The Many Meanings Of Wikipedia

Todd W. Schneider dug through Wikipedia to discover the terms with the highest degree of ambiguity:

Have you ever found yourself looking up John Smith on Wikipedia, only to discover that there are 205 different John Smiths with Wikipedia pages? It’s a testament to the breadth of knowledge on Wikipedia, but it can also be kind of annoying: what if you just want to know the real deal about the English explorer John Smith’s encounter with Pocahontas?

I found myself in the above situation recently, and decided that it’d be interesting to know what is the longest disambiguation page on all of Wikipedia. John Smith has 205 entries, which seems like a lot, but maybe there are other generic terms that have even more Wikipedia entries?

St. Mary’s Church (584 pages) was the winner, followed by the Communist Party (569 pages) and Aliabad (520 pages). Meanwhile, Mona Chalabi created a big chart of Wikipedia’s most edited entries:

Many of these subjects are controversial, such as No. 24, global warming, and we can imagine Wikipedia editors in a never-ending tug-of-war. Others pages simply cover sprawling subjects — when will the No. 6 entry, “list of total drama characters,” be complete?

George W. Bush has been by far the most contested article among Wikipedia editors: Through September 2013, the page had been revised 45,273 times. That’s three revisions for every word in the article.

Not surprisingly, Bush isn’t the only political figure to attract factual controversy. The Wikipedia entry on Barack Obama has been revised 23,514 times — just slightly ahead of Adolf Hitler (23,499 revisions). Ronald Reagan, Abraham Lincoln and Bill Clinton all make it into the top 100 (Sarah Palin falls just short, in 104th place).