All the Rage #11: Britain’s Got Wikipedians at Blog P.I.

For the third time in four weeks, an article about a British television show takes the top spot in our exploration of the top 10 most-edited articles on the English-language Wikipedia for the week of June 1 to June 7. Hat tip as usual to WikiRage creator Craig Wood for making this feature possible. Let’s get started:

Article: Britain’s Got Talent
Why: Simon Cowell’s latest show actually named its winner in time for last week’s edition, but apparently there was more to stay about it. Sustained editing and discussion of how best to organize the article continued until June 4, but now the edits are trailing off as the article stabilizes.
Detail: I think for the first time, we have the same #1 two weeks in a row, although if not for week nine’s asterisk edition, I think Indy IV would have preceded it.

Article: Harold Innis
Why: Featured Article on June 1. Heavily vandalized
Detail: I had never heard of the guy, but the article certainly demonstrates that he was interesting. But what’s more interesting to me is what appears to be no mere vandalism, but a hacking of the MediaWiki software. But be careful clicking on that link, especially if you have a large monitor. The heavily pixelated background is NSFW in the extreme, though it takes a moment to realize the fact.

Article: Yves Saint Laurent (designer)
Why: The French fashion designer whom I would not have won an “alive or dead?” guessing game until his death on June 1 was announced.
Detail: It’s actually a surprisingly short article for a business celebrity or a most-edited page. My guess is that Saint Laurent didn’t do much publicity. The article’s two photos are from when he was fairly young. I can’t ever recall seeing him answer Vanity Fair’s Proust questionnaire like Karl Largerfeld has done. Heck, Lagerfeld picked the music and DJs for a radio station in Grand Theft Auto IV. Yves Saint Laurent, not so much.

Article: Bo Diddley
Why: The American rock singer, songwriter and rectangular guitarist died at age 79 on June 9.
Detail: I wondered what the last version of the page before his passing was announced looked like, so I looked it up. It’s substantially the same and approximately even the same length, but now is more tightly written. One image has been removed, likely because it wasn’t clearly released under a public license. It may be tempting to think of the latter change as making Wikipedia worse, but Wikipedia is quite conservative when it comes to approving images for use, probably to avoid being sued. This actually makes the “information wants to be free” types on Wikipedia strong defenders of copyright, which is kind of ironic.

Article: Ran (film)
Why: Featured Article (FA) on June 1.
Detail: The article is fairly long, but apparently its suitability for the front page fell under dispute almost as soon as it went up. The page seems fine to me, and I’m not sure this wasn’t just a case of a user from WikiProject Music sniffing that his work was better.

Article: Confederate government of Kentucky
Why: Featured article on June 3.
Detail: You can always count on certain articles which have reached FA status resulting in some debate on the associated talk page, even though these are pages which have supposedly reached enough stability that they’ve been so approved for the front page. Headline on the latest talk page debate: “’provisional government’ or ’shadow government’ a better term?”

Article: 2008 Danish embassy bombing
Why: The Danish embassy in Islamabad was the site of a suicide car bombing on June 2, killing five. Al-Qaeda reportedly claimed responsibility on June 5, citing the Jyllands-Posten cartoons as motivation.
Detail: With no natural disasters to meticulously document this week, Wikipedia’s newshounds instead focused on building up this article. With the breakdown of country-by-country responses and substantial number of news citations (48) it certainly looks more than a little like it.

Article: One Night Stand (2008)
Why: It’s a WWE pay-per-view event that aired on June 1.
Detail: WWE has been dominating the bottom half of these lists for awhile. Long enough now that maybe we should think about it. Apparently one of the entertainment/media subcultures that has really taken to Wikipedia is professional wrestling and its fans. They may be more active than fans of any other professional sport; playoffs and championships pages sometimes show up here when they come around, but the 2008 NBA Finals are nowhere to be found, though it’s not a bad page. I used to have a WWE-related page watchlisted and for awhile, noted the changes each day. Kudos to WP:PROWRESTLING, or WikiProject Professional wrestling (you don’t capitalize “wrestling”). They’ve created 5 Featured Articles, which is pretty good, considering the subject matter.

Article: Giovani dos Santos
Why: At first I thought he might be Baby Diego from “Children of Men” but apparently he’s a 19-year-old “attacking midfielder or forward, who plays for Barcelona and the Mexican national team.”
Detail: Why him, why now? Looks like the surge of interest owes to Santos transferring to Tottenham Hotspur in London, a deal worth between four and eight million pounds.

Article: Night of Champions (2008)
Why: It’s a pay-per-view WWE event coming up on June 29.
Detail: “The official theme song is “Devour” by Shinedown.[3]”