John Howard is more controversial than homosexuality, the right to bear arms and 9/11 conspiracy theories.

That is if you measure the contentiousness of topics by the number of editing skirmishes on Wikipedia.

Former Prime Minister John Howard. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

Researchers from Oxford, Rutgers and the Central European University have done just that. The team counted the number of reversed editing changes ("reverts") to devise a list of the 100 most fought over English language pages in a cache of 4.7 million.

The researchers' "WikiWar Monitor" found the former Australian prime minister ranked 44 on the list, giving rise to more disputes than creation science, the Armenian genocide, Freemasonry, Fox News, evolution and God.