What are the most controversial topics in Wikipedia? What articles have been subject to edit wars more than others? We now have a tool to explore what topics are most controversial in different languages and different parts of the world.
Wikipedia is great! There is no doubt about it. You may argue that it’s not reliable, it’s incomplete, it’s biased, etc, and I might agree. However, despite all these issues, Wikipedia IS useful, fast, practical and phenomenal!
Do you have any other example of a mass collaboration at the scale of Wikipedia with more 40 million editors, having produced more than 37 million articles in more than 280 languages?
Coordinating a small group of friends becomes a big issue when it’s about collaboration and reaching agreement on some topic, how is that possible that this huge number of unprofessional individuals with different backgrounds, cultures, opinions, come together and produce the largest encyclopaedia of all times?
Well, the answer is: it’s not easy and it’s not always smooth. Many Wikipedia articles are about neutral topic, like watermelon and hamsters. But there are lots of editorial wars and opinion clashes happening behind the scenes of Wikipedia as well. What are the main characteristics of these wars? What are the most disputed articles? Does it give us a window to how humans of different parts of the world think about stuff? It’s not difficult to observe some of the editorial wars in English Wikipedia, for example see the list of controversial issues in Wikipedia. But first of all there is no guarantee that these lists are inclusive, and more importantly, such lists are only available for the biggest language editions like English Wikipedia.
There have been already nice studies on Wikipedia conflict, but unfortunately only limited to English Wikipedia. In a recent multidisciplinary project (see the paper), my colleagues Anselm Spoerri (communication and Information scientist), Mark Graham (geographer) , János Kertész (senior physicist), and I (physicist in transition to computational social scientist) studied Wikipedia editorial wars in 13 different language editions including: English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, … Persian, Arabic, Hebrew, … Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, …. Chinese and Japanese.
We have developed our tools to locate, quantify, and rank the most controversial articles in different language editions without being able to read the language! Our method to measure editorial wars has been reported in our previous papers on Dynamics of conflicts in Wikipedia and Edit wars in Wikipedia.
Now that we have measures of controversy for all the articles in the language editions under study, we could have lots of fun!
First take a look at the awesome post by Mark on mapping conflict and geographical locations of the controversial articles, and then I’ll tell you something about most debated topics in different language editions.
Here’s the top-10 list of most controversial articles in different languages:
| English | German | French | Spanish | Portuguese | Czech | Hungarian | Romanian | Arabic | Persian | Hebrew | Japanese | Chinese | |
| 1 | George W. Bush | Croatia | Ségolène Royal | Chile | São Paulo | Homosexuality | Gypsy Crime | FC Universitatea Craiova | Ash’ari | Báb | Chabad | Koreans in Japan | Taiwan |
| 2 | Anarchism | Scientology | Unidentified flying object | Club América | Brazil | Psychotronics | Atheism | Mircea Badea | Ali bin Talal al Jahani | Fatimah | Chabad messianism | Korea origin theory | List of upcoming TVB series |
| 3 | Muhammad | 9/11 conspiracy theories | Jehovah’s Witnesses | Opus Dei | Rede Record | Telepathy | Hungarian radical right | Disney Channel (Romania) | Muhammad | Mahmoud Ahmadinejad | 2006 Lebanon War | Men’s rights | TVB |
| 4 | List of WWE personnel | Fraternities | Jesus | Athletic Bilbao | José Serra | Communism | Viktor Orbán | Legionnaires’ rebellion & Bucharest pogrom | Ali | People’s Mujahedin of Iran | B’Tselem | internet right-wing | China |
| 5 | Global warming | Homeopathy | Sigmund Freud | Andrés Manuel López Obrador | Grêmio Foot-Ball Porto Alegrense | Homophobia | Hungarian Guard Movement | Lugoj | Egypt | Criticism of the Quran | Benjamin Netanyahu | AKB48 | Chiang Kai-shek |
| 6 | Circumcision | Adolf Hitler | September 11 attacks | Newell’s Old Boys | Sport Club Corinthians Paulista | Jesus | Ferenc Gyurcsány’s speech in May 2006 | Vladimir Tismăneanu | Syria | Tabriz | Jewish settlement in Hebron | Kamen Rider Series | Ma Ying-jeou |
| 7 | United States | Jesus | Muhammad al-Durrah incident | FC Barcelona | Cyndi Lauper | Moravia | The Mortimer case | Craiova | Sunni Islam | Ali Khamenei | Daphni Leef | One Piece | Chen Shui-bian |
| 8 | Jesus | Hugo Chávez | Islamophobia | Homeopathy | Dilma Rousseff | Sexual orientation change efforts | Hungarian Far- right | Romania | Wahhabi | Ruhollah Khomeini | Gaza War | Kim Yu-Na | Mao Zedong |
| 9 | Race and intelligence | Minimum wage | God in Christianity | Augusto Pinochet | Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva | Ross Hedvíček | Jobbik | Traian Băsescu | Yasser Al-Habib | Massoud Rajavi | Beitar Jerusalem F.C. | Mizuho Fukushima | Second Sino-Japanese War |
| 10 | Christianity | Rudolf Steiner | Nuclear power debate | Alianza Lima | Guns N’ Roses | Israel | Polgár Tamás | Romanian Orthodox Church | Arab people | Muhammad | Ariel Sharon | GoGo Sentai Boukenger | Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 |
Interesting and familiar titles, right? Did you realise that some titles appear in many different language editions? Many of them are about religion: Jesus; countries: Israel, Brazil; politics: Ségolène Royal, George W. Bush.
If you’d like to take a look at the top-100 or in case you fancy having the complete lists with controversy score, get them from here.
What you see at the right is a Word Cloud of all the titles in top-100 lists.
There are interesting patterns. Similarities and differences. International and global issues and very local items. An interactive visualization of top-100 lists in different languages to show overlaps and similarities, is waiting for you here.
To have a more general picture, we would have to look further than just “titles”. We need to consider more general topics and concepts, which the articles can be categorised based on.
We hand-coded all the articles in top-100 lists with 10 different category tags. See the population of topical categories in each language in the interactive chart below (click on it!).
Some interesting patterns: Religion and Politics are debated in Persian, Arabic, and Hebrew even more than the others. Spanish and Portuguese Wikipedias are full of wars on football clubs. French and Czech Wikipedias have relatively more disputed articles on science and technology related topics. Chinese and Japanese Wikipedia are battle fields for manga, anime, TV series, and entertainment fans. TVB product appear quite often in the Chinese list, and well, the number 19 most disputed article in Japanese Wikipedia is “Penis”!
“So What?” is probably what you are asking. Generally speaking the implication of these kind of studies are two-fold:
1) These results could help Wikipedia and similar projects (which are already many, and growing) to be better designed, considering these experiences and the observations we made. Local effects shouldn’t be neglected and specially Wikipedias with smaller community of editors could be inefficiently very much focused on local issues.
2) we believe that this kind of case-studies (Wikipedia being the case) could help us and social scientist to understand more about human societies. Topics like conflict emergence, its dynamics, its universal features, and the resolution mechanisms could be empirically examined for the first time. Most of the theories in social science could have never been tested against real world experiments (in contrast to natural sciences). But now, thanks to our digital life of today, we are able to track and analyse all the actions and interactions of a huge society of individuals (here, Wikipedia editors), so why not test the pre-existing social theories in a large “social experiment” of Wikipedia?
Read more about this project:
Yasseri, Taha, Spoerri, Anselm, Graham, Mark and Kertesz, Janos, The Most Controversial Topics in Wikipedia: A Multilingual and Geographical Analysis (May 23, 2013). Fichman P., Hara N., editors. Global Wikipedia: International and Cross-Cultural Issues in Online Collaboration. Scarecrow Press (2014), Forthcoming. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2269392
And more on Wikipedia by our team:
Török, J., Iñiguez, G., Yasseri, T., San Miguel, M., Kaski, K., and Kertész, J. (2013) Opinions, Conflicts and Consensus: Modeling Social Dynamics in a Collaborative Environment. Physical Review Letters 110 (8).
Yasseri, T., Sumi, R., Rung, A., Kornai, A., and Kertész, J. (2012) Dynamics of conflicts in Wikipedia. PLoS ONE 7(6): e38869.
Yasseri, T., Kornai, A., and Kertész, J. (2012) A practical approach to language complexity: a Wikipedia case study. PLoS ONE 7(11): e48386.
Yasseri, T., Sumi, R., and Kertész, J. (2012) Circadian patterns of Wikipedia editorial activity: A demographic analysis. PLoS ONE 7(1): e30091.
Mestyán, M., Yasseri, T., and Kertész, J. (2012) Early Prediction of Movie Box Office Success based on Wikipedia Activity Big Data.
Taha Yasseri 
The most controversial topics are the most expected, politicians, cults, fringe areas, but very little science. Can you use your tool to search for say the top 10 most controversial science articles on en.Wikipedia? I would be interested also to see, for example, a country-by-country comparison of the most controversial topics in history by country, also?
Surprisingly French Wikipedia has experienced relatively lots of editorial wars on science and technology related articles. In English Wikipedia the most controversial articles in the topic of science and technology are
Global warming
Evolution
Wikipedia
Nicolaus Copernicus
Akatsuki
Truth
the complete lists and the lists of top-100 controversial articles are available here:
http://wwm.phy.bme.hu/
hope this helps.
Thanks, pretty much as expected, pseudo-science pushers and nationalism. But Akatsuki? That’s a disambiguation page.
Korea is Japan’s No. 1, 2 and 8 most visited entry? I hope these are just people looking up stuff, but experience tells me…
Hi, this is not about visiting, it’s about controversies and editorial wars. Korean related topics are very much debated in Japanese Wiki, as you noticed…
Yes, no surprise that the most edited and controversial topics on Japanese Wikipedia would be about Korea; probably done by as many Japanese as Japanese-speaking Koreans.
who’s ali bin talal al jahani?
Wikipedia it 🙂
http://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8%B9%D9%84%D9%8A_%D8%A8%D9%86_%D8%B7%D9%84%D8%A7%D9%84_%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AC%D9%87%D9%86%D9%8A
thanks, i can’t type in arabic 🙂 didn’t try translating to arabic, searching wikipedia and translating back.
Do you have data on how many different people are involved in each of these debates? Are some of them due to 2 or just a few people “warring”? Are some the result of scores or hundreds of persons making the edits? (Just curiosity.) Also: do you freeze the article (perhaps leaving 2 or more versions of a sentence) after a number of identical revisions and reversions?
Thank you.
Thanks for the comment. yes we have the statistics and what we have observed is that usually the core of the war is due to 5-10 pairs of editors at a time. This is disscussed in Figure 22 of this paper: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0038869#pone-0038869-g022
As for the second question, yes, the articles might bot frozen to the latest version with consensus, and then discussions could continue “behind the scene” to reach a newer consensus and then the article will be updated.