If Wikipedia is to be believed, former US President George W Bush is the most controversial topic for the English-speaking world.
Researchers have analyzed almost two million article pages in 10 languages on the crowdsourced encyclopedia, to find the topics that spark what they call ‘edit wars’, where changes are almost immediately undone and changed back to what they said earlier.
Topics relating to religion and philosophy feature across all languages, with Jesus, Christianity, and Islam making multiple lists.
Many articles related to local controversies: In Hungarian, the most controversial page was Gypsy Crime; in Romanian, it was soccer team Universitatea Craiova.
The French are apparently very concerned about UFOs, which was their second-most controversial article.
Researchers tested how controversial particular topics were by “reverts” in the text – where facts had been edited, and then edited again to say exactly what they had before.
They analyzed pages in English, German, French, Spanish, Persian, Czech, Hungarian, Arabic, Romanian and Hebrew.
Scientists Taha Yasseri, Anselm Spoerri, Mark Graham and Janos Kertesz conducted the research, which will be published next year.
Top 10 most controversial English-language articles
• George W Bush
• Anarchism
• Muhammad
• LWWEe (List of World Wrestling Entertainment, Including Employees)
• Global warming
• Circumcision
• United States
• Jesus
• Race and intelligence
• Christianity
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