I have assembled a list of the most controversial Wikipedia articles from the data on this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_reports/Talk_pages_by_size

There are 66 pages from the main article namespace listed there, and they are, in order of total size of all talk page archives, as follows:

  1. Donald Trump
  2. Intelligent design
  3. Climate change
  4. Barack Obama
  5. Race and intelligence
  6. Jesus
  7. United States
  8. Catholic Church
  9. Homeopathy
  10. Circumcision
  11. Chiropractic
  12. Monty Hall problem
  13. Muhammad
  14. Gaza War (2008-2009)
  15. Evolution
  16. Gamergate controversy
  17. Abortion
  18. Sarah Palin
  19. Prem Rawat
  20. Christ myth theory
  21. World War II
  22. India
  23. Jehovah's Witnesses
  24. Cold fusion
  25. Climatic Research Unit email controversy
  26. September 11 attacks
  27. Atheism
  28. Anarchism
  29. George W. Bush
  30. Falun Gong
  31. Armenian Genocide
  32. Neuro-linguistic programming
  33. Israel
  34. Cities and towns during the Syrian civil war
  35. Jerusalem
  36. Mass killings under communist regimes
  37. Transcendental Meditation
  38. British Isles
  39. Libertarianism
  40. Kosovo
  41. Christianity
  42. Thomas Jefferson
  43. International recognition of Kosovo
  44. United States and state terrorism
  45. United Kingdom
  46. Acupuncture
  47. Israel and the apartheid analogy
  48. Syrian civil war
  49. Adolf Hitler
  50. COVID-19 pandemic
  51. Russo-Georgian War
  52. Second Amendment to the United States Constitution
  53. Tea Party movement
  54. Murder of Meredith Kercher
  55. Genesis creation narrative
  56. Historicity of Jesus
  57. Electronic cigarette
  58. List of best-selling music artists
  59. Shakespeare authorship question
  60. List of sovereign states
  61. Taiwan
  62. Michael Jackson
  63. 0.999...
  64. European Union
  65. Chronic fatigue syndrome
  66. Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections
  • Shitbird [any]
    ·
    edit-2
    3 years ago

    “say the majority of a website is libertarian without saying the majority of a website is libertarian.”

          • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]
            ·
            edit-2
            3 years ago

            You're 100% correct but the internet still surprises me sometimes. I live in South Africa, probably one of the most racist countries in the world, where white kids in high school would casually drop racial slurs that are illegal to say, the aftermath of apartheid is visible everywhere, and the internet still gets me on occasion. I don't know what it is, if it's the anonymity or something, but it fucks with my brain seeing how blatant it gets on the internet.

            • Pezevenk [he/him]
              ·
              edit-2
              3 years ago

              Anonymity. Everyone just spouts whatever racist shit they want to without inhibition.

        • JoesFrackinJack [he/him]
          ·
          3 years ago

          absolutely but i've always maintained that biggest assholes and racists are of course going to be both the loudest and some of the most online people. Most normal people don't give one shit about wikipedia battles or go the darker corners of where the racists hang out. Vast majority of people are not like that and just don't care what happens online in those spaces. They're just posting pictures of their pet or looking up recipes and liking shit on social media that is wholesome and family/friends.

      • HumanBehaviorByBjork [any, undecided]
        ·
        3 years ago

        I mean I'd be more worried if Obama was an uncontroversial figure, except I know what viewpoints are actually represented in the debate.

        • JoesFrackinJack [he/him]
          ·
          3 years ago

          He most certainly is but you didn't see George W Bush on there high enough either. Equally comparable in many ways if not more

            • JoesFrackinJack [he/him]
              ·
              3 years ago

              Sorry I kinda worded that weird myself. I was just trying to draw a parallel to those two figures and how starkly different their rankings were while being quite seriously so similar in so many ways. Just one is a black American and the theme of so many of these is racism and bigotry

  • Elecdim00 [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Thank you for this, I've just discovered that my new favorite hobby is reading through decade old arguments where someone tries to convince actual scientists that they've disproved some fundamental concept. The talk section for 0.999… is a trip.

    • Windows97 [any, any]
      ·
      3 years ago

      holy shit that's amazing, I'm going to have to remember that when I have nothing better to do.

    • cosecantphi [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      3 years ago

      0.999... tripped me out so hard when I first learned about it. I'm not surprised it's controversial because it's pretty weird if you've never thought about it before. My favorite proof is the one where you multiply 3 by 1/3 or 0.333.... It equals 1, and therefore so does 0.999...

      Similarly amazing was learning about the Euler identity: e^(πi) = -1

      Taking one transcendental number to the power of another transcendental number times the square root of -1 somehow equals -1. Took me a long while to understand that one!

      • Pezevenk [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        It is weird because it is not taught properly in schools, and people aren't made to understand that the decimal representation is just a representation, it's not the number itself, and one number can have many different ones.

    • RealAssHistoryHours [he/him,they/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      I was just on the talk page for Dialogism and some guy was trying to cite his own unreviewed papers to prove the incoherence of Nikolai Bakhtin. Fantastic stuff.

  • buh [she/her]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Chronic fatigue syndrome

    :doomer:

  • Teekeeus
    ·
    edit-2
    11 days ago

    deleted by creator

    • NephewAlphaBravo [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      3 years ago

      My guess is that it's like those facebook "98% of people get this math problem wrong" 167k replies

    • Shitbird [any]
      ·
      3 years ago

      probly like one dude who was really convinced everyone els was wrong

    • redthebaron [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      like i am pretty sure this happens every other week like https://twitter.com/VickerySec/status/1393018028938338304 this dude was being extremelly wrong about the monty hall thing on twitter like some 3 days ago and he also started his rant with

      If you think you understand the "Monty Hall Problem", I promise you it is much more likely that you do not understand it.

    • TankieTanuki [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Crazy weather we've been having, right? Did you know that Michael Jackson did circumcision on Hitler, 9/11?

    • Civility [none/use name]
      ·
      edit-2
      3 years ago

      It's a really unintuitive maths thing.

      0.999... has been proven to be equal to 1.

      • asaharyev [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Yeah, it's a super simple proof, too. So I'm not sure why it's controversial.

        Maybe it's all discussion about whether to merge the page with 1, since they are equal.

        • Civility [none/use name]
          ·
          3 years ago

          That would be beautiful.

          I took a peep and it mainly seems to be people with an overabundance of confidence and a tenuous grasp on reality being persistently and defiantly wrong about fairly basic mathematics.

          • HumanBehaviorByBjork [any, undecided]
            ·
            3 years ago

            I don't know that it is fairly basic. It challenges us to understand the fine difference between a number and the representation of that number in a way that isn't intuitive.

            • WaterBear [they/them, comrade/them]
              ·
              3 years ago

              Your argument is good. I also like the Cantor, Kronecker argument of constructions of entities. If you need an infinite number of steps to construct 1 from the limes of 0.333 etc with the number of digits being the number of steps, then the construction is fundamental different from the explicit construction of the same thing in finite steps.

          • Liberalism [he/him,they/them]
            ·
            edit-2
            3 years ago

            but it's only over whether it's been proven or defined to equal 1

            I mean it's kind of both, but it's defined to equal the limit of 0.9 + 0.09 + 0.009 + 0.0009 ... for infinitely many terms, which is 1, Usually the issue is people not accepting the definition rather than disputing the limit of the series.

        • Pezevenk [he/him]
          ·
          3 years ago

          It's not "defined" to be equal to 1. The same is true for 1.99... and 2.99... etc. It's a consequence of the definition of repeating decimals.

          Can't believe there has to be a struggle sesh for that lol

          • Liberalism [he/him,they/them]
            ·
            3 years ago

            It’s defined to equal the limit of 0.9 + 0.09 + 0.009 + 0.0009 … for infinitely many terms, which is 1.

            Usually the issue is people not accepting the definition rather than disputing the limit of the series, so that's why I see it as more of a definition thing, but the fact that that series sums to 1 is something you can prove so it could really be either.

            • Pezevenk [he/him]
              ·
              edit-2
              3 years ago

              It's not defined to be 1 though, it is proven to be 1 based on the definition that it is an infinite sum. It's kind of different. And people do question the limit, actually they often have trouble accepting the very concept of a limit.

              • Liberalism [he/him,they/them]
                ·
                3 years ago

                Right, there's a definition element and a proof element, but I'm just going off what I've seen from "0.999... denialists"

                Usually they don't understand/know the definition, and often they seem to not know what a limit is, so that's what makes me say the difference has to do with definition rather than proof. I feel like if proof were the issue then they would be outright saying "0.999 ... is equal to the limit of the sequence (0.9, 0.99, 0.999...) but that limit is not 1" but someone who understands those terms would be very unlikely to say that

                • Pezevenk [he/him]
                  ·
                  3 years ago

                  It has to do with everything and it is very tiresome because it pops up again and again. Some people just don't want to accept it no matter how many times it gets explained.

                  • Liberalism [he/him,they/them]
                    ·
                    3 years ago

                    That's true. I feel like math cranks have got to be a weird symptom of our insanely individualist culture but I can't prove it.

      • WaterBear [they/them, comrade/them]
        ·
        edit-2
        3 years ago

        The limit is 1, surely. I am a friend of the non standard analysis argument that some people intuitively don't want it to be the same and are just more in line with fundamental non standard analysis concepts - in which the Archimedian principle isn't valid, so that n time epsilon is always smaller than m when n is smaller than m and epsilon is the special smallest number (which is different from standard analysis).

        This does resolve the problem, enables 0.99 etc to be 1 in the limes, and acknowledges the other person's stand point without trouble.

        Besides as proof 3x0.33 etc is not a good one for 1,cause it needs a lot of arguments that for this operation this is allowed.

        Arguments which in itself are limes and as such aren't 'simple'.

        • Pezevenk [he/him]
          ·
          edit-2
          3 years ago

          No. Stahp. The repeating decimal representation inherently represents a limit, you can't be like "oh, if you use non standard analysis...". It's a standard limit. And it's simply a different representation of the same thing. Stop trying to make it not be 1. Stooooooooop.

          Like if you want to do finitism just don't do infinite repeating decimals

      • Sen_Jen [they/them]
        ·
        3 years ago

        What? How? 0.999... isn't one, on account of it not one.

        Is this some nerd stuff?

          • Sen_Jen [they/them]
            ·
            3 years ago

            no it isnt :juche-tears: 0.999999 isnt one! its 0.99999! this is 1984

              • Sen_Jen [they/them]
                ·
                3 years ago

                We see through your filthy capitalist lies, Soros! 0.99999 doesn't equal one and it never will. That's economics 101

            • asaharyev [he/him]
              ·
              edit-2
              3 years ago

              If 0.999... isn't equal to 1, then what does 1-0.999... equal?

    • TruffleBitch [she/her]
      ·
      edit-2
      3 years ago

      Lots of math guys being wrong.

      There's a woman who answered the question for her column in I think Parade Magazine (Ask Marilyn maybe?). She claims to have a high IQ and writes a column about puzzles and logic problems. She answered the Monty Hall problem once and explained it and dudebros wrote in to tell her that she was wrong FOR YEARS.

      • Thordros [he/him, comrade/them]
        ·
        edit-2
        3 years ago

        The best part about this is that with computers, we can trivially prove the solution to the Monty Hall problem. If you keep the same door 100,000 times, you get a goat ⅔ of the time. If you change doors 100,000 times, you get a car ⅔ of the time. No math required—just open hundreds of thousands of doors in a few seconds.

        smdh my dick head at these fake geek boys who can't use computers

      • GalaxyBrain [they/them]
        ·
        3 years ago

        It makes fucking intuitive sense even! Like if you lay it out it makes perfect fucking sense.

  • Shitbird [any]
    ·
    edit-2
    3 years ago

    kosovo double dipping

    🇽🇰🇽🇰🇽🇰🇽🇰🇽🇰🇽🇰🇽🇰🇽🇰

  • JoesFrackinJack [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    The first 10 almost all have very strong connections to each other in a few ways. Mainly that it's heavily associated with right wing ideology. Not all that surprising. but good list, kinda interesting!-

    • JoesFrackinJack [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      My guess is that most of the people who disagree with the predominate idea of what actually happened just don't care enough about it to wage a wiki war on it. You're more than likely not going to change many people's opinion on that one unless they want to. This can be also said about many of the things on the list but it doesn't evoke as much of an emotional response I'd imagine as many of the others do.

  • WhatAnOddUsername [any]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Neat, although it seems kind of pathetic that Joe Biden apparently isn't even interesting enough to make the list.