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Comment by M4v3R | Hacker News Reader

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.

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).

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

"Forty-thousand men and women every day (Like Romeo and Juliet)"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClQcUyhoxTg

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.

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.

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.

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.

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