Wicked-Pedia

Wikipedia is that vast, relatively open-sourced reference book in the clouds. It is edited and reedited by sanctioned experts, who often disagree on the “facts.” “Brewing beneath the surface of every popular Wikipedia page is a minor war. Wikipedians bicker with each other in hidden ‘Talk’ pages about word choice and bias and, if a debate gets particularly contentious, one editor may edit over another editor's work.” Huffington Post, June 1^st.

To examine the cultural priorities among controversial topics, “A group of researchers from Hungary, the UK and the U.S. determined the ‘controversiality’ of a Wikipedia page ‘by focusing on ‘reverts,’ i.e. when an editor undoes another editor’s edit completely and brings it to the version exactly the same as the version before the last version.’ Wikipedia's most controversial articles cover most of the subjects that engender controversy at the dinner table: religion, philosophy and politics.” Huffington Post.  The report is entitled The most controversial topics in Wikipedia: A multilingual and geographical analysis, and the scholars come from Oxford, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, the Central European University and Rutgers.

Across the board, the study reports that “The Islam and Muhammad pages are the most highly contested pages that are both contained the English, German, French Spanish language set and the Arabic, Persian, Hebrew languages set. Roughly 10% of the pages in each language set are also contested in another language set.” In terms of controversy, the authors say, “Politics-related articles exceed one quarter of the whole population and in addition to ‘geographical places’ and ‘Religion’ cover more than half of the most controversial articles. Culture-related articles including, literature, authors, printed and public media, movies and animations, entertainment and music industry, although ranked 8-10 according to the relative population. However putting all these categories together, it goes beyond 10% of the sample.”

A sample of the most controversial topics, by country, is presented in the graphic above. “The results are pretty fascinating. Americans are stuck in the past: the most controversial U.S. Wikipedia article is on George W. Bush. Czech Wikipedians are really interested in homosexuality; 3 of the top 10 most controversial articles deal with homosexuality. Unsurprisingly, Jesus causes controversy in most languages.” Huffington Post, June 1^st.  In the end, Wikipedia is flushed with the biases and prejudices of the society around us, but it is indeed interesting how differently even Western cultures prioritize the controversies within their local purview.

I’m Peter Dekom, and understanding how many differences exist among and between cultures is often difficult for Americans living in a vast land with literally only two bordering countries.