There's a silent war being waged on Wikipedia.
While topics like evolution, alternative medicine, climate change, and nuclear power are not scientifically controversial, they are politically controversial.
It is for this reason that those topics often fall victim to "edit wars" on Wikipedia, where users alter information to fit their biased beliefs or tarnish the integrity of the page with slanderous statements. Other users respond by correcting the changes.
Adam Wilson and Gene Likens, both based out of the University of Connecticut, were curious just how often this happens.
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 them to four politically uncontroversial topics -- heliocentrism, general relativity, continental drift, and the standard model in physics.
They found that significantly more edits were made to the controversial topics compared to the uncontroversial ones, and far more words were changed per day on average.
Table 1. Statistics summarizing the view and edit history of selected Wikipedia articles.
...To prevent misinformation getting loose, Wilson and Liken offered some advice.
"Users should be aware that content in Wikipedia can be extremely dynamic; two students could obtain, within seconds, diametrically different information on a controversial scientific topic. Educators should ensure that students understand the limitations and appropriate uses of Wikipedia, especially for controversial scientific issues."
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