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:
- Donald Trump
- Intelligent design
- Climate change
- Barack Obama
- Race and intelligence
- Jesus
- United States
- Catholic Church
- Homeopathy
- Circumcision
- Chiropractic
- Monty Hall problem
- Muhammad
- Gaza War (2008-2009)
- Evolution
- Gamergate controversy
- Abortion
- Sarah Palin
- Prem Rawat
- Christ myth theory
- World War II
- India
- Jehovah's Witnesses
- Cold fusion
- Climatic Research Unit email controversy
- September 11 attacks
- Atheism
- Anarchism
- George W. Bush
- Falun Gong
- Armenian Genocide
- Neuro-linguistic programming
- Israel
- Cities and towns during the Syrian civil war
- Jerusalem
- Mass killings under communist regimes
- Transcendental Meditation
- British Isles
- Libertarianism
- Kosovo
- Christianity
- Thomas Jefferson
- International recognition of Kosovo
- United States and state terrorism
- United Kingdom
- Acupuncture
- Israel and the apartheid analogy
- Syrian civil war
- Adolf Hitler
- COVID-19 pandemic
- Russo-Georgian War
- Second Amendment to the United States Constitution
- Tea Party movement
- Murder of Meredith Kercher
- Genesis creation narrative
- Historicity of Jesus
- Electronic cigarette
- List of best-selling music artists
- Shakespeare authorship question
- List of sovereign states
- Taiwan
- Michael Jackson
- 0.999...
- European Union
- Chronic fatigue syndrome
- Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections
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.
Anonymity. Everyone just spouts whatever racist shit they want to without inhibition.