Thread:Gsimenas/@comment-3014077-20170203191410/@comment-6697950-20170203191723

Adopting an article means that you're pledging to work on an article and don't want people to start making random edits without informing you in advance (if two people work on the same page at the same time, the second person will get an edit conflict, which may lead to them losing their work). It's basically just a safety net we have on the wiki so that people would know if anyone is working on an article and communicate before doing anything to ensure that conflict doesn't arise.