Wikipedia may look smooth on the outside, but just below the surface there is an ongoing discussion over how certain people and events are going to be remembered.
This process involves the editing of pages, sometimes over and over again, by the site's most passionate users. If you look at the most-edited pages, you can see the topics that our society is trying to make sense of, or fighting over. Some of these pages have over 45,000 edits, and range from individual entertainers to religions to wars.
Every year Wikipedia releases an official list of the most-edited English language pages for a given year. There are some big ones that often show up: deaths, sports results, music releases, and so on. But there are also topics that are very particular to a given time, and show what our obsessions were that year.
For 2016, there should be no surprise over the one that loomed large: The 2016 US presidential election. Donald Trump took the number two spot, the list of Hillary Clinton's endorsements took the third, and election itself took the fourth. Pop culture events that made it into the top 20 were Kanye West's album "The Life of Pablo," "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice," and painter Vincent van Gough, who was the subject of a big page rewrite this year.
Here is the full list:
Most-edited Wikipedia pages in 2016
Deaths in 2016 (18,230 edits)
Donald Trump (8,933)
List of Hillary Clinton presidential campaign endorsements (6,527)
2016 Orlando nightclub shooting (5,540)
Bailando 2015 (5,342)
Donald Trump presidential campaign endorsements, 2016 (5,328)
2016 in sports (5,277)
2016 in South Korean music (5,074)
Beverly Gray (4,957)
Statewide opinion polling for the United States presidential election (4,743)
Panama Papers (4,659)
2016 in Philippine television (4,600)
2016 Pacific typhoon season (4,244)
2016 Atlantic hurricane season (3,874)
The Life of Pablo (3,574)
Vincent van Gogh (3,551)
While many of these are constantly updating lists, which makes sense, one of the most fascinating areas of debate in Wikipedia centers around people, and the list of public figures whose legacies are in dispute. We also looked at which people had the all-time most-edited pages.
You have those you might expect, like ex-presidents or dictators, but also a run of professional wrestlers you probably never knew were so disputed.
We have compiled a list of the top 29 most-edited pages of people on Wikipedia, along with a sample edit from each. Edits removing portions of the text are shown in red, and edits adding new text are shown in blue.
Here is the list: