Analysis in progress

Building the edit-history map

Pulling revision metadata, checking activity spikes, and preparing the charts.

Finding the article

Reading recent revisions

Counting editors

Checking revert pressure

Drawing timelines

What the edit history of DNA tells you

The Wikipedia article on DNA has been edited 6,411 times by 2,612 different editors since it was created roughly 25 years ago in 2001. That works out to an average of about 256 edits per year, though activity is rarely spread evenly — most articles see long quiet stretches punctuated by short bursts of intense editing.

With a controversy score of 10/10, this is one of the more contested articles on English Wikipedia. A score this high means edits are frequently reverted — editors are undoing each other's work rather than building on it, which is the classic signature of an active dispute over how the subject should be described. Readers should treat sections of this article as potentially unstable, and check the talk page to understand what the disagreements are about.

Within the 500 most recent revisions we analysed, the single most active contributor is Iztwoz, responsible for about 11% of the changes in that window. That is a fairly healthy spread, suggesting the article is maintained by a broad community rather than dominated by any one voice. The busiest year in our data was 2019, when editing activity peaked — spikes like this usually line up with real-world news events involving the subject.

The sections that show up most often in edit summaries are History, Properties, See also, Evolution, Non-canonical bases. These are the parts of the article that editors revisit most — a useful shortcut to where the action, and any disagreement, is concentrated.

All figures above are computed live from Wikipedia's public revision data. For a deeper explanation of what these numbers mean, see our guides on edit wars, article quality ratings, and how to read an edit history.