Wiki Word Count ...

... as a metric for how serious our culture takes different topics, from the reliably funny and insightful Achenblog:

Selfless Wikipedians are staying up into the wee hours reading each individual article for the characters of the old G.I. Joe cartoon, ensuring the entry about Cobra Commander is neutral and unbiased.

It stands to reason that if an obscure cartoon villain can get a fair shake, then our first president will, too. The test is simple, if a little imprecise.... Do a word count, and you have a rough sense of your subject's importance in human affairs.

Winston Churchill: 10,808
Abraham Lincoln: 10,595
Napoleon Bonaparte: 10,414
Moses: 9,443
Jesus: 9,310
Muhammad: 9,194
Batman: 8,953
Julius Caesar: 8,766
Superman: 7,945
"Buffy the Vampire Slayer": 7,371
Christopher Columbus: 7,181
Albert Einstein: 7,135

Comments

[Adam Hyland]

I'm sure this has been mentioned in the WP comments, but there are a few easy ways to eliminate some of the worst innacuracies.

First, articles about controversial figures or figures about whom there are controversies (Paris Hilton) will tend do garner longer articles because wikipedia's policies frown on the creation of new articles solely to house those controversies (this isn't universal, but broadly applied). So uncontroversial individual events (like George Washington's time in the French-Indian war) may merit a snippet in the main article and another full article on its own. An article covering only the Britney spears divorce might violate NPOV (as a WP:FORK) unless it is balanced by the content in the rest of the article.

Second, the word count list should pick only featured articles, as popular figures tend to have unreasonably long articles unless policed well. Batman is a featured article, so that provides a good comparison metric, but Britney Spears is not.

Third, certain comparisons do not work at all. "Buffy" is a television series. While it is a featured article (so probably does not suffer too much bloat), it isn't strictly proper to compare the article length with a biography.

I know the test is tongue in cheek and that the results are unscientific, but the comparison could be made sharper if a few rules were followed. The word length count is great to show that decentralized effort tends to produce different results than something more top-down. I would submit that the series of articles on the simpsons (in other words, anything in "Project: Simpsons") provides a perfect example of this. The project is well policed--articles are brief and shorn of trivia--but total word count easily exceeds 100,000. Compare this count with that of the articles on the American Civil War or other broad, important topics. The impacts of recency and specialization are clear. While there may be a genuine civil war expert here and there, people who know the Simpsons to the same level of detail are far more common. Consequently, even though the articles on items of historical interest do not lack for secondary sources, they find few editors confident to make changes and author sections.

[tijoka]

Adam, you have to understand that the biggest flaw in wiki counting is that it means my social significance is zero. I'm not sure my ego can take that kind of rejection.

Seriously, you raise some good points about the role of controversy in coverage. If it bleeds, it leads ... and gets a longer wiki entry. This reminds me of the price of water, an example used in educational introductions to economics -- nothing is more valuable than water in sustaining life, and yet it is priced vastly lower than luxuries such as perfume and wine and food dye. It is so plentiful (for one) and fundamental (for two) that it is underappreciated. So are wiki counts similar to prices in a free market -- imperfect but somehow optimal?

[list of perfumes]

well i really feel you raise some good points about the role of controversy in coverage. If it bleeds, it leads ... and gets a longer wiki entry.