Wikipedia 'edit wars' revealed

Scientists analysed page edits in 10 editions to find topics fought over by contributors to the open encyclopaedia.

While some topics were locally controversial, many religious subjects, such as Jesus and God, were universally debated, they found.

Further research is planned to log how controversial topics change over time.

Researchers from the University of Oxford and three other institutions analysed logs of the changes made to Wikipedia pages to identify those in the throes of an "edit war". Such a conflict involves editors of pages making changes that are almost instantly undone by another editor.

Finding the pages over which editors scrap about such changes was a better guide to controversial subjects than simply picking out those that changed a lot, wrote the researchers in a paper describing their work.

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