At last check, the article had been edited 25889 times - it is, quite possibly, the most edited article on Wikipedia. Jay.

Also, there is now a Firefox extension allowing you to search in edit boxes! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tools/Browser_Integration#Search_wit… Tony Sidaway wrote:

On 12/25/05, Steve Bennett <stevage(a)gmail.com> wrote: I think I can go along with that. What upset me at the time was that the editor experience of legitimate editors of that article was being very seriously degraded for no apparent good reason. Vandalism continued to rise. It has fallen since, though I'm not convinced that the rise and fall can be attributed to the application and removal of the NOEDITSECTION directive (which has been absent from the article now for four or five days). Rather, I think that the NOEDITSECTION was an imposition that disproportionately hit legitimate editors of the article, while delivering no measurable reduction of vandalism in the face of a sustained campaign of vandalism by a particular person or group--the kind of campaign that I know from experience can be ignored, because it has little of no effect on the ability of good faith editors to continue their work. That the article sufffered its worst week of vandalism during the period of the NOEDITSECTION is a correlation where I truly believe it would be inappropriate at this stage to make a definitive assignment of which was cause and which was effect. However I still see absolutely no coherent elucidation of a mechanism by which this directive could be expected to reduce vandalism in the first place--so it's failure was hugely unsurprising. I've more to say but I'll put it into a more general post which will go to a number of mailing lists.

On 12/25/05, Steve Bennett <stevage(a)gmail.com> wrote: It's a high profile article and naturally attracts a lot of first time edits, many of which are of the "hey, can I really call Dubya a poopyhead?" type. In addition there was a single person or organized group deliberately taunting and goading the anti-vandalism people. Neither of the two classes of vandalism constitutes much of a problem for legitimate editors, but the anti-vandalism measures on the other hand were a serious problem. The NOEDITSECTION is gone now and I think it's unlikely to be tried again. A semi-protection policy is in place and, if it's successful in deterring vandals, perhaps that can be removed too.