2016's most-edited Wikipedia articles(blog.wikimedia.org)
blog.wikimedia.org
2016's most-edited Wikipedia articles
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/12/21/death-politics-most-edited-articles/
62 comments
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... [2] https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/01/03/wikipedia-top-twenty/
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... [2] https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/01/03/wikipedia-top-twenty/
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.
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.
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.
> my top-edited article is the South American dreadnought race,
Great article! It's a very interesting topic on which I know nothing about, had no idea the South American countries had an arms race at the beginning of the 20th century.
Great article! It's a very interesting topic on which I know nothing about, had no idea the South American countries had an arms race at the beginning of the 20th century.
"It's a very interesting topic on which I know nothing about ..." --> you and literally everyone else I've met in my life. :-) Thanks for the compliment!
In your Beverly Gray example, it's all one editor who did not seem to realize that there is a preview button. The sad part about that is that Wikipedia has a WSIWYG editor called VisualEditor so maybe using that might have helped avoid the log spam. As for your question, the reasons are likely as you guess, mundane, and are probably just popular topics that get updated frequently or were targeted by a few editors to improve.
> In your Beverly Gray example, it's all one editor who did not seem to realize that there is a preview button.
Wow. I count 4930 edits to that page, by a single account, over the 199-day period from January 20, 2016 to July 26, 2016. And then 56 edits by other accounts cleaning up after that one account -- an awful lot of them by just one other account -- with comments like "prune. excessive detail, excessive quotation, excessive referencing".
The result seems to be quite a nice page. I've noted in other contexts that a certain kind of two-author team can be very productive: one who can spew out mountains of verbiage, and one who can edit it down to something readable. Here we see the phenomenon at work once again.
Wow. I count 4930 edits to that page, by a single account, over the 199-day period from January 20, 2016 to July 26, 2016. And then 56 edits by other accounts cleaning up after that one account -- an awful lot of them by just one other account -- with comments like "prune. excessive detail, excessive quotation, excessive referencing".
The result seems to be quite a nice page. I've noted in other contexts that a certain kind of two-author team can be very productive: one who can spew out mountains of verbiage, and one who can edit it down to something readable. Here we see the phenomenon at work once again.
>what the hell happened in South Korean music this year
Sadly most k-pop topics are maintained by fans, editing without registration or much regard for notability and quality standards. Compare with 2016 in American music: everything in the American version is wikilinked, while half the artists mentioned on the Korean list wouldn't meet WP:BAND, much less have any particular release included in a "list of notable events and releases".
Sadly most k-pop topics are maintained by fans, editing without registration or much regard for notability and quality standards. Compare with 2016 in American music: everything in the American version is wikilinked, while half the artists mentioned on the Korean list wouldn't meet WP:BAND, much less have any particular release included in a "list of notable events and releases".
I think it's perfectly fine though for Wikipedia to grow - I personally think the notability criteria is bad.
I agree. Notability criteria are really bad. IMHO they should only be used super sparingly on occasion if a real problem is identified. The last 10 years has seen a huge amount of good content deleted, and more importantly new contributors put off Wikipedia because of policy thumping nutjobs.
Why do you think it's so bad? I think it's a good thing that helps with the signal to noise ratio. Nothing in the Notability article [1] seems unreasonable to me, such as ensuring that the content is verifiable by reliable sources. It seems that Wikipedia is already too relaxed on this guideline.
Do you have an example of a good article being removed for that?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability
Do you have an example of a good article being removed for that?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability
signal to noise ratio
This is frequently raised as a concern but I believe the reality is that, as a user, you're not going to be clicking on obscure-character-in-single-cartoon or random-person-who-has-done-little-of-public-significance unless you are actually searching for them in the first place, usually on an external search engine. Therefore, you are interested in either reading what is there or improving it. Why not let them be? There is ~no cost to Wikipedia in doing so. Anything with verifiable citations should be kept. The negative affect on frustrated early contributors resulting from content deletion (many quit) is far more important than the nominal quality enhancement, when considered in light of real usage.
This is frequently raised as a concern but I believe the reality is that, as a user, you're not going to be clicking on obscure-character-in-single-cartoon or random-person-who-has-done-little-of-public-significance unless you are actually searching for them in the first place, usually on an external search engine. Therefore, you are interested in either reading what is there or improving it. Why not let them be? There is ~no cost to Wikipedia in doing so. Anything with verifiable citations should be kept. The negative affect on frustrated early contributors resulting from content deletion (many quit) is far more important than the nominal quality enhancement, when considered in light of real usage.
Here are the most viewed articles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Top_25_Report
Anywhere I could get a list for the entire year? (that shows the past week ^)
Anywhere I could get a list for the entire year? (that shows the past week ^)
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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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...
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...
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.
"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.
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...
3. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:EpochFail/When_will_wik...
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...
3. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:EpochFail/When_will_wik...
1) News and lists get tons of edits, but how much content added to articles about current events survives subsequent revision? How much time is spent adding 10 items to a list, versus the amount of consideration and debate that can go into a single choice of words in something like the van Gogh article? The wiki format is the best one I know of for the places where Wikipedia editors spend their time and energy.
2) Not quite sure what you're getting at. Having standards attainable only through months of concerted effort is a choice to encourage people to expend that effort. The featured article criteria could be made arbitrarily more or less difficult, and article quality wouldn't change as far as people uninterested in the distinction are concerned.
2) Not quite sure what you're getting at. Having standards attainable only through months of concerted effort is a choice to encourage people to expend that effort. The featured article criteria could be made arbitrarily more or less difficult, and article quality wouldn't change as far as people uninterested in the distinction are concerned.
Isn't that the point of "featured"? If they featured everything it would lose its meaning.
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1) It is, primarily, none of those things. It's a crowdsourced encyclopedia, and a wiki is ideal for that.
2) We don't need an infinite number of featured articles, we only need one per day.
You're also making the mistake of assuming articles that people visit are evenly spread across all the levels of quality. I'm doubting that the thousands of stub articles that are just demographic info on US counties get much in the way of visitation, for example.
2) We don't need an infinite number of featured articles, we only need one per day.
You're also making the mistake of assuming articles that people visit are evenly spread across all the levels of quality. I'm doubting that the thousands of stub articles that are just demographic info on US counties get much in the way of visitation, for example.
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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.
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.
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.
Wikipedia is a great source of knowledge for everything... except politics.
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Why am I not surprised to see Donald Trump in this list?
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...
[0] http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-most-edited-wikipedi...
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.
note that the rankings in that article, as well as this year's rankings, include a month (and a half) after the election occured. I'd imagine a good amount of the edits came after the first tuesday in november.
Similarly, I'd like to see a map of where the edits are coming from.
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://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Privacy_policy
For more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:CheckUser https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Privacy_policy
Because you have some kind of common sense most likely.
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It's a bit depressing that the most edited page is "Deaths in 2016".
On 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.
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.
Well, 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?
Radio 4's More Or Less programme covered this topic: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08504ln
"Have more famous people died this year?"
It 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).
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).
Makes a lot of sense. 2 people die every second.
How do they get to that quantity? I assumes is world-wide
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.
I 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.
Life expectancy is way below 100 years currently. Even for people born now, it's probably only 100 years in some developed countries.
It's very much a back of the envelope calculation, everything is very approximate, 100 years makes for an easier calculation.
Ok, so where's the part where you get that 2 from?
Well 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.
"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
That's unavoidable. The second one in the list was very much avoidable.
at 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"
That was #2 on the list.
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.
I think the editors were just trying to keep up with the update of the campaign and the news.
Both?
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.
Yeah it has to be. We have certainly learned a lot about Donald Trump this year.
Compare Bill Clinton's articles with those from a couple years ago or so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Beverly_Gray&acti...