This is a great idea. Wikirage ( http://www.wikirage.com/ ) tracks the Wikipedia entries with the most edits per unique editor over given periods of time. So it’s somewhat about what people are interested in, but also what they’re interested in revising…

The default view from the front page is for the most edits in the last day. But you can check a time window as narrow as the last hour or as wide as the last month. No matter what time span you’ll check you’ll get a list of the entries that have had the most unique editor edits in that time period.

I checked out the last day. I saw that the number one listing on that page was Richard Jewell (who, as you might remember, was wrongly accused of being involved with the bombing at the 1996 Summer Olympics. “Why in the world,” I thought, “is his page high on the edits list?” I clicked on it and got a summary of the page from Wikipedia, as well as a graph of the number of unique editors for that page (which had spiked in the last day.)

But I did not get the whole story until I clicked through to the Wikipedia page itself (which is linked through the “Summary from Wikipedia” line; it’s a bit hard to find.) Richard Jewell passed away today. Despite checking in with multiple news sites through the day, I did not get the news on this until I saw the link in Wikirage (and confirmed with a check of CNN.)

Not everything on the list was a person. There were several people, but I also noticed video games, historical events, sports teams — even films and TV shows.

What an interesting perspective to track. The only thing I’d add would be a way to make the linkthrough to the actual Wikipedia article more obvious, and perhaps add a direct link to the history page (so you can get some idea of what edits are being made and at what speed.)