
2016's most-edited Wikipedia articles - The_ed17
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/12/21/death-politics-most-edited-articles/
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danso
Would love to hear a more thorough explanation for why the non-news events --
what the hell happened in South Korean music this year, and who the hell is
Beverly Gray? Is the high number of edits just a result of the usual mundane
battles of editors over publicists? In the latter case, I'm intrigued why this
seemingly insignificant series of school story novels (from 1934 to 1955) has
not only such a lengthy entry, but such high editing activity [0]...who could
possibly benefit from a puffed-up entry other than it being some kind of
prank?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Beverly_Gray&acti...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Beverly_Gray&action=history)

~~~
The_ed17
While I don't have a large sample size to prove this, incredibly high edit
numbers on these sorts of non-news events tend to be just one person. These
people are unpaid and can focus on whatever they want, and sometimes they just
want to edit one page.

That said, accumulating /thousands/ of edits is definitely unusual. For
example, my top-edited article is the South American dreadnought race, where
I've made 800 edits over four years.[1]

For another example, last year's list had "Geospatial summary of the High
Peaks/Summits of the Juneau Icefield" at #2.[2] It was just one person making
over 7,000 edits.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_American_dreadnought_rac...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_American_dreadnought_race)
[2] [https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/01/03/wikipedia-top-
twenty/](https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/01/03/wikipedia-top-twenty/)

~~~
dx034
Wow, your article looks incredibly well researched! Thanks for contributing,
I'm sure it's extremely useful to everyone who wants to start reading up on
it.

I still don't understand why many academic institutions dislike Wikipedia so
much. Articles like this show that a well written Wikipedia article is often
the best place to start researching.

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The_ed17
Thanks! You're talking to someone who's right in the middle of that conundrum
--my Wikipedia writing has slowed down considerably since I started grad
school, as I'd rather devote that writing to my papers.

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joejohnson
Here are the most _viewed_ articles:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Top_25_Report](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Top_25_Report)

Anywhere I could get a list for the entire year? (that shows the past week ^)

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The_ed17
OP here. I'm planning to write something up on the most-viewed articles as
well, but maybe a day or two after January 1st. I wanted to be able to capture
the full year, unlike here (where we had to cut off half of December). Keep an
eye out for it!

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M4v3R
It's a bit depressing that the most edited page is "Deaths in 2016".

~~~
user5994461
Makes a lot of sense. 2 people die every second.

~~~
truth_sentinell
How do they get to that quantity? I assumes is world-wide

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billforsternz
7000 million people in the world. 30 million seconds in a year. 3000 million
seconds in a lifetime. So approx 2 people die a second.

~~~
dx034
Life expectancy is way below 100 years currently. Even for people born now,
it's probably only 100 years in some developed countries.

~~~
billforsternz
It's very much a back of the envelope calculation, everything is very
approximate, 100 years makes for an easier calculation.

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sparkzilla
Here are at least two of the real questions posed by this article, other than
"Trump, blah, blah, Prince".

1) From the list of pages it seems that Wikipedia is a news site, and a list
site, and a calendar site. Yet it uses an wiki format that is ill-suited to
any of those tasks. Discuss.

 _Four Wikipedia editors collaborated to rewrite the article on Vincent van
Gogh, one of the most well-known painters in Western art, and brought it to
‘featured‘ status, a quality marker awarded only after an extensive peer
review process by fellow Wikipedia editors.The effort required to rewrite van
Gogh’s article was “enormous,” Wikipedia editor Victoriaearle told us, due to
the amount of research, reading, and writing required. This shows up in the
number of edits made by the four, which put it at the twentieth-most edited
article in the entire year._

2) If it takes such an enormous amount of effort to create one "featured
article", it becomes impossible to get all articles to featured status. There
simply is not enough time/people to do the work. The question is: where is the
quality boundary drawn? Go to any random page and see when it was last
updated, or if it has outdated time information. The "infinite monkey" theorem
says an infinite amount of monkeys working for an infinite amount of time will
come up with the complete works of Shakespeare. But in this case, there is
neither infinite time, nor infinite monkeys. I'll call this Sparkzilla's
Theorem: Given a finite amount of people and time, the quality of Wikipedia
articles will always be suboptimal. It would be interesting for someone with a
statistics background to prove this...

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sushisource
The second point is obviously true, and always will be. Stated more generally:

"There are limitless things we would like to do, and limited time and
resources with which to do them"

The definition of a featured article is quite rigorous, and there's zero
expectation that all wikipedia articles will hit that bar.

~~~
halfak_
Well, we spend about 12 million labor hours per year editing Wikipedia[1].
We've put in like 150 million by now. Right now, we have 5,893 out of
5,095,532 articles in the Featured class. We have another 29,152 that are
_almost_ featured[2]. Based on some bold assumptions I just made[3], we could
probably finish off Wikipedia by 2262.

1\. Geiger, R. S., & Halfaker, A. (2013, February). Using edit sessions to
measure participation in wikipedia. In Proceedings of the 2013 conference on
Computer supported cooperative work (pp. 861-870). ACM. Chicago

2\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editoria...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team#Statistics)

3\.
[https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:EpochFail/When_will_wik...](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:EpochFail/When_will_wikipedia_be_done)

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logicallee
And yet they're protected against editing. Really - vincent van gogh is going
to be vandalized?

I tried to edit this: "was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who is among the
most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art." to simply
"was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who is among the most famous and
influential figures in Western art." which has the same meaning without
unnecessary fluffery (like "in the history of the world" to "in history" ) -
obviously western art means that.

But i can't because it's protected. Grandstanding indeed.

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40acres
Kanye West's The Life of Pablo might also be the most-edited (post-release)
album of 2016, he added songs and changed production well after it's release
date.

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ythn
Donald Trump at #2. Not sure if that means people were trying to make his page
more accurate or that people were trying to make his page less accurate.

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knd775
Both?

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CDRdude
It certainly must be both, which makes me wonder which how many of each. I
wonder if text sentiment analysis is good enough to parse all of the 2016
edits and come up with an estimate of the political persuasion of each editor.

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necessity
Wikipedia is a great source of knowledge for everything... except politics.

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desbest
Why am I not surprised to see Donald Trump in this list?

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M4v3R
It's nothing extraordinary, really. In 2008 "Barack Obama" was the 3rd most
edited article on Wikipedia. In 2004 it was "George W. Bush". [0]

[0] [http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-most-edited-
wikipedi...](http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-most-edited-wikipedia-
pages-over-the-last-15-years/)

~~~
TheSmiddy
It's only a sample size of 3 but it seems like the candidate with the most
edits is an indicator for who is going to win and if your running mate has
more edits than you then it's probably not a good sign. Would like to see how
the candidates ranked against each other in 2012.

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iLoch
Similarly, I'd like to see a map of where the edits are coming from.

~~~
The_ed17
That would be extremely difficult to do—you could for non-registered editors,
as their IPs are recorded, but registered users' IPs are not publicly logged.

For more:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:CheckUser](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:CheckUser)
[https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Privacy_policy](https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Privacy_policy)

