Edit Wars Reveal The Most Controversial Topics on Wikipedia | Hacker News Reader

Edit Wars Reveal The Most Controversial Topics on Wikipedia

technologyreview.com

71 pointsdariusm527 comments

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Seriously.

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...

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

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)

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.

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.

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.

I think the link is socioeconomic status and crime. If there was a connection between skin color and crime in the US why would this genetic predisposition stop at the border?

Does it?

http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/02/01/police-routinely-sup...

The way I read that article the whitewashing means that it is not possible for researchers to assess wether the LEOs are engaging in racial profiling. Did you interpret the article to mean that some minorioties are genetically predisposed to crime?

The article did not discuss genetics. Your question makes no sense.

Just to make sure we are on the same page: You don't think that increased levels of melanin means that an individual is more likely to be a criminal?

With that out of the way. The conversation went like this:

dsuth: "I thought that [the link between skin colour and crime in the US] was a fairly massive social issue over there, well-deserving of a wikipedia page."

me: "If there was a connection between skin color and crime in the US why would this genetic predisposition stop at the border?"

you: "Does it? http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/02/01/police-routinely-sup... "

I am not sure where we got our signals crossed.

* What were you questioning when you asked "does it?"

* What did you expect I was going to get out of the article you linked to?

* You do not think that a person's race is a matter of genetics?

Didn't you mean to imply that blacks in countries bordering the US had substantially lower crime rates than blacks in the US? If you didn't, then I have no idea what you were getting at.

It's not the topic, but rather how the title frames the topic. It isn't exactly neutral. (Compare the actual article title.) It seems that in contrast to article titles, Wikipedia allows redirects containing non-neutral language, and when an article title is deemed inappropriate and changed, they sometimes even allow the original title to be maintained as a redirect.

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

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).

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?

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.

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

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

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).

1. George W Bush

2. Anarchism

3. Muhammad

4. List of World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. employees

I'm disappointed in Scientology.

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