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
  • 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]
      ·
      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.