Wikipedia Edit Wars: Religion, Politics, and Professional Wrestling?

Don't be fooled by Wikipedia's clean look and orderly format: Beneath that serene and informative façade rages a war of edits and reversions.

Scientists at the University of Oxford have analyzed the articles on Wikipedia that get the most edits and reversions (when a Wikipedia editor reverts the article back to its original form, wiping out the changes made by another editor), have used that metric to come up with a list of the most controversial topics on Wikipedia.

The crowd-sourced encyclopedia allows anyone to sign up and write about a topic, but has a somewhat strict, and private, culture of editing. However, there are about 77,000 total Wikipedia contributors editing more than 22 million articles, so there are bound to be disagreements.

Researchers found the most controversial topics undergoing "edit wars" by Wikipedia editors by analyzing which topics - across ten different language editions - had the most changes that were almost instantly undone by other editors. The new study on those so-called "edit wars" was published with the name "The most controversial topics in Wikipedia: A multilingual and geographical analysis," as a chapter of an upcoming book to be published in 2014.

In the English language version of Wikipedia, "George W. Bush" takes the top spot as the most controversial subject. The next two most controversial subjects in English are "anarchism" and "Muhammad." Those make sense as tendentious issues - as does "Jesus," "Race and intelligence," "Christianity," and "United States" - they say you should never discuss religion or politics in polite company. But apparently, you shouldn't discuss professional wrestling either, as "List of World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. employees" is in the number four spot of the most controversial topics.

What's interesting about the study is how various geographical and language editions of Wikipedia share some controversial topics in common. "Jesus," and "Homeopathy," for example, are both highly contested subjects in English, German, French, and Spanish editions. But the most controversial topics, across all of the editions studied, were:

• Israel
• Adolf Hitler
• The Holocaust
• God

A lot of other controversial articles are only hotly contested in specific languages and regions though. For example, "Jesus," while being on the top 10 most controversial list for English, German and French Wikipedia editions, ranks 42^nd for the Spanish edition.

"Chabad," a Hasidic movement in Orthodox Judaism, is the top most controversial subject on the Hebrew edition of Wikipedia, while it doesn't appear on the top 10 list of the other editions studied. Similarly Augusto Pinochet is a hot topic for the Spanish edition, while Wahhabi - an ultra-conservative branch of Sunni Islam - takes the same spot on the Arabic Wikipedia.

The researchers ranked most controversial articles across languages by topic and found that the most controversial topic, unsurprisingly, was politics: 25 percent of the most controversial articles were about politics, political movements, ideologies, parties, and politicians. Articles about countries took 17 percent of the most controversial subjects, followed by 15 percent for religion and 9 percent for history.

Of all the editions of Wikipedia, say the researchers, English is the most commonly edited by various regions. "The English Wikipedia, in particular, occupies a unique role. The language's status as a lingua franca, means that English Wikipedia ends up being edited by a broad community beyond simply that have the language as a mother tongue," says the study. "As a result, it is expected that globally disputed themes are often represented in this Wikipedia."

The study was conducted over millions of articles from 10 language editions, including English, Spanish, German, Arabic, Hebrew, Czech, and Persian. The data were taken from Wikipedia in 2010. Click here for the full study.