Now here is something that is either fun, maddening, insane, brilliant or all of the above. A friend of this blog who pretty much lives on the Web sent me this link that points to a list of the "top 20 most hotly revised articles on Wikipedia."

Now, before you dig into this lovely list, here is some info about how and why the list was created.

You really need to see the interesting graphic that goes with that article, which I elected not to use because I could not tell its copyright status.

How do you keep track of the bubbling mass of information that is Wikipedia?

... It's a mind-boggling task. About 4 million "Wikipedians" have made over 130 million edits, and the English-language version alone contains 1.7 million articles. Every second a new edit is made, and every day 2000 new articles spring up.

To make sense of it all, Bruce Herr and Todd Holloway of Indiana University, Bloomington, created clusters of 300 or so articles that touch on a related topic, such as a religion or a famous person. For each cluster they took one picture from the most popular article and laid them out in a circular grid.

Atop the grid are coloured dots showing how often and how recently each article has been edited. The larger, darker dots mean more intense activity. The list of blitzed articles reveals the idiosyncratic priorities of Wikipedians: Jesus, Adolf Hitler, Nintendo, Hurricane Katrina, Britney Spears and Albert Einstein.

So with no further ado, here is the list.

Note the central role of religion and even of personalities -- heck, from Adolf Hitler to Britney Spears -- who often tend to get linked to religious debates in the minds of some people. Was Hitler a Christian or an anti-Christian? Is Britney still a Southern Baptist?

• Jesus • Adolf Hitler • October 2003 • Nintendo revolution • Hurricane Katrina • India • RuneScape • Anarchism • Britney Spears • PlayStation 3 • Saddam Hussein • Japan • Albert Einstein • 2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake • New York City • Germany • Muhammad • Pope Benedict XVI • Ronald Reagan • Hinduism

What a world, huh?

I have never understood why many people think that it would be boring to be assigned to the religion beat, broadly defined (and I do mean broadly defined).

Does anyone have any favorite religion ghosts that they see lurking in this hot-button list?