This means that living and dead people are equally controversial.Īlthough you might expect facts surrounding historical figures to become firmly established over time, the results show that dead people remain controversial. You get the same result whether or not you count the 6 recently-deceased people from the 'Both' group as 'Alive'. When you compare the page edits between people who are alive or dead, however, there's no difference (P=0.343). Status of Wikipedia's 100 most controversial people (Image CC BY 4.0: JV Chamary) As a consequence, you might predict that an article about a dead person would have fewer revisions. The biography of a living person is continuously updated with new events, and you might expect this to be especially true for celebrities because their fans and publicists have an agenda (to delete information that portrays their hero in a negative light) whereas other Wikipedia editors are motivated to present the truth. Another 6 people died between 20: Pope John Paul II, Saddam Hussein, Michael Jackson, Osama bin Laden and Whitney Houston – the group labelled 'Both' on the charts below. Of the top 100, 70% are still alive and almost a quarter were dead before Wikipedia was launched. As it stands, men and women are equally controversial. more page edits for the male group) it might have produced fewer revisions among females overall (Note: P<0.05 is significant). If there had been more men at the top of the list (i.e. Gender of Wikipedia's 100 most controversial people (Image CC BY 4.0: JV Chamary)īut while women did indeed have slightly fewer edits (13,497 total or an average 900 per person per year) compared to men (total 15,142, mean 1009), this difference is not statistically significant (P=0.09954, Wilcoxon signed-rank test). Bush comfortably beats current President Barack Obama, Adolf Hitler, Beyoncé and Britney Spears, wrestlers Kane and The Undertaker, and Roger Federer. His page has been revised 45,866 times over the past 15 years – 63% more than the next most-edited people: Michael Jackson and Jesus (over 28,000 edits each). Fans will promote their hero's positive image and add details that many readers would consider trivial, going against Wikipedia's guidelines on article size and a neutral point of view, for instance.įormer US President George W Bush is by far Wikipedia's most controversial person. The number of edits can be used as a surrogate measure of controversy because frequent revisions over a long period of time are caused by underlying conflicts of interest between Wikipedia editors. Based on the definition of controversy – prolonged public disagreement or heated discussion – we could interpret 'most edited' to mean 'most controversial'. The number of edits reflects how much we care about the content of a Wikipedia page.
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