2016's most-edited Wikipedia articles

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/

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.

>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".

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!

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?

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"

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

Radio 4's More Or Less programme covered this topic: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08504ln "Have more famous people died this year?"

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.

That's unavoidable. The second one in the list was very much avoidable.

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.

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.

Isn't that the point of "featured"? If they featured everything it would lose its meaning.

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.

Both?

I think the editors were just trying to keep up with the update of the campaign and the news.

Compare Bill Clinton's articles with those from a couple years ago or so.

Because you have some kind of common sense most likely.

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...