One of the most unusual and seemingly random signals I get in my email is the Weeklypedia Digest.  The Digest summarizes the top edited articles, new articles, and discussions on English Wikipedia for the week.

I find the Digest fascinating for the ways it surprises me. In other words I am always surprised by the up to date listing of folk who have died.  For example, I am always drawn to the list of deaths for the year.  It is quite a traipse through super short summary of folks’ lives who we may or may not have known.  Is there anything less surprising than death, yet…

Just consider, first, that someone somewhere on Wikipedia has decided that out of all the people who have so far died this year thesse were the most noteworthy. Second, I am always shocked at how few of these deaths were personally notable to me, that meant anything to me in my memory.  Here are the names I knew: Karen Pryor, Bob Uecker, David Lynch, and Buck White.  I daresay you will have a few you would note, but like me you are reminded of the global nature of death.  That is as obvious as death itself.  People die in farflung hollars and deserts and oceans I have never heard of AND most of them have Wikipedia pages. Someone cares that Punsalmaagiin Ochirbat lived and died.

Here are a few of his awards:

Ochirbat was the recipient of several awards and medals, including; Order of Chinggis Khan, Order of the Polar Star, Honoured medal of labour, Medal of the 50th, 60th, 80th anniversary of the People’s Revolution, Medal of Military Force, Medal of the 800th Anniversary of the foundation of the Great Mongolian State, and Medal of the 20th Anniversary of the Democratic Revolution.

(Which, of course, begs the question as to why he got no medal for the 70th anniversary of the People’s Revolution. A question for another day.)

I am always looking for signals of the futurity as I sift through my world of interest.  I am reminded that this world is global and huge and humbling.  Everybody remember: life is a continuous one-time effort much like the Red Queen notes in Alice in Wonderland, “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”

If you are numbers jockey, you can ride this thoroughbred all day long;

A few numbers from last week:

• 89,300 registered users and 49,924 unregistered users made 806,789 edits to 386,174 articles
• Unregistered users made 134,897 edits to 67,648 articles
• 47 robots made 59,660 edits to 56,520 articles