Longest repeated paragraph on Wikipedia

Tue, 26 May 2026 22:20:17 +0800

What is the most frequently occurring sentence in Wikipedia? ANS: A 213-word paragraph about how minor planets are named, which appears in 418 Wikipedia articles, word-for-word!

There are ~380,000 asteroids. Wikipedia has 418 pages for these - including one for each thousand-range of asteroids.

Every single one of these pages includes the phrase:

As minor planet discoveries are confirmed, they are given a permanent number by the IAU’s Minor Planet Center (MPC), and the discoverers can then submit names for them, following the IAU’s naming conventions. The list below concerns those minor planets in the specified number-range that have received names, and explains the meanings of those names.

Official naming citations of newly named small Solar System bodies are approved and published in a bulletin by IAU’s Working Group for Small Bodies Nomenclature (WGSBN).[1] Before May 2021, citations were published in MPC’s Minor Planet Circulars for many decades.[2] Recent citations can also be found on the JPL Small-Body Database (SBDB).[3] Until his death in 2016, German astronomer Lutz D. Schmadel compiled these citations into the Dictionary of Minor Planet Names (DMP) and regularly updated the collection.[4][5]

Based on Paul Herget’s The Names of the Minor Planets,[6] Schmadel also researched the unclear origin of numerous asteroids, most of which had been named prior to World War II.

Check out these pages | 85001-86000 | 213001-214000 | 269001-270000 | 380001-381000

This is not the only such common sentence. There are several more.

Here’s the Slovakia census note: 81 words that appear across 2,920 Wikipedia pages, like Sabinov District, Smolenice, Ilija, Slovakia, Baloň, … and thousands more!

Note on population: The difference between the population numbers above and in the census (here and below) is that the population numbers above are mostly made up of permanent residents, etc.; and the census should indicate the place where people actually mainly live. For example, a student is a citizen of a village because they have permanent residence there (they lived there as a child and has parents), but most of the time he studies at a university in the city

Note: As of 26 May 2026, this has been shortened to:

Note on population: The difference values of population numbers in the table “Population statistic” and in the sections “Ethnicity” & “Religion” is caused by the use of various statistical methods.

There are several more such that you can read about in The Paragraph That Appears 418 Times.

That also includes how Codex analyzed the Wikipedia structured dataset on Hugging Face and what else you can do with the data.

Finding subversives using Amazon wishlists

Wed, 11 Jan 2006 12:00:00 +0000

Finding subversives using Amazon wishlists.

Datamining the NSA

Mon, 07 Mar 2005 12:00:00 +0000

An information civil rights organization has data mined an NSA mailing list. The first chapter is online. The graphs are interesting.

Wal Mart mines 460 terabytes of data

Tue, 16 Nov 2004 12:00:00 +0000

Wal Mart mines 460 terabytes of data.

Oracle of Google

Wed, 11 Sep 2002 12:00:00 +0000

The Oracle of Google is the coolest Google app so far. Ask it a question with 4 choices, and it uses Google to guess the answer. It knows that Abdul Kalam is India’s President, though it did prefer Vajpayee to former Presidents. via Google Weblog

data-mining on S Anand

Longest repeated paragraph on Wikipedia

Finding subversives using Amazon wishlists

Datamining the NSA

Wal Mart mines 460 terabytes of data

Oracle of Google