Anything suspicious in the recent wiki revisions?
i did not go through all the recent edits, but it appears that at least some of the recent controversy deals with the question of whether or not to include references 37 and 38 in regards to the application of benford’s law to political elections. It went back and forth several times before allowed and the page locked down by the wiki powers that be to control (for better or otherwise) further editing. In the following, Mebane (who has used Benford in the recent past (2006; currently listed as citation 34) for election fraud analysis) formally published a 2011 rebuke to a 2011 paper by Deckert which claims that there are problems applying Benford’s Law to find election fraud. However, some people seem to have gone on to apply Benford to the 2016 Russian election for the purposes of fraud detection, in particular, Mebane in the Washington Post in 2017 (currently listed as citation 42).
37 Deckert, Joseph; Myagkov, Mikhail; Ordeshook, Peter C. (2011). “Benford’s Law and the Detection of Election Fraud”. Political Analysis. 19 (3): 245–268. doi:10.1093/pan/mpr014. ISSN 1047-1987.
38 Mebane, Walter R. (2011). “Comment on “Benford’s Law and the Detection of Election Fraud””. Political Analysis. 19 (3): 269–272. doi:10.1093/pan/mpr024.
42 Kirill Kalinin and Walter R. Mebane, Jr., “When the Russians fake their election results, they may be giving us the statistical finger”, The Washington Post (January 11, 2017).
note that it can be difficult to tell what controversy is relevant simply by volume of edits during a wiki editing controversy in which an edit lockdown occurs, because sometimes the editing lockdown itself can be politically motivated.