Mapping controversial content on Wikipedia

We reported here on early results from mapping disputed content on the English Wikipedia identified through two controversy indicators, a first step in our research program to characterize imbalanced outcomes of such disputes as possibly biased topic areas. Other studies tended to focus on individual articles that are heavily contested. We aim to extend the study of controversies from the article level to the topic area level, to eventually address whether entire topic areas might be biased on Wikipedia. Contentious topic areas and their interconnections found here were mostly expected, but also harbored surprises. A spot-check of some particularly innocuously titled Wikipedia articles did confirm their identification as heavily disputed, but we did not yet attempt a systematic evaluation. In all, results indicate that the methods we used to identify controversial articles and to group them into topic areas appear to have worked very well. In that sense, we can present here a high-quality map of contentious topics on the English language Wikipedia, independent from and more comprehensive and refined than Wikipedia’s own list. Science is not immune to contention - Einstein vs. Bohr or Leibniz vs. Newton famously attest to that. Our results show the never-ending science vs religion fight (Fig 2) and the contentious labeling of traditional medicinal practices as “pseudoscience.” Several large contentious topic areas in physics (Figure 5) or medicine (Figure 6) as well as several smaller STEM topic areas (Figure 1) are also identified in our results. Topic areas that appear uncontroversial in principle become battle grounds for major other controversies in practice, witness GamerGate (political correctness issues in computer games) and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (Palestinian statehood controversy in lists-of-countries). This finding should come as no surprise, as both major controversies frequently spill over into academia. A full classification of controversies on Wikipedia thus awaits further research, and the present paper is an early step. Given its immense impact as the present-day go-to information source, enforced by technology giants like Google or Facebook, it is important for information science to analyze Wikipedia. Its lay editors, some of them men on a mission (in the traditional medicine case, on a scientism crusade), desperately need academic oversight over their activities. Our findings indicate topic areas on Wikipedia that could benefit from analysis in the form of published scholarly research that Luyt exemplifies