- Joined
- Jan 7, 2011
By now, if you're not familiar, Wikipedia has become the most frequently used source of basic information on a vast, comprehensive variety of topics. And it got this way because it's an open-source encyclopedia: anybody can edit it, and millions have. Of course, people sometimes disagree on things. This leads to instances on Wikipedia where an entry on a topic is changed one way by one editor and then reverted back by another editor, and so on and so forth. A study has come out using the amount of those reversions, weighted towards editors who are more active on the site, to come up with a list of the most controversial entries on the website in a variety of languages.
For a summary of the study and a top ten list of controversial entries in each of the languages used, read this blog entry by one of the study's authors.
A name in the top ten lists immediately popped out to me. It seems in addition to dominating women's figure skating and lists of the most bankable South Korean athletes, Queen Yuna also tops the list of the most controversial individuals in the Japanese Wikipedia! Kim comes out ahead of Mizuho Fukushima, an anti-nuclear activist/politician in Japan, and Shintaro Ishihara, the former governor of Tokyo who may be best known in the US as the co-author of the book The Japan That Can Say No that drastically and hilariously altered US/Japan relations in the 80s/90s. You'd have to go down to #25 to find Yuna's long time rival, Mao Asada. Although it's predictable that Asada would inspire less controversy among her fellow citizens. For a long list of the most controversial entries in Japanese and other languages, refer to this site. Sadly, Korean isn't one of the languages used in the study, so we don't know if Yuna is similarly controversial on the Korean Wiki, or whether her counterpart, Mao, occupies a similar spot.
That Yuna can inspire so much debate and passion among internet posters who speak Japanese probably isn't a total surprise to us skating fans. We've seen plenty of Kim-bots and Mao-bots descend on even our tiny forum during Olympic years to dazzle us with their passion and vitriol. Any skatefan who tried to search for skating related clips around the time of Vancouver were probably bombarded by pro/anti Yuna/Mao clips instead of what they were looking for. As long as no one is really hurt (and no one has been, as far as I know), I think it's pretty wonderful that skating can inspire so much passion in so many people in at least one part of the world.
For a summary of the study and a top ten list of controversial entries in each of the languages used, read this blog entry by one of the study's authors.
A name in the top ten lists immediately popped out to me. It seems in addition to dominating women's figure skating and lists of the most bankable South Korean athletes, Queen Yuna also tops the list of the most controversial individuals in the Japanese Wikipedia! Kim comes out ahead of Mizuho Fukushima, an anti-nuclear activist/politician in Japan, and Shintaro Ishihara, the former governor of Tokyo who may be best known in the US as the co-author of the book The Japan That Can Say No that drastically and hilariously altered US/Japan relations in the 80s/90s. You'd have to go down to #25 to find Yuna's long time rival, Mao Asada. Although it's predictable that Asada would inspire less controversy among her fellow citizens. For a long list of the most controversial entries in Japanese and other languages, refer to this site. Sadly, Korean isn't one of the languages used in the study, so we don't know if Yuna is similarly controversial on the Korean Wiki, or whether her counterpart, Mao, occupies a similar spot.
That Yuna can inspire so much debate and passion among internet posters who speak Japanese probably isn't a total surprise to us skating fans. We've seen plenty of Kim-bots and Mao-bots descend on even our tiny forum during Olympic years to dazzle us with their passion and vitriol. Any skatefan who tried to search for skating related clips around the time of Vancouver were probably bombarded by pro/anti Yuna/Mao clips instead of what they were looking for. As long as no one is really hurt (and no one has been, as far as I know), I think it's pretty wonderful that skating can inspire so much passion in so many people in at least one part of the world.