Contested historyROEN

Wikipedia · contested editing · 2005–2026

Romanian history on Wikipedia: where editors fight, in Romanian and in English

Who undid whom on the history pages of Romania: 22 topics in the Romanian and English editions, measured on each page’s complete edit history, with towns and Kosovo as points of comparison.

English Wikipedia’s page on the Moldovan language has 97 mutual reverts between editors in 3,106 edits: 31.2 per thousand edits. The page on Kosovo has 20.0. The same topic on Romanian Wikipedia: 3 mutual reverts in 857 edits.

Per 1,000 edits
  • Moldovan language · English edition31.2
  • Kosovo · English edition20.0
  • Moldovan language · Romanian edition3.5

The scale

The same topic in two editions: the scale of fights#

An edit war shows in a page’s history: one editor removes another’s change, the other puts it back. The scale counts these mutual reverts per 1,000 edits. Each topic has two dots: red for English Wikipedia, blue for Romanian Wikipedia. The line between them shows how far apart the two editions are.

On the scale the Moldovan language (31.2) and Transnistria (24.2) pass Kosovo (20.0), and the origin of the Romanians (15.2) sits beside the Armenian genocide (13.1) and the Macedonia naming dispute (13.9). Pages on towns and rivers in the Romanian edition stay between 0.0 and 3.4.

The exception among towns is Cluj-Napoca in English, at 7.9. No town is exempt.

English edition Romanian edition comparison pages towns and rivers hollow dot: under 10 reverts, too few to compare

Comparison pages (English edition)

  1. Kosovo20.0
  2. Nagorno-Karabakh18.9
  3. Gdańsk18.7
  4. Macedonia naming dispute13.9
  5. Armenian genocide13.1
  6. Crimea11.1
  7. Cluj-Napoca · English edition7.9

Pick a row for the topic’s figures.

The figures, page by page
Each topic in the two editions, with the page title. Talk / edit: edits on the main talk page divided by the article’s edits.
TopicEnglishRomanian
page in ENMutual revertsEditsPer 1,000Talk / editpage in ROMutual revertsEditsPer 1,000Talk / edit
Moldovan languageMoldovan language973,10631.21.12Limba moldovenească38573.50.20
TransnistriaTransnistria2048,42124.21.08Transnistria55898.50.10
Székely LandSzékely Land261,29420.10.43Ținutul Secuiesc67917.60.20
Treaty of TrianonTreaty of Trianon523,27415.90.13Tratatul de la Trianon02150.00.00
Origin of the RomaniansOrigin of the Romanians744,88415.21.04Originile românilor15341.90.09
MoldovaMoldova16310,86215.00.26Republica Moldova83,0832.60.04
Corneliu Zelea CodreanuCorneliu Zelea Codreanu181,43412.60.10Corneliu Zelea Codreanu69616.20.10
Ion AntonescuIon Antonescu232,05911.20.29Ion Antonescu121,6227.40.29
Stephen the GreatStephen the Great181,8449.80.18Ștefan cel Mare01,2800.00.09
Second Vienna AwardSecond Vienna Award66828.80.21Dictatul de la Viena12593.90.31
King Michael IMichael I of Romania283,4438.10.16Mihai I al României71,2075.80.16
RomaniaRomania13517,6757.60.19România104,5272.20.09
Hungarians in RomaniaHungarians in Romania111,6846.50.13Maghiarii din România02910.00.10
TransylvaniaTransylvania406,1686.50.28Transilvania91,9784.50.24
BessarabiaBessarabia81,5225.30.09Basarabia05030.00.04
Molotov–Ribbentrop PactMolotov–Ribbentrop Pact214,4214.80.43Pactul Ribbentrop-Molotov03020.00.04
Nicolae CeaușescuNicolae Ceaușescu174,9033.50.13Nicolae Ceaușescu21,6331.20.18
Vlad the ImpalerVlad the Impaler238,7822.60.13Vlad Țepeș09740.00.10
Michael the BraveMichael the Brave21,3351.50.27Mihai Viteazul01,1630.00.18
1989 RevolutionRomanian revolution22,3450.90.17Revoluția Română din 198921,1311.80.12
Iron GuardIron Guard11,6500.60.06Mișcarea Legionară41,3652.90.30
Carol IICarol II of Romania01,2780.00.04Carol al II-lea al României16171.60.10

About what

Among the pages chosen, English argues about origins, language and borders; Romanian, about the 1940s#

Reverts are one half of a fight. The other is the talk page: how many edits appear there for each edit to the article. On the town and river pages the ratio is about 0.07 in English and 0.05 in Romanian. The page on the origin of the Romanians has 1.04: 5,081 talk-page edits against 4,884 in the article. The Moldovan language and Transnistria sit at almost the same ratio.

In the Romanian edition the 1940s pages are discussed most among the 24 chosen: the Second Vienna Award (0.31), the Iron Guard (0.30), Ion Antonescu (0.29). These are small numbers next to the English ones, but about six times those of the town pages.

Talk-page edits per article edit — the top six topics in each edition

English edition

  • Moldovan language1.12
  • Transnistria1.08
  • Origin of the Romanians1.04
  • Székely Land0.43
  • Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact0.43
  • Ion Antonescu0.29

Romanian edition

  • Second Vienna Award0.31
  • Iron Guard0.30
  • Ion Antonescu0.29
  • Transylvania0.24
  • Székely Land0.20
  • Moldovan language0.20
The bar is the ratio; the vertical line is the value for ordinary pages (towns and rivers) in the same edition. Main talk page only; archives are not counted.

A late war

The war over where Romanians come from came late#

On most of the comparison pages, mutual reverts piled up in Wikipedia’s first years: 68% of those on Kosovo are from 2008 or earlier, 76% on Gdańsk, 65% on the Armenian genocide. The Moldovan language (85%) and Transnistria (86%) follow that pattern.

Among pages with at least 50 mutual reverts, the origin of the Romanians is the exception: only 6% of its reverts are from 2008 or earlier, 46% from 2015–2019 and 26% from 2020–2026. Stephen the Great has an equally late pattern (95% since 2015), with only 18 mutual reverts. The origin page was protected 12 times between 2008 and 2018. Among the comparison pages only Crimea has a similar shape: 65% of its reverts are from 2015–2019. Crimea has been occupied by Russia since 2014.

When the mutual reverts happened, by period
≤20082009–142015–192020–26
  • Kosovo681711732
  • Gdańsk76119314
  • Armenian genocide651514380
  • Moldovan language85228
  • Transnistria8610503
  • Crimea16651999
  • Origin of the Romanians224626186
Each period’s share of the reverts inside the page’s mutual pairs, counted in both directions; the figure on the right is their total. It therefore differs from the total on the scale, which takes the smaller direction of each pair.

The news

The years with the most edits are not the years with the most reverts#

In 2022, the year Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Transnistria page had 407 edits, its highest number since 2015. Mutual reverts: 15. In 2023, the year with the most edits on the Moldovan language page since 2015 (199), there were 6.

On Kosovo, Gdańsk and the other comparison pages, most mutual reverts also date from 2008 or earlier.

Edits per year and mutual reverts per year, 2015–2025

editsmutual reverts

Transnistria

2015: 128 edits, no mutual reverts152016: 164 edits, 4 mutual reverts2016: 4 mutual reverts162017: 151 edits, no mutual reverts172018: 136 edits, no mutual reverts182019: 88 edits, no mutual reverts192020: 203 edits, 10 mutual reverts2020: 10 mutual reverts202021: 275 edits, 3 mutual reverts2021: 3 mutual reverts212022: 407 edits, 15 mutual reverts2022: 15 mutual reverts224072023: 349 edits, 17 mutual reverts2023: 17 mutual reverts232024: 285 edits, 3 mutual reverts2024: 3 mutual reverts242025: 163 edits, 3 mutual reverts2025: 3 mutual reverts25

Moldovan language

2015: 15 edits, no mutual reverts152016: 89 edits, 8 mutual reverts2016: 8 mutual reverts162017: 40 edits, no mutual reverts172018: 66 edits, 5 mutual reverts2018: 5 mutual reverts182019: 44 edits, 2 mutual reverts2019: 2 mutual reverts192020: 39 edits, 4 mutual reverts2020: 4 mutual reverts202021: 98 edits, 6 mutual reverts2021: 6 mutual reverts212022: 21 edits, no mutual reverts222023: 199 edits, 6 mutual reverts2023: 6 mutual reverts231992024: 88 edits, no mutual reverts242025: 66 edits, 2 mutual reverts2025: 2 mutual reverts25
Bars: edits per year. Dots: reverts inside mutual pairs, counted in both directions, on the same scale.

How it was measured

How it was measured#

For each page the complete edit history was read, with a hash of each version’s text. A revert is an edit whose text is identical to an earlier version’s, with at least one edit in between. The revert is attributed to the author of the first edit it undid. Only reverts between two registered accounts count; anonymous edits, temporary accounts and accounts with “bot” in the name (an approximation for bots) are left out.

A revert is mutual when both editors have undone the other’s edits in turn. For a pair, the smaller of the two directions counts. The total is divided by the page’s edits and scaled to 1,000. The split by year and period counts every revert inside mutual pairs. The method follows the research on edit wars in Wikipedia (Yasseri and colleagues, 2014).

What the scale does not say: who is right. A revert can be the correction of a poor edit, not a quarrel over substance. Partial reverts and rewrites are invisible. The Romanian-edition figures rest on few cases (0 to 12 per page), so a page with fewer than 10 reverts is not compared with the others. Transnistria is internationally recognised as part of Moldova; page names are Wikipedia’s own.

The grey band of the scale is the highest value among town and river pages of the same edition: 3.4 in Romanian (Constanța), 2.0 in English, leaving out Cluj-Napoca, which scores 7.9 and is shown on its own. Talk pages are counted on the main talk page only; archives are not, so the figures are a floor.

Of the 24 pairs chosen, two could not be compared: “Daci” in Romanian leads to a wider page, “Cultura și civilizația dacică”, and “Holocaustul în România” has no exact counterpart in English. The data are from 7 November 2026. A search result is computed now, on the page’s history as it stands.

Sources#

  1. MediaWiki Action API: revisions and protection log (en.wikipedia.org, ro.wikipedia.org)
  2. Yasseri, Spoerri, Graham, Kertész (2014), The most controversial topics in Wikipedia: a multilingual and geographical analysis
  3. Wikipedia: Edit warring

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