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
“say the majority of a website is libertarian without saying the majority of a website is libertarian.”
Some of the items on this list...
:yikes-1::yikes-2::yikes-2::yikes-3:
Barack Obama
Race and intelligence
right next to each other :yikes:
The internet is just so racist man it's actually unbelievable
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.
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.
I mean I'd be more worried if Obama was an uncontroversial figure, except I know what viewpoints are actually represented in the debate.
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
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
Have we ever conclusively determine who, in fact, is “nailin’ “ her?
Wikipedia was the frontline for the war over the consensus reality before Twitter got big, and also a number of changes in the site were made to prevent new, highly opinionated editors from wasting everyone's time.
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.
holy shit that's amazing, I'm going to have to remember that when I have nothing better to do.
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!
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.
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.
The Monty Hall Problem? What on earth happened to get that of all things up to number twelve?
My guess is that it's like those facebook "98% of people get this math problem wrong" 167k replies
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.
Crazy weather we've been having, right? Did you know that Michael Jackson did circumcision on Hitler, 9/11?
It's a really unintuitive maths thing.
0.999... has been proven to be equal to 1.
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.
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.
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.
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.
ehh more like it's defined to equal 1 but that's not that big a difference
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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'.
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
What? How? 0.999... isn't one, on account of it not one.
Is this some nerd stuff?
no it isnt :juche-tears: 0.999999 isnt one! its 0.99999! this is 1984
We see through your filthy capitalist lies, Soros! 0.99999 doesn't equal one and it never will. That's economics 101
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.
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
It makes fucking intuitive sense even! Like if you lay it out it makes perfect fucking sense.
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!-
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.
Neat, although it seems kind of pathetic that Joe Biden apparently isn't even interesting enough to make the list.
