Twitter
Advertisement

Most controversial pages on Wikipedia revealed

Overall, after religion and politics, the most controversial topics were countries and geographical places, followed by sex, gender and race-related topics.

Latest News
article-main
FacebookTwitterWhatsappLinkedin

The most controversial topics on Wikipedia that people argue about the most around the world have been revealed.

The behind-the-scenes look at the so-called edit wars on Wikipedia revealed that the most controversial topic was ‘religion and politics’.

Considering that Wikipedia is the result of mass collaboration, with essentially 40 million editors, back-and-forth editing and even arguments are bound to occur.

According to researchers, the three most disputed topics on the English-language version being George W. Bush, anarchism and Muhammad.

Oxford University physicist Taha Yasseri, co-author of the new study detailed online May 23 in the preprint journal arXiv, said Wikipedia seems to be a cool and novel platform for collaboration, but it suffers from very traditional features of human societie.

According to Fox News, Yasseri and his colleagues collected the revisions on all of the articles submitted over ten years. They then looked at edit wars in which Wikipedia users repeatedly override one another and don't reach a consensus.

The researchers identified the 100 most controversial topics in 13 languages.

Overall, after religion and politics, the most controversial topics were countries and geographical places, followed by sex, gender and race-related topics.

Some subjects, such as Israel, were heavily debated in all the languages, and some topics were local to different language editions.

Religion and politics were heavily disputed in Middle Eastern languages, including Hebrew, Persian and Arabic, the report added.

Find your daily dose of news & explainers in your WhatsApp. Stay updated, Stay informed-  Follow DNA on WhatsApp.
Advertisement

Live tv

Advertisement
Advertisement