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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Would love to hear a more thorough explanation for why the non-news events -- what the hell happened in South Korean music this year, and who the hell is Beverly Gray? Is the high number of edits just a result of the usual mundane battles of editors over publicists? In the latter case, I'm intrigued why this seemingly insignificant series of school story novels (from 1934 to 1955) has not only such a lengthy entry, but such high editing activity [0]...who could possibly benefit from a puffed-up entry other than it being some kind of prank?

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Beverly_Gray&acti...

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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/

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.

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.

"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.

>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".

I think it's perfectly fine though for Wikipedia to grow - I personally think the notability criteria is bad.

In this case I'd hope everyone would agree that having "2016 in South Korean music" effectively being an exhaustive list (of pop releases, anyway) is not a positive thing, at least without significant changes to structure and formatting.

That's Discog's job

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

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.

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