Near universal gross hyperbole against a product probably means there's something wrong with it.

He's using wikipedia to measure who's editing wikipedia. Considering it's one of the top collaborative sites, it's a pretty good source to determine how global inputs are spreading -- and since he's studying English language entries, he'd expect data to cluster around the USA. What he's trying to find out is how that diverges over time.

Is your definition of "murderers" part of the "reinvention of linguistics"