The top 10 most edited Wikipedia articles of 2014: Ebola, Malaysia Airlines, and … some surprises

Bing, Spotify, Google, and Facebook have all delivered retrospectives on the year gone-by, and now the Wikimedia Foundation has delivered its first year-in-review with the launch of a crowdsourced video.

The skit was compiled in less than two months using images and videos from Wikipedia users and a budget of next-to-nothing. “We had to get creative to make this happen, we couldn’t just throw money at it,” Wikimedia Foundation video producer Victor Grigas explained in a blog post. “This video was made with everyday tools: a computer, an Internet connection, lots of deep, patient thinking, research and collaboration, and the free content that ordinary people uploaded to Wikipedia.”

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And here is the Wikipedia: #Edit2014 video, in all of its near-three-minute glory. But it doesn’t really reveal that much about what topics received the most attention in 2014.

After a little bit of digging (okay okay, we consulted the Wikimedia Foundation), we discovered that more than three million articles were created this year, with 100 million edits made across the board. But which of these articles were contributed to most?

Well, there were similar topical patterns to what we’ve seen on other social channels, with Ebola and the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 featuring highly. But there were a handful in there that may surprise you.

Indeed, the top post by quite some margin in 2014 was Deaths in 2014, which has notched up 19,324 edits at the time of writing, almost double that of the 10,166 from Malaysian Airlines Flight 370. And what about third place? Well, Japanese dissidence during the Shōwa period, of course, with 8,101 edits. The List of works by French sculptor Eugène Guillaume was in 10th place.

The entire top 10 most edited articles from the English-language Wikipedia are as follows:

1. Deaths in 2014 (19,324)
2. Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 (10,166)
2. Japanese dissidence during the Shōwa period (8,101)
4. Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa (7,644)
5. Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (7,312)
6. 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict (6,485)
7. Shooting of Michael Brown (5,419)
8. Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (5,147)
9. 2014 Pacific typhoon season (4,954)
10. List of works by Eugène Guillaume (4,229)