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Why would that necessarily be true? After a celebrity dies, a short amount of text is expected to be added about the death, but beyond that, why would you expect the length to increase?

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Generally increased media attention?

Heck, even the simple increase of eyes on article seems like it'd increase the edits. Then there is the potential for reporting on something to cause people to add / amend the relevant articles.

You can make the case for increasing the number of edits (although I doubt there's really that much of an effect; anyone who has to visit the Wikipedia page to find out about the person just died isn't likely to be someone who already has a vested interest in putting some information on that page), but my comment was arguing against the idea that the article length would increase (beyond the small amount of text regarding the celebrity's death).

That's a fair question, and I have no hard data to back it up. Seems to me like it would be true (as another poster said, mostly number of edits, due to increased attention), but of course my intuition could be wrong.

Still, since it plausibly could be a factor it is something that should be ruled out.

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