From 2004 to 2022, as the English Wikipedia accumulated millions of articles on every conceivable subject, Americans continued to be injured by golf carts at a statistically correlated rate, with r of 0.97 across 19 years. One presumes that Wikipedia does not have a satisfactory article on golf cart safety, or if it does, the injured parties were not consulting it beforehand. The most disturbing implication is that we are building a vast repository of human knowledge at precisely the rate that humans are being run over by small electric vehicles. Progress is complicated.
English Wikipedia grew from roughly 500,000 articles in 2004 to over 6.5 million by 2022, following a predictable content accumulation curve as volunteer editing matured. Golf cart ER injuries in the US grew from an estimated 5,000-6,000 annually in the early 2000s to over 15,000 by the late 2010s, driven by expanded golf cart use beyond golf courses — retirement communities, resorts, campuses, and increasingly residential areas. Both are monotonic growth curves across the same 19-year span. The golf cart injury increase reflects genuine expanded usage and an aging population of operators, not a knowledge deficit.
Nineteen years of simultaneous growth is statistically sufficient to produce an r of 0.97 between almost any two upward-trending quantities in the modern world. The correlation is not the mystery; that we find it surprising is.
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Want to learn more about why correlations like “English Wikipedia articles” vs “Golf cart ER injuries” don't prove causation? Read our guide to statistical thinking.
