Marshall McLuhan was wrong: There is no global village, an Oxford University researcher has found.

Digging into the bowels of Wikipedia — in 10 languages — to find the most controversial pages on the site, researchers found there were pages subject to “reverts” — that is, when one editor obliterates another’s work.

Only one subject came up repeatedly across cultures: Jesus.

Otherwise, it was pretty parochial, lead research Taha Yasseri told the Toronto Star.

Top of the edit wars in English: George W. Bush. In French, Ségolène Royal, the Socialist politician. In Spanish, Chile. In Hungarian, gypsy crime. In Hebrew, Chabad, a branch of Hasidic Judaism.

And in German: Croatia.

“Some were quite surprising,” Yasseri said. “We found that Croatian and Serbian editors go to German Wikipedia and basically fight there.

“Both have their own Wikipedia editions, but they’re not very popular. They found German Wikipedia as a common field.”

That lies at the heart of Yasseri’s research: finding countable evidence behind the social sciences.

“We’re interested in analyzing Wikipedia to learn more about human interactions, its impact in the way it produces and transfers knowledge.”

Where else to see human nature in action than among the volunteer legions of Wikipedia editors who can dispute, erase and battle over every sentence with each other?

“This can give us a very deep understanding of human society, about conflict collaboration,” Yasseri said. The fact that local concerns dominate the “revert” pages “challenges our theories about globalization.”

On a macro scale, though, researchers were fascinated to see that politics and religion still trigger the biggest arguments the way they have for centuries.

And although the English Wikipedia top-10 list of most controversial topics looks very American (Bush, United States, global warming, Muhammad, race and intelligence), the editing split is 50-50 between North America and Europe, he said.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Yasseri and his fellow researchers created an algorithm to capture data on the pages with the most “reverts” in the 10 languages for which they had at least one native speaker in the group. All of the results were cross-checked manually by humans for accuracy until the algorithm was as perfect as possible.

“The final result was quite accurate, 90 per cent correct,” he said. “We have a huge amount of data.”

In the Wiki spirit, the researchers have made all of their data available online so different academic fields — politics, history, linguistics — can dig into it and see what they can find out.

Read more about: