Wikipedia Wars: ‘Controversial’ Science Topics Are Edited More Often Versus Uncontroversial Subjects

Wikipedia Wars: ‘Controversial’ Science Topics Are Edited More Often Versus Uncontroversial Subjects

There is a war that is silent waged on Wikipedia. Entries on alleged “controversial” scientific subjects tend to be persistently modified to mirror ideology, perhaps maybe maybe not facts.

While subjects like advancement, alternative treatment, weather modification, and atomic power aren’t scientifically questionable, they have been politically controversial. It really is as a result that those subjects usually fall prey to “edit conflicts” on Wikipedia, where people change information to match their beliefs that are biased tarnish the stability regarding the web web page with slanderous statements. various various Other users react by fixing the modifications.

Adam Wilson and Gene Likens, both based from the University of Connecticut, had been interested so just how usually this occurs. Them to four politically uncontroversial topics — heliocentrism, general relativity, continental drift, and the standard model in physics so they downloaded the complete revision histories (dating from 2003 to 2012) of three politically controversial scientific topics — acid rain, global warming, and evolution — and compared. They discovered that a lot more edits had been built to the topics that are controversial to the uncontroversial people, and much more terms were altered a day an average of. Читать далее “Wikipedia Wars: ‘Controversial’ Science Topics Are Edited More Often Versus Uncontroversial Subjects”