On 12/15/05, JAY JG jayjg@hotmail.com wrote:
At last check, the article had been edited 25889 times - it is, quite possibly, the most edited article on Wikipedia.
Yes, the article has been edited approximately 5,000 times since late October. The difference now is that if you want to edit a single section of the article you have to load the whole thing. I'm asked to believe that this deters vandalism. I don't. but I am very aware of the difficulty of editing the piece. This in itself is tantamount to an act of vandalism, and profoundly anti-wiki.
The article is being treated as if it were a finished work. It isn't. I've edited that article when vandalism was something that happened almost constantly, and it had very little effect on the process of editing because editing doesn't require a whole article to be free of vandalism at all times (a pipe dream with the Bush article) but only that it should be stable while one is editing it--which is easy enough to assure.
If Wikipedia continues to be fetishized as a finished work, it can only damage the activity of producing an encyclopedia.