Ok everyone just calm down.
I had read about the discussion pages of Wikipedia before. The AV Club (the non fake part of The Onion) does a weekly list of things called Inventory. A little while back they wrote about “Surprisingly Controversial Wikipedia Articles“, what they find controversial about the articles is based on the discussion pages of the articles. Some pretty funny stuff.
Anyway I checked out some highlights of Irish History, including Michael Collins, The Easter Rising, and Kilmainham Gaol. Kilmainham was pretty timid, a very short discussion over whether it should be “JAIL” or “GAOL” (they settled on Gaol). Michael Collins, however was another story. A heated battle raged over the make up of the Irish Free State Army, as well as citation for those facts, two editors were fighting like pretentious high schoolers. It made for some amusing reading. The Easter Rising was by far the longest, with 59 issues in the table of contents ranging from the wording of the intro, to the causes of the event itself. The arguments that ensued were again, very amusing.
That’s actually a pretty interesting way to go about choosing the articles. I just randomly thought up topics that varied in their level of expected controversy and was somewhat surprised by which ones actually had controversies. I’ll of course have to write about it on my own blog post later, but I agree with you that from an outsider’s point of view it was somewhat humorous and I wanted to say, “Ok, everyone, take a chill pill.”