipedia's most controversial topics generate heat across pages in different languages.Image: The Most Controversial Topics In Wikipedia: A Multilingual And Geographical Analysis
These guys begin by defining what they mean by a controversy. In Wikipedia, the editorial history of every article is easily accessible but the number of changes is by no means a measure of controversy; it may simply indicate a rapidly changing topic.
Instead, Yasseri and his team focus on "reverts" — edits in which one author completely nullifies changes made by another, returning the article to an earlier version. Reverts are relatively common in Wikipedia and may not necessarily be indicative of controversy.
So Yasseri looked instead for "mutual reverts," in which one editor reverts another's work and vice versa — so both editors have undone each other's changes.
According to Yasseri, mutual reverts are essential to determining an article's controversiality:
The controversiality of an article is defined by summing the weights of all mutually reverting editor pairs, excluding the topmost pair, and multiplying this number by the total number of editors involved in the article.
The research team went through each language version of Wikipedia searching for mutual reverts and calculating the controversiality of the stories these reverts were associated with.
Their work generated a simple list of the most controversial articles in each language. In English, the top 10 most controversial articles are:
But it is also possible to group the languages into three sets: English, German, French and Spanish; Czech, Hungarian and Romanian; and Arabic, Persian and Hebrew. Using these subdivisions of Wikipedia, Yasseri and his research team then compared the lists from each group to see which topics overlapped.
They say that, in general, major religions and religious figures as well as articles related to anti-Semitism and Israel are highly contested in many languages. In particular, "The articles Israel, Adolf Hitler, The Holocaust and God are highly contested in all the three language sets," Yasseri reports.
However, while there are a small number of topics that seem to be controversial in most languages, most of the controversial articles are language dependent. So they may be controversial in one language but not another, the Islas Malvinas/Falkland islands article in the Spanish Wikipedia, for example.
That's an interesting insight into the topics that different language communities consider worth fighting about.
Yasseri and his fellow researchers have plans for the future. They say their measure of controversiality clearly varies with time as the nature of the topic changes and the editors working on it shift. In order to see how the patterns of controversy change over time, they intend to study Wikipedia editing trends in greater detail.
Image: Bill Olive/Getty Images
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This article originally published at MIT Technology Review here
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