Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia Announces the Most Edited Articles of 2016 (npr.org)
Wikipedia has revealed its most edited articles of 2016. Believe it or not, the two most edited articles of the year were for Deaths in 2016, which was edited 18,230 times, and Donald Trump, with 8,933 edits as of December 21. NPR reports: Some are completely unsurprising -- like the articles about Brexit, the Panama Papers, the Orlando nightclub shooting, and other recent and controversial news topics. The popularity of editing others is somewhat more mysterious: like the article for RuPaul's Drag Race, and one for a fictional character named Beverley Gray -- the subject of a series of 26 mystery stories written between 1934 and 1955. The article on Vincent Van Gogh was also edited thousands of times in 2016, as editors reportedly sought to clarify misunderstandings about the artist in hopes of achieving "featured" status for the page. The most edited article by far was for Deaths in 2016, which was edited 18,230 times. David Bowie, Janet Reno, Gwen Ifill, Leonard Cohen, Fidel Castro, Muhammad Ali, John Glenn and Prince are among the notable people who died this year. Donald Trump's entry was second, with 8,933 edits as of Dec. 21. If history is any indication, there's a good chance the president-elect's Wikipedia page will come under even more scrutiny: The Wikimedia Foundation revealed earlier this year that George W Bush's article has the most edits of any article in English in the history of the site, with 45,862 revisions at last count.
> just because something is edited the most doesn't mean the article is of high quality, or importance
I'll say, just a quick glance at the top edits shows that most concern movies and other pop culture detritus.
captcha: insipid
I'll be surprising nobody but the most staunch biased people, that Wikipedia has plenty of great articles but you NEVER go to the "dark side" of Wikipedia... which is anything hardcore liberals might find interesting and worthy of "parking"--sitting on an article, watching any changes, and ferociously fighting any changes you don't like. As long as the parking-person is more willing to fight than you are to see the truth (almost always), then they win. And Wikipedia becomes this world of dicks fighting turf wars over control of mere words.
I'm not sure why you're calling out "hardcore liberals" here. I have no doubt that hardcore conservatives also "park" in the way you describe.
I'll never forget reading the article on "Political Correctness." It was horrific. Like entering a completely different (hence "dark") Wikipedia. It called PC a "pejorative" word (you know, like a hate word used to hurt someone). It argued that PC didn't actually exist AND that it was actually a good thing at the same time. It didn't even try to be rational and in the the talk pages? They "ruled" that any professor, article, or idea they didn't like was "violating Wikipedia's rules". Rules they didn't apply to their own links to radical blogs with readers in the dozens.
I just did a quick read of the Wikipedia article on Political Correctness. It's an exhaustive (exhausting?) historical and academic treatment of the term, but I don't see that it's "horrific." The supposed inconsistencies are easily seen as the various contradictory uses of the term in various historical contexts. I didn't see anything about the supposed controversies in the talk pages. Care to enlighten us with links?
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
You should check out the gamergate page. Not only have dozens of editors been banned for edit warring, but the entire thing is a complete mess where even factual information is removed because it's contrary to the people who are pushing a narrative. That's the same article where a dozen hardcore feminists were banned for edit warring, and it's gone to abcom at least 3 times because of progressive parking and edit warring. It's pretty sad when "know your meme" and "encyclopedia dramatica" have more factual articles.
Om, nomnomnom...
The same problem is why I never really got into contributing to Wikipedia.
In the earlier but not early days, I would occasionally fix obvious minor errors -- spelling mistakes in someone's name, one technical term written when another similar-sounding or similar-looking term was obviously intended, that kind of thing. After the first few such changes were reverted, apparently (semi-)automatically with no justification given, it became clear that whatever Wikipedia was aiming for, accuracy wasn't one of the things it was actually set up to achieve.
What really wound me up, though, was seeing a few technical articles about mainstream subjects in computing that were not just slightly wrong but completely misrepresenting the topic. More specifically, they were taking an established technical subject with many years of history and development behind it, and instead of describing all of that, they merely described some modern bastardization that had become popular with the young, enthusiastic, but inexperienced crowd. Usually that seemed to happen after someone abused terminology in the recent past in connection with some new product or service that had become the current hyped thing, and a handful of editors within the related community who maybe just didn't know any better then appointed themselves the custodians of that page.
Sometimes, more knowledgeable people would try to correct some of the errors, or at least raise the issue of the overall distortion on the talk pages. Those talk pages would then exhibit the most absurd rationalizations for why the new, distorted version was right. They'd argue that the meaning of terminology established for decades had changed almost overnight. They'd point to numerous sources all from within that same very new community, and refuse to see or accept that there was already a much larger community with a much longer history using the term another way that hadn't suddenly disappeared. It was like a real-time demonstration of the Dunning-Kruger effect, which was particularly ironic, because that was sometimes a favourite cliche to throw at people who had probably been using the ideas under discussion since before the unhelpful editors had been born and who probably knew more about the subject than all of those other editors put together...
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.