Abstract
Table 7: Controversy and readability
['[EMPTY]', 'Controversial', 'Peaceful']
Since we can locate destructive conflicts in Wikipedia based on measuring M, a computation that does not take linguistic factors into account, we can check independently whether linguistic complexity is indeed decreased as the destructivity of the conflict increases. To this end, we created two similarly sized samples, one composed of 20 highly controversial articles like Anarchism and Jesus, the other composed of 20 peacefully developing articles like Deer and York. The Gunning fog index was calculated both for the articles and the corresponding talk pages for both samples. We see that the fog index of the conflict pages is significantly higher than those of the peaceful ones (with 99.9% confidence calculated with Welch’s t-test).