philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Edit Wars Reveal The 10 Most Controversial Topics on Wikipedia

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 co focus on “reverts”, edits in which one author completely undoes changes made by another and so returns the article to an earlier version. Reverts are relatively common in Wikipedia and may not necessarily be indicative of controversy.

So Yasseri and co looked instead for “mutual reverts” in which one editor reverts another’s work and vice versa, so both editors are undoing each other’s changes.

That leads to a relatively straightforward definition of 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,” say Yasseri and co.

That gives a simple list of the most controversial articles in each language. In English, the top 10 most controversial articles are as follows:

1. George W Bush
2. Anarchism
3. Muhammad
4. List of World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. employees
5. Global Warming
6. Circumcision
7. United States
8. Jesus
9. Race and intelligence
10. Christianity

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