“Roman Empires”: Captivating the Minds of Wikipedia Editors
If you have been on Tik Tok for the past few months you have likely heard the term “roman empire” which is a new take on a story as old as time. A “roman empire” can be described as an expression for something that someone constantly thinks about and it is inspired by the belief that most men frequently think about the actual Roman Empire. As someone who has a few “roman empires” of their own I felt as though the best way to analyze some of the most popular “roman empires” would be to look at Wikipedia. I looked into the users who are most frequently updating the pages of these thought provoking topics, as Wikipedia is typically where I head first when trying to find out more about a topic. How much do these “roman empires” really captivate the minds of others?
One of the most common “roman empires” at least for me and many of my friends is the Bermuda Triangle. We always thought that the Bermuda Triangle was going to be something we were going to encounter a lot in life and when we first heard about it we all shared this common idea that we should be incredibly concerned about it.
It appears that there are about 2,540 other users who are also concerned about the Bermuda Triangle and who have been spending countless hours updating the Wiki page to ensure people like me and my friends could get the most accurate and up to date information. With the first entry being before the majority of my friends were born on December 21st, 2001 it appears many others would consider the Bermuda Triangle one of their “roman empires”. In fact for one user who had 227 revisions to the page over a 6 month period, I begin to wonder if others shared the belief that the Bermuda Triangle was also going to be something that they encountered frequently. It is also clear that perhaps the height of the Bermuda Triangle concerns happened in 2006 with the chart below accurately displaying the huge peak in page revisions.
Another popular “roman empire” would be quicksand. Many people I know spent a lot of time with the idea of getting trapped in quicksand occupying their mind and creating some anxieties. For me, quicksand was not one of my biggest concerns and the data supports this notion.
With its first page revision in December of 2003, 802 unique users have added revisions to this Wiki page. In comparison to others, this is a relatively small number of users which leads me to believe that the quicksand community is small. However, the argument still stands that for some, quicksand is their “roman empire”. With one user having a mere 63 revisions you may think that this is irrelevant, but the nuance lies in the timespan. This one user, the top page revisionist, has updated the page for over 16 years. This is the epitome of a “roman empire” in my opinion as quicksand has occupied the mind of this user from 1/7/2005 all the way until 7/7/2021. As seen in the image below, the user has continually come back to make edits to this page over time which is an incredible commitment. (Called User X for anonymity)
It did not feel fair to evaluate peoples “roman empires” without evaluating the concept that started it all, the real Roman Empire. As I mentioned before, the idea of a “roman empire” started because it was thought of by a Tik Tok community that the Roman Empire occupied boys’ minds and it was something that they were constantly thinking about. Although I am unsure if the total increase in all statistics is a fair comparison to the other “roman empires” I looked at as the actual Roman Empire is commonly taught in school which would naturally yield more Wiki users editing the page, I felt that this analysis would not be complete without an investigation.
The Roman Empire page as a whole boasts a total of 12,020 total revisions with 4,573 different users contributing to this. Similarly to the quicksand page, this page has a handful of users who have been around for a while. The top user on this page has 541 revisions spanning over 14 years. This is crazy to me, and I totally respect the hustle of keeping up with a topic this heavily. This user has been making edits from 2010 up until 2024, therefore I am assuming they are still relatively active on the page. This user has consistently made at least one update to the page every year since their first revision. Likewise, the graph below depicts a large spike in 2013 and then constant growth in the number of revisions since then. (Called User X for anonymity)
This evaluation into some niche topics that a lot of people my age find themselves thinking about has been eye opening. I completely agree with the Tik Tok trend that some people really do find themselves captivated by unique topics and this leads me to want to explore in more depth other topics that people consider “roman empires”. I would love to dive deeper into what some of these users are doing when they are making page revisions to see if they would consider themselves fully capitvated in the idea of their “roman empire”.
