Wikipedia Humour

My favourite page on Wikipedia is the description of the ‘Lamest Edit Wars’

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars

Wikipedia is a treasure trove of (very) dry humour about often very controversial topics. Normally, if you’re in a conversation about a controversial topic, you can step out, but not an encyclopedia, which is expected to have words on everything.

You can see the workshopping that must have gone into it. I wonder if there are ways to detect the most workshopped phrases? To detect the ‘most controversial*’ parts of Wikipedia? (Although parsing the revision history may give you this.)

“Both frequencies coexist today (Japan uses both) with no great technical reason to prefer one over the other[1] and no apparent desire for complete worldwide standardization.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_frequency

If you enjoyed the humour above, you may also enjoy (hattip to AM):

https://github.com/bup/bup#things-that-are-stupid-for-now-but-which-well-fix-later

And my favourite subreddit of them all:
https://www.reddit.com/r/notinteresting

It is truly sublime, including such gems as:
“checking the radiator pipe cover”

radiator

*It turns out that Wikipedia has a list of these (of course it does): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_controversial_issues
This is different from controversies about Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedia_controversies
There are even articles in reputable news sources written about this: http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/24/tech/web/controversial-wikipedia-pages/ And research papers: http://arxiv.org/vc/arxiv/papers/1305/1305.5566v1.pdf

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