English Wikipedia articles

The English Wikipedia, growing one citation at a time. American body-mass averages, growing for entirely different reasons. Both lines reaching upward across two decades, neither aware of the other, both very thoroughly documented.

English Wikipedia grew from about a million articles in 2004 to over six million by 2022, with the bulk of expansion happening in the 2007-2014 boom of editor activity. US adult obesity climbed from roughly thirty percent to over forty percent in the same window, driven by an unrelated stack of factors: ultra-processed food share, sedentary work, sleep loss, and stress. The lines share a slope because both are products of the digital economy's first two decades, which produced more knowledge and more sitting in roughly equal measure.

Knowledge work has a body cost. The encyclopedia thrived; the people writing it sat down.