Redactle-Inspired Edits

May 8, 2022

My favorite Wordle-related game right now is Redactle, where you have to try to guess a random Wikipedia article by the words it contains. It’s great fun trying to tease out what word could go where based on sentence structure, word length, other words around it, typical Wikipedia phrasing, and so forth.

I was curious whether being featured in Redactle inspired any extra editing of the articles. To find out, I wrote a little script that looked up the revision history for each article and compared the average edits per day for the 60 days before the puzzle to the following two days. You can see the results below.

Puzzle	Article	Prev. 60d	Next 2d
31	Literary genre	0.02	4.5
30	Grenada	0.58	1.0
29	Cannibalism	0.05	0.5
28	Monosaccharide	0.15	3.5
27	Rope	0.07	2.5
26	Babylonia	0.5	1.0
25	Lagos	0.43	1.5
24	Hospital	0.33	1.5
23	Screw	0.3	2.0
22	Buddhist philosophy	0	0
21	Zoology	0.17	0.5
20	Meryl Streep	0.28	1.0
19	Exponential distribution	0.37	0
18	Snow	0	1.0
17	College of Cardinals	0.1	0
16	Frédéric Chopin	0.13	0
15	Inclined plane	0.1	1.5
14	Carrot	0.05	0
13	Prophecy	0.05	0.5
12	Atahualpa	0.05	0.5
11	The Washington Post	0.85	1.0
10	Microwave oven	0.17	0
9	Holocene	0.13	1.0
8	House of Medici	0	0

It does look like there’s a bit of a bump for being featured in Redactle, and that the more recent puzzles have a larger effect. That makes sense given Redactle is presumably still growing in popularity. But the bump is modest at best: even Literary genre has only 9 edits since it was featured.