Longest Article on Wikipedia?

Serendipitously, I happened to stumble across a Wikipedia page today that was flagged as "too long." Curious to see what would get an article flagged (as 5,000 words worth of footnotes seems to pass muster), I clicked through. This led me to a goldmine - the list of the largest articles on wikipedia!

Regrettably, I was wrong about my prediction for longest article. At 16,209 words, list of wikipedians by number of edits is dwarfed by the most massive article, which weighs in at an almost unbelievable 45,749 words. The topic? Line of succession to the British throne. That's almost cracking novel length.

Of course, nobody's going to read all 45,749 words, as the article is, for the most part, a list. Thrilling prose like:

Sophia → George I → George II → Anne, Princess Royal → Princess Carolina of Orange-Nassau → Frederick William, Prince of Nassau-Weilburg → Princess Henrietta of Nassau-Weilburg → Archduchess Maria Theresa of Austria → Princess Maria Immaculee of Bourbon-Two Sicilies → Archduke Leopold Salvator of Austria

is not going to hold even an above-average internet reader's attention for long. In fact, most of the list of longest articles is just that - lists. Lists of things like atheists (43,534 words), episcopal bishops (26,952 words), Barack Obama presidential campaign endorsements (31,559 words), and US Core Statistical Areas (36,359 words).

The longest "real" article is on Hillary's 2008 campaign (34,308 words). She just barely edged out Barack's list of endorsements, a fact which I'm sure we're going to see her using as a justification to continue into West Virginia. "But... I beat him on Wikipedia!"

The next largest real article in on critical philosophy, clocking in at 32,893 words. This one looks like someone just copied and pasted their dissertation straight into the article. No section headings, no links, not even a real reference section. It's full of jargon and philosophobabble, and stylistically it's unusually unreadable, even for a Wikipedia article.

Kant, it is well known, did not put himself to much trouble in discovering the categories. 'I', the unity of selfconsciousness, being quite abstract and completely indeterminate, the question arises, how are we to get at the specialised forms of the 'I', the categories? Fortunately, the common logic offers to our hand an empirical classification of the kinds of judgement. Now, to judge is the same as to think of a determinate object. Hence the various modes of judgement, as enumerated to our hand, provide us with the several categories of thought. To the philosophy of Fichte belongs the great merit of having called attention to the need of exhibiting the necessity of these categories and giving a genuine deduction of them. Fichte ought to have produced at least one effect on the method of logic. One might have expected that the general laws of thought, the usual stock-in-trade of logicians, or the classification of notions, judgements, and syllogisms, would be no longer taken merely from observation and so only empirically treated, but be deduced from thought itself. If thought is to be capable of proving anything at all, if logic must insist upon the necessity of proofs, and if it proposes to teach the theory of demonstration, its first care should be to give a reason for its own subject.

The 2007 Texas Longhorn football team makes the list at just over 25,000 words. I'm sure there's some joke I could put in here about sports and Texas, but honestly, I just can't see the humor in the fact that this is six and a half times longer than the entry for Claude Monet.

the last real article in the top 50 is on the Iraq War. At 27,662 words long, it wins an award for being the only topic on the list which has a subject that justifies its length.

As a final note, Wikipedians have submitted just over 2,000 pictures of their cats to category:Felis silvestrus catus. At the current exchange rate, this is equal to an article containing a mind-blowing two million words.

Take that, British monarchy!