So, you may know that the English-language Wikipedia has more than 5 million pages, with 10 edits/s and about 800 new articles per day.

What you may or may not know about is the intense and detailed structure that has grown up inside Wikipedia. Consider the following page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Battles_involving_England

”
This category includes historical battles in which unified Kingdom of England (10th century–1707) participated. Please see the category guidelines for more information.

See Category:Battles involving the Britons and Category:Battles involving the Anglo-Saxons for earlier battles.
See Category:Battles involving the United Kingdom for later battles.

Subcategories

This category has the following 19 subcategories, out of 19 total.
”

Think about what this means. Given the propensity for people to argue*, there were probably discussions about all aspects of this, such as which were the appropriate progentior and successor states, what qualifies as a battle, how to group categories and sub-categories, and that’s even before you argue about any one specific article. Of the many reasons I love Wikipedia, possibly the most useful is its ability to direct human arguing into something more useful.

Note that this is one category, and as of today, there are 361703 categories and sub-categories in English Wikipedia.

Also, I learned that ‘Deira’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deira was a real place, and possibly not just made up by David and Leigh Eddings. (Although, given how full namespaces currently are, it’s often difficult to know.)

*This is my favourite Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars