My Controversy

Wikipedia - A Controversy Over Controversy

While perusing the various controversial topics from this year on the web, my eye caught on a strange article. It wasn't the "Wikipedia" tag that grabbed my attention, but rather the glimpse the search gave me of a controversy over controversy itself.

URL for article here

This article spoke about Wikipedia's status as an academic source - whether or not it should be avoided and is a reliable, accurate website in regards to its entries. The article at Why Evolution Is True, a science news website, focused on the controversy over Wikipedia through a study on controversies on Wikipedia.com. While that may seem confusing, the author conveyed her argument well, as she cited a study conducted by an Adam Wilson and Gene Likens that monitored less controversial topics' entries on Wikipedia to much more controversial topics' pages (namely, global warming, acid rain, and evolution). Compared to the study's "control" topics such as heliocentrism and general relativity, the Wikipedia pages for the "controversial" topics had drastically more edits and views per day, some of which included non-scientific statements and obscenities. I personally found this article interesting because it not only provided interesting facts about Wikipedia, which I frequent very often, but also because it justified both sides of argument over Wikipedia. The article defended Wikipedia being used as a source by drawing attention to the facts that most pages aren't edited much and remain accurate by dedicated users, while more controversial issues that may be viewed differently by different groups of people are often the centers of obscene edits and arguments. The article, for me, put Wikipedia's usage in a different light that doesn't approach either extreme of the debate over the site itself.