The 27 most controversial people on Wikipedia, featuring Britney Spears, Bill Clinton, and Adolf Hitler

By Nathan Mcalone

Wikipedia may look smooth on the outside, but just below the surface there is an ongoing war over how certain people and events are going to be remembered.

That war involves small edits made, sometimes over and over again, by the site's most passionate users. If you look at the most edited pages you can see the topics that our society is still fighting over. Some of these pages have over 45,000 edits, and range from entertainers to religions to wars.

But one of the most fascinating areas of debate centers around people, and the list of public figures whose legacies are in dispute in the world's most popular encyclopedia is incredibly varied. You have those you might expect, like ex-presidents or dictators, but also a run of professional wrestlers you probably never knew were so disputed.

We have compiled a list of the top 27 most-edited pages of people on Wikipedia, along with a sample edit from each. Edits removing portions of the text are shown in red, and edits adding new text are shown in blue.