In 2014, Professor and Chair of Technology and Society Taha Yasseri—a physicist and sociologist known for his research on crowdsourcing, collective intelligence and computational social science—from the School of Social Sciences and Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, published a chapter in the book Global Wikipedia: International and Cross-Cultural Issues in Online Collaboration about controversial Wikipedia topics.
Dr. Yasseri's team created a formula to quantify controversy based on "reverts" and "on-going reverts"—times when one editor undoes another editor's changes entirely and when the editors continue to spar.
The team downloaded all of the articles available in 10 different languages as of March, 2010, and calculated a controversy value for each.
In 2010, the top ten most controversial English language topics were:
- George W. Bush
- Anarchism
- Muhammad
- List of WWE personnel
- Global Warming
- Circumcision
- United States
- Jesus
- Race and intelligence
- Christianity
How much of a difference would almost 15 years make?
Reddit user StraightCashHomie69 asked:
"Who has a Wikipedia page that's an unexpected rollercoaster to read through?"
Harland David Sanders
"Colonel Sanders is a wild ride."
"Court room brawls, mistresses, murder."
~ INparrothead
Jerrie Cobb
"Jerrie Cobb had an interesting life! She was part of NASA's Mercury 13, which tested and screened women for space."
"Years later when filmmaker Mary Haverstick wanted to make a documentary about her life, she was warned by the US Dept of Defense to not look too closely into Cobb's life."
"From the article: 'Her curiosity aroused, further research led Haverstick to discover that another woman, June Cobb, shared an extraordinary amount of biographical detail with Jerrie Cobb. In a subsequent interview, Jerrie Cobb denied she was June Cobb, but said, "I heard she impersonated me for a while". When Haverstick suggested that June Cobb had flown a plane waiting at Redbird Airport, Dallas, on November 22, 1963, the day President Kennedy was killed, which had been standing on the runway for an hour with engines running, and was rumored to be the get-away plane for Lee Harvey Oswald, Jerrie Cobb reacted strongly, but gathered herself and said, "I was at the Redbird Airport". Haverstick has concluded that Jerrie Cobb was a spy who used the name June Cobb'."
~ TinaRex
Jack Parsons
"Marvel 'Jack' Whiteside Parsons who was instrumental to the science of rocketry, and an important NASA engineer, and who was also also a pupil of the occultist Aleister Crowley; worked with L. Ron Hubbard (founder of Scientology) on 'The Babalon Working', a magical ritual meant to birth the physical manifestation of the goddess Babalon."
~ AlsoOneLastThing
"Parsons' death was consistent with a ritual where you'd try to create a homunculus, which is like a little guy created with alchemy."
~ thispartyrules
"And then Hubbard ran off with Parsons' money, girlfriend, and boat."
~ fubo
Shi Pei Pu
"Shi Pei Pu was a 'Chinese opera singer from Beijing. He became a spy and obtained secrets from Bernard Boursicot, an employee in the French embassy, during a 20-year-long sexual affair in which the performer convinced Boursicot that he was a woman'."
"'He claimed to have had a child that he insisted had been born through their relations. The story made headlines in France when the facts were revealed'."
"'The affair inspired American David Henry Hwang's play M. Butterfly (1988), which was produced on Broadway. It was adapted as the 1993 film of the same title'."
~ pilonidus
Michael Angelo Aquino
"Michael Angelo Aquino (October 16, 1946 – 2020) was an American political scientist, military officer, and Satanist. He was the founder and high priest of the Temple of Set."
"Aquino was also a specialist in psychological warfare for military intelligence and an officer in the U.S. Army."
~ barkallnight
"Even his death has some intriguing aspects to it. The circumstances surrounding COVID and his background give potential weight to the idea that he may have faked his own death for reasons unknown."
~ regal1989
Juan Pujol García
"Juan Pujol García. He’s the only person to receive medals from both the British and Nazi governments during WWII."
"Basically he went to England and asked if he could spy on Germany for them."
"They said no, so he went to Germany and offered to spy for them, then fed them a bunch of bogus information."
"He made up an entire spy network by writing tons of fake letters."
~ MemeFarmer314
Julie d'Aubigny
"Julie d'Aubigny. How about a female opera singer and duelist with a lesbian lover who gets sent to a convent."
"So she steals the body of a dead nun, sneaks in posing as a postulant, steals back her lover—then burns the convent down."
~ BoredBSEE
Arthur Rimbaud
"Arthur Rimbaud. Famous French poet who wrote all of his immensely influential poetry as a teenager, then stopped writing completely."
"Too bad the English Wikipedia version of the article isn't as complete, because his life has everything from gay sex, to travelling all around the world on ships, to firearm trafficking on camel back, and dying of cancer at 37."
~ trebeju
Northern Calloway
"Northern Calloway , the guy who played 'David' on Sesame Street from 1971 to 1989 when we were growing up. Sadly, he faced lots of mental health struggles, but the documentation of the things that took place in the 70s/80s in between filming Sesame Street episodes is an absolute roller coaster ride."
"For example: On the morning of September 19, 1980, Calloway was arrested in Nashville, Tennessee. He had been a guest in the home of Mary Stagaman, marketing director of the Tennessee Performing Arts Center, after performing there on the 13th."
"After being asked to leave the house and refusing to do so, Calloway beat Stagaman with an iron, causing serious head and rib injuries. He then fled into the suburbs of Nashville, where he smashed a plate glass window and storm door at one house and did extensive damage to the interior of another, destroying the family’s collection of fine crystal, smashing a television set, and breaking light bulbs with his bare hands."
"He also stole a backpack from a first grader, smashed a windshield with a rock, and stole a bag of herbicide from elderly resident Douglas Wright. Calloway spilled the herbicide on his body and was rolling on the ground and running around, at which point Wright attempted to hold Calloway at gunpoint and fired a warning shot at him, causing Calloway to dive to the ground and scream that he was shot."
"He then jumped up and washed his hands and face in the Wrights’ birdbath before fleeing the scene, where witnesses reported him wearing only a Superman T-shirt. He was arrested after hiding out in a couple’s garage, screaming, 'Help! I’m David from Sesame Street and they’re trying to kill me'."
~ slapjammy
Jake Weber
"There was a TV series in the late 00s called Medium starring Patricia Arquette. Nothing special, a psychic woman helps police solve crime while trying to balance her homelife."
"Her husband was played by English actor Jake Weber."
"Whose father was a drug dealer to among others the Rolling Stones. There are photos of 8-year-old Jake rolling joints for the Stones and he also said his father used him as a drug mule to bring drugs to Mick and Bianca's wedding in France."
~ ohdearitsrichardiii
Tarrare
"Definitely Tarrare, the man with a bottomless stomach who suspected of eating a whole, live 1-year-old toddler."
"'...a French showman, soldier and spy noted for his unusual appetite and eating habits. Able to eat vast amounts of meat, he was constantly hungry; his parents could not provide for him and he was turned out of the family home as a teenager."
"'Despite his unusual diet, he was underweight...'."
"'...he agreed to submit to any procedure that might cure his appetite. The procedures failed, and doctors could not keep him on a controlled diet; he snuck out of the hospital to scavenge for offal in gutters, rubbish heaps and outside butchers' shops, and attempted to drink the blood of other patients in the hospital while they were bloodletting and to eat the corpses in the hospital's morgue. After being suspected of eating a one-year-old toddler, he was ejected from the hospital'."
~ EclipseMF
1904 Marathon Runners
"The 1904 Olympic marathon. There were a bunch of characters in that event."
"A peach thief, a competitor that hitchhiked, an experiment on dehydration, a competitor that got chased by wild dogs, and the winner was poisoned and was hallucinating for the last part of the race."
"That's not even everything strange about that race. The article itself isn't even that long, as it designates only a sentence or two to each oddity, but there were many of them."
~ Prowler64
Jim Thorpe
"Wa-Tho-Huk a.k.a. James 'Jim' Francis Thorpe. He's now recognized by numerous sports organizations as the greatest athlete of the 20th century, but his life was full of tragedy and loss."
"He was sent to Indian boarding schools by his mixed race father Hiram who was Irish and Sac and Fox tribe. These were not good places."
"His twin brother Charlie who was at school with him died when they were 9 and he ran away from school. So his father sent him to a school farther away."
"His mother Charlotte—who was full blood Potawatomi—died when he was 14 and his father died when he was 16."
"He won Olympic gold medals in track and field, then was stripped of them in 1913—in violation of the IOC's own rules requiring all challenges be formally done within 30 days—because of playing semi-professional baseball to survive, like many Indigenous athletes at boarding schools."
"And they had White actors in bad redface star in the 1951 movie of his life Jim Thorpe: All American. He eventually became an alcoholic and died penniless in 1953 at age 66 despite excelling as a professional player in football, baseball and basketball."
"His 3rd wife sold his remains to the city of Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania as a curiosity to generate publicity and tourism against his children's wishes. His grave is far from his family's graves and his ancestral homelands in Oklahoma."
"Then 30 years after he died, the IOC issued him gold medals as the "co-winner." It wasn't until 2022 that he was once again reinstated as the sole winner of the gold in classic pentathlon and the decathlon."
~ MohawMais
Roy Sullivan
"Roy Sullivan was a park ranger who survived seven lightning strikes. The man started carrying a coffee can of water with him, in case he was struck again, so that he could extinguish the fire on his head."
~ flylikemusic
"How is Roy Sullivan only known for being stuck by lightning 7 times, and not for also having fended off at least 22 bear attacks, especially considering that he once had both happen at the same time?"
~ Clipsterman
What's a Wikipedia page that fascinates you?
