Words count at Wikipedia — or do they?
If the number of words written about anything was tantamount to its importance, then the publicly editable online encyclopedia known as Wikipedia puts more value on pop culture than just about anything else.
Or, so Games Radar has found. A few folks from the gaming site recently took the time to count words in Wikipedia entries and discovered that when it comes to documenting history, there’s no time like the present.
For example, according to Games Radar, Wikipedia contains more than 13,000 words devoted to “Call of Duty,” video game set during World War II, but less than 12,000 words about the actual war. There supposedly are more words describing Pokemon trading cards (5,721) than poker (1,857), blackjack (5,228), even checkers (2,326). Master Chief of “Halo 3″ fame has far more words describing him in Wikipedia than 11 U.S. presidents do.
And, believe it or not, the animated character Knuckles, of “Sonic the Hedgehog” fame, has a longer entry than even God. (Yes, that God.)
Games Radar explained that its word count took place a week before its article was published and was careful to note that open-source information sites such as Wikipedia change by the minute, so the numbers will be in flux as well.
Still, it’s fair to say that even God probably wonders who the hell he has to sleep with at Wikipedia to get better publicity.
Any comparison based solely on word count is probably misleading. For example, although “Knuckles the Echidna” is a *longer* entry than “God”, God is rated (see the discussion pages) as a much higher-quality article, a “Good Article” to Knuckles’ “C-class”.
Further, it doesn’t imply anything other than that obsessive nerds sometimes edit Wikipedia—if one of every hundred obsessive nerds who don’t ordinarily edit Wikipedia add a sentence or fact to a game-related article, the article will likely quickly swell up to a huge size and contain pretty much every little pointless detail about the topic, to the point of being (prohibited) original research. Often these huge articles get this way not because a horde of dedicated Wikipedians has descended upon them, but because they *aren’t* getting the proper attention and paring-down that they all-too-often desperately need.