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

    It's a really unintuitive maths thing.

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

    • asaharyev [he/him]
      ·
      4 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]
        ·
        4 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]
          ·
          4 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]
            ·
            4 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.

    • Sen_Jen [they/them]
      ·
      4 years ago

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

      Is this some nerd stuff?

        • Sen_Jen [they/them]
          ·
          4 years ago

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

            • Sen_Jen [they/them]
              ·
              4 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]
            ·
            4 years ago

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

    • WaterBear [they/them, comrade/them]
      ·
      4 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]
        ·
        4 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

        • Liberalism [he/him,they/them]
          ·
          4 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]
        ·
        4 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]
          ·
          4 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]
            ·
            4 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]
              ·
              4 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]
                ·
                4 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]
                  ·
                  4 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.