One of my favorite weekly newsletters is called the Weeklypedia; here’s last Friday’s edition. Each email contains two lists: The 20 Wikipedia articles that have been edited the most times in the past week, and the 10 most-edited articles created within the past week. If you read it long enough, you’ll start to see the subcategories most of these articles fall into — and the amount of volunteer labor that goes into them.
There are the very specific lists that some completist has taken on as a challenge. (Last week, “List of Phi Alpha Honor Society chapters” was edited 257 times — by only two authors. Or “Deaths in March 1982,” edited 398 times by five authors.)
There are the sports tournaments and reality TV shows that demand moment-to-moment updates. (Last week, there were 268 edits on “2026 Malaysia Open (badminton)” and 605 on “Bigg Boss (Tamil TV series) season 9.”)
There are the biographies of people whom someone has decided deserve memorializing. (Last week, user Mary Mark Ockerbloom created the article on Quaker abolitionist John Vickers and edited it 161 times. User pigsonthewing did the same for the artist Charles Shepard — best known for making posters for the British travel industry — but edited it only 90 times.)
But the most common Wikipedia genre represented each week is news. When something big happens in the world, some Wikipedian will start an article — and within minutes, editors will descend on it, using news articles as raw material to construct something encyclopedic. Here’s last week’s top 10 — it’s awfully close to a summary of the week’s front pages:
Wikipedia turns 25 years old today. On January 15, 2001, at 2:27 p.m. EST, Jimmy Wales made the first edit: “This is the new WikiPedia!” (They’ve gotten better since then.)
To celebrate, you can take a “What Wikipedia of the future are you?” quiz. Without even taking the quiz, though, I know which one I am: the Wikipedia That Gets Respect As a Source of News.
The site’s early years were filled with media outrage about a source of “truth” that anyone could edit. And yes, you could right now go edit in a claim that Happy Chandler was a lizard person. But the layers of accountability the site has built up over the years would likely reverse your edit within minutes. If those minutes are the cost of creating perhaps humanity’s single greatest source of information, I’m willing to pay it — with apologies to Happy’s descendants. Here are a few things news organizations could learn from it.
Photo via Adobe Stock.