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Wikipedia's article on George W. Bush is the third most edited article on the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.[1] As of September 2023[update] it had been edited more than 48,000 times,[2] around 9,200 edits behind the first place article, List of WWE personnel, which has been edited more than 57,200 times.[3] There are, however, many internal project pages, user pages, and talk pages of the aforementioned page types, which have received more edits, such as Wikipedia:Administrator intervention against vandalism, currently the most edited page at over 1.9 million edits.[1] The article's talk page has also been widely edited. As of September 2023[update] it has been edited around 23,250 times,[4] making it the 19th most edited mainspace talk page.[1] As of September 2023[update] the article contains 14,188 words.[2]
George W. Bush had been the incumbent American president for most of Wikipedia's early existence, having been inaugurated five days after its founding date, and remaining in office for the next 8 years. The article was created very soon after Wikipedia started in January 2001, but the original version has been lost. The earliest saved version comes from January 29, 2001, when the article was at GeorgeWBush (see Wikipedia:CamelCase and Wikipedia). It was a rather brief "stub" article, edited from the one on whitehouse.gov.
The biggest cause to the massive amount of edits on George W. Bush is likely as a result of the controversy that stand behind his figure, as is reported in media sources such as The Daily Telegraph[5] and The Independent,[6] who wrote news articles on the article's large number of edits. This controversy has caused many large disputes on the article's talk page, which caused excerpts from the page to be mentioned in the book Wikipedia – A New Community of Practice? as an example of talk page discussion.[7] According to the book, by 2009 the talk page for the article, including all of its archives, had half a million words written in it.[7]