7 ms·
2016's most-edited Wikipedia articles
- M4v3R 10y agoIt's a bit depressing that the most edited page is "Deaths in 2016".
- ythn 10y agoWell, it has an abnormally high number of edits because every month they archive the past month and restructure the page to the current month. Notice how that page only shows December?
- sharkjacobs 10y agoat least there is a valid reason for "Deaths in 2016", I was worried the most edited page was going to be something which was just the subject of endless edit wars like "Donald Trump"
- Cyph0n 10y agoThat was #2 on the list.
- user5994461 10y agoMakes a lot of sense. 2 people die every second.
- WildUtah 10y ago"Forty-thousand men and women every day (Like Romeo and Juliet)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClQcUyhoxTg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClQcUyhoxTg
- truth_sentinell 10y agoHow do they get to that quantity? I assumes is world-wide
- billforsternz 10y ago7000 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 10y agoLife expectancy is way below 100 years currently. Even for people born now, it's probably only 100 years in some developed countries.
- billforsternz 10y agoIt's very much a back of the envelope calculation, everything is very approximate, 100 years makes for an easier calculation.
- truth_sentinell 10y agoOk, so where's the part where you get that 2 from?
- billforsternz 10y agoWell 7/3 = 2 (more or less - the whole calculation is very approximate obviously). The basic idea is if you have 100 people (of a broad spectrum of ages) you'd expect about 1 of them to die each year.
- billforsternz 10y agoI should have made it clearer that this is just a sanity check. I find the rough approximation 30 million seconds in a year often comes in handy for back of the envelopers like this. 10 seconds thought was all it took to check that 2 people dying every second is at the very least reasonable.
- rwmj 10y agoRadio 4's More Or Less programme covered this topic: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08504ln http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08504ln "Have more famous people died this year?"
- maxmcd 10y agoIt would seem the takeaway here is: In the first 3 months of 2016 famous people died at 2x the rate of previous years. Since then there has been a normal rate of famous person death. "Quantity of famous people dying" is measured using BBC obituary count (which they admit as in imperfect measure).
- Fnoord 10y agoOn a philosophical level: not really. The present, and therefore the future, are in constant motion. History, not so much. When someone (known, in these cases) passes away this is akin to assimilation in biology and it closes a chapter. The final balance is made; credit where credit is due, but also criticism where appropriate. Both is easier because the person is now dead. This develops a momentum of focus from various individuals, both in raw information, and the need to reach consensus. If we were to wait the danger lies in trying to reach that many years later when information, memories, and sources have (partly) faded. Compare that to journalism (news reporting). Those facts are in common flux, and nowadays get journaled in detail which does the very same as death of a (known) human. If you look through the list, a lot of the most edited articles are news. In an encyclopedia! I'd argue news is, in essence, assimilation; Wikipedia even more so. Some things which are in full momentum, like a new startup, are technically news as well. Yet you won't find that on Wikipedia since it isn't part of establishment! It is still too much in motion, but later on you may actually very well see it part of an entry if the startup got bought. Which is, quite obviously, assimilation. Like I said earlier, death is akin to assimilation in biology. Heck, death is the way a human assimilates.
- akhilcacharya 10y agoThat's unavoidable. The second one in the list was very much avoidable.
- ythn 10y agoDonald 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.
- knd775 10y agoBoth?
- CDRdude 10y agoIt 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.
- plandis 10y agoYeah it has to be. We have certainly learned a lot about Donald Trump this year.
- user5994461 10y agoI think the editors were just trying to keep up with the update of the campaign and the news.
- Natsu 10y agoCompare Bill Clinton's articles with those from a couple years ago or so.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- desbest 10y agoWhy am I not surprised to see Donald Trump in this list?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- zulln 10y agoBecause you have some kind of common sense most likely.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- M4v3R 10y agoIt'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-wikipedia-pages-over-the-last-15-years/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-most-edited-wikipedi...
- TheSmiddy 10y agoIt'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.
- iLoch 10y agoSimilarly, I'd like to see a map of where the edits are coming from.
- The_ed17 10y agoThat 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
- 40acres 10y agoKanye 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.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- danso 10y agoWould 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&action=history https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Beverly_Gray&acti...
- The_ed17 10y agoWhile 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_race https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_American_dreadnought_rac... [2] https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/01/03/wikipedia-top-twenty/ https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/01/03/wikipedia-top-twenty/
- dx034 10y agoWow, 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.
- The_ed17 10y agoThanks! 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.
- joejohnson 10y agoHere 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 ^)
- The_ed17 10y agoOP 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!
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- sparkzilla 10y agoHere 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...
- sushisource 10y agoThe 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_ 10y agoWell, 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_Editorial_Team#Statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editoria... 3. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:EpochFail/When_will_wikipedia_be_done https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:EpochFail/When_will_wik...
- necessity 10y agoWikipedia is a great source of knowledge for everything... except politics.
- logicallee 10y agoAnd 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.