Soccer, Anarchism, George W. Bush Spark Wikipedia Controversy

A team led by Janos Kertesz of CEU's Center for Network Science has extensively studied “edit wars” on Wikipedia. They analyzed which topics are keeping Wikipedia editors' keyboards busiest in 10 different languages and looked at the escalation and resolution of controversies.

A summary of their results will appear as a chapter of the book “Global Wikipedia: International and Cross-cultural Issues in Online Collaboration”.

Wikipedia is a collaboratively edited encyclopedia and with so many contributors there is, inevitably, conflict. The team gauged controversy by recording the number of times chosen lines in an article were changed and then reverted back by another editor and changed again. Motivated by the statistical analysis of the conflicts, the research team led by Kertesz published a paper in the journal “Physical Review Letters,” showing that when a fixed number of individuals form one “mainstream” and two opposing “extremist” groups, consensus in the medium's content is achieved but only after a long time and this may not correspond to the initial mainstream view. In the case of a dynamic environment where new editors replace existing ones, they found periods of conflict and consensus can alternate indefinitely, depending on the rate of newcomers and the degree of controversy in the article's topic but the average number of conflicts over a topic is seven.

“The controversy comes from the fact that some people who have strongly opposing opinions are very active,” said Kertesz. “They are very much devoted to representing their opinions. The rest of the editors, from time to time, try to move the articles back to a 'mainstream,' or more common line. Some conflicts are permanent because people are constantly fighting.” U.S. President Barack Obama is one such topic that never finds consensus.

In addition to controversies by language, the team looked at topics of debate by geographical area. Although some results were not surprising – for example, heavily edited articles addressing ArabIsraeli conflict in the Middle East – others were. Germany is another controversial topic in the Arab world and more present than America in conflicts. Team member Anselm Spoerri, from School of Information and Communication at Rutgers University, has created an interactive tool that graphically represents the top 100 most edited subjects across the 10 languages.

The most controversial subjects in the English-language Wiki are: George W. Bush, anarchism, and Muhammad while the Spanish version is alive with debate over soccer. Researchers report that religion, politics, and geographical places seem to be the common fields of editorial wars in all editions, however with local effects: far-right politics and nationalism in Hungarian; current Iranian political figures in Persian; sex and gender-related topics in Czech; and football clubs in Spanish.

As for the future of this research, Kertesz says the team plans to extend and refine their model. “Wikipedia is a very good, well-documented sample where one can study, in detail, these mechanisms, which drive conflicts and conflict resolutions.”