In sociology, history, or any kind of online ethnographic academic study, flame wars as a corpus, in a STS approach of controversies, may be used to understand what is at stake in a community. The idea is that the flame war drives the actors into abandoning a polite stance and forces them to engage into debate and to unveil otherwise concealed arguments. In this respect, the most interesting parts of an online corpus are the flame wars as "outbursts of heated, short and dense debates, in an ocean of evenly distributed polite messages".