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Wikipedia Communications Network The Internet Technology

Meet the Man Behind a Third of What's On Wikipedia (cbsnews.com) 189

Thelasko shares a report from CBS News: Steven Pruitt has made nearly 3 million edits on Wikipedia and written 35,000 original articles. It's earned him not only accolades but almost legendary status on the internet. The online encyclopedia now boasts more than 5.7 million articles in English and millions more translated into other languages -- all written by online volunteers. Pruitt was named one of the most influential people on the internet by Time magazine in part because one-third of all English language articles on Wikipedia have been edited by Steven. An incredible feat, ignited by a fascination with his own history.

How much money does he make from his work? None. "The idea of making it all free fascinates me. My mother grew up in the Soviet Union ... So I'm very conscious of what, what it can mean to make knowledge free, to make information free," he said. Pulling from books, academic journals and other sources, he spends more than three hours a day researching, editing and writing. Even his day job is research, working in records and information at U.S. Customs and Border Protection. He joked that his colleagues probably think he's nuts. To put in to perspective what it took for Pruitt to become the top editor, he's been dedicating his free time to the site for 13 years. The second-place editor is roughly 900,000 edits behind him, so his first place status seems safe, for now.

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Meet the Man Behind a Third of What's On Wikipedia

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  • by Bruce66423 ( 1678196 ) on Wednesday January 30, 2019 @05:09AM (#58044504)

    This seems a great thing to be!

    • Why is he lauded for skewing the "encyclopedia" toward his opinions?
  • by xack ( 5304745 ) on Wednesday January 30, 2019 @05:10AM (#58044508)
    I used to be in the top 300 editors before I was hounded out by deletion fascists. They would all use their delete voting sockpuppets on AFD and it didn’t matter how many sources you provided if ‘they’ didn’t like it would go. Wikipedia uses its Google ranking to influence the web and if it wants you to be an unperson it will. I hope this guy gets a job at Britannica or World Book since he is wasting his talent at Wikipedia.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      Recently I've noticed that wikipedia pages are rarely the top results on any search engine I use. I don't know why that is or if it is only in my region, but it seems maybe they're losing their shine.

      • A large number of Google searches I run have not just a link to Wikipedia but incorporate WP content into the results page.
    • I wasn't up at the top, but I also don't edit because of deletion fanatics.

      Sometimes I see a mistake about something I know enough about to find a reference, but no way, no how. I refuse to edit ever again.

      Public voting doesn't make something factual, true, or well-supported by evidence. It only tells you what is popular; and opinions are always going to be more popular than facts, it is human nature.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    with his own navel.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Of Wikipedia. Big corporations monitor "their" pages and anyone that swoops in for an edit with factual information backed up with sources, quickly gets reverted by company hawks. It's BS and why I don't donate anymore.

  • by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Wednesday January 30, 2019 @05:33AM (#58044562)
    Wikipedia has been around for 18 years. 18 years / 3 million edits = 3 min 9 sec between edits. If you figure he has an 40 hour/week job (since Wikipedia doesn't pay him) and sleeps / showers / eats 8 hours a day, that works out to 83 seconds between edits if he did nothing but edit Wikipedia during his free time for 18 years.
    • by stephanruby ( 542433 ) on Wednesday January 30, 2019 @06:08AM (#58044636)

      that works out to 83 seconds between edits if he did nothing but edit Wikipedia during his free time for 18 years.

      For his own sake, I hope many of those contributions were his own custom bots correcting spelling or formatting mistakes.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      TFA says he has only been editing for 13 years, and presumably there was some slow ramp-up at the start. He has a government job but it doesn't say if it's full time or not.

      I'm guessing that a lot of edits were actually on non-article pages, like the talk pages or other wiki-wank admin stuff. It's like a game of D&D for rule-lawyers.

    • by ranton ( 36917 ) on Wednesday January 30, 2019 @09:21AM (#58045190)

      You could just look at his edit history [wmflabs.org] if you want to see what those 3 million edits consist of. It appears that many of the edits are very small, and so far today he mostly added and edited categories on a few dozen articles. For instance he edited four soccer game articles and changed the category from "August 19xx sports events" to "August 19xx sports event in Europe". That consisted of 6 edits in 6 articles within 2 minutes. Another half dozen edits were editing dashes on various articles he had previously edited using a script (changing "1911-12" to "1911–12").

      I have only looked at 20 of his edits which mostly took place in a 10 minute period, but it at least shows how his total edit count can get so high after only 13 years. He made 15 edits in a 6 minute period earlier this morning.

    • Edits might be a simple typo fix. I suspect the guy fixed typos one by one, publishing each time in between, to increase the count.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 30, 2019 @05:33AM (#58044564)

    Over 13 years, that's 632 edits a day, every day, plus 7.3 original articles each day.

    "Pulling from books, academic journals and other sources, he spends more than three hours a day researching, editing and writing."

    So that's 1 article every 24 minutes while making and one edit every 17 seconds

    I call bullshit. Story does not add up.

    • Pfffft. That's nothing. He's had over 12 billion of his edits reverted.
    • by Faluzeer ( 583626 ) on Wednesday January 30, 2019 @06:11AM (#58044642)

      Over 13 years, that's 632 edits a day, every day, plus 7.3 original articles each day.

      "Pulling from books, academic journals and other sources, he spends more than three hours a day researching, editing and writing."

      So that's 1 article every 24 minutes while making and one edit every 17 seconds

      I call bullshit. Story does not add up.

      I believe it adds up to him doing a lot of research and possibly editing whilst supposedly working at his government job.

    • Even if he was a lazy clerk doing nothing but his hobby in the office, this would quite challenging.

      The most logical explanation would be either that this is a group of people or that he uploaded a big bunch of articles from other sources. Both scenarios aren't bad, it just deflates the sensationalism of the news-story.

  • by nukenerd ( 172703 ) on Wednesday January 30, 2019 @05:36AM (#58044574)

    It worries me that he must be writing articles and making edits mainly just on the basis of looking stuff up. He cannot have a very deep knowledge of most of what he is doing.

    An advantage of Wikipedia should be that every article can be written/edited by someone well versed with the subject. I have done edits and articles in three or four areas I know well, with the assistance of refererences too, but I think that is about the limit of what anyone can be expert enough to do reliable edits.

    • by monkeyxpress ( 4016725 ) on Wednesday January 30, 2019 @05:59AM (#58044618)

      It's possible, but on the other hand someone who is prepared to search out hard references is pretty valuable. There are plenty of subject experts who will type out the information they know, or amend an incorrect point, but can't really be bothered to go and find a proper reference for their edits. Having someone who will go through and do that helps make the system more robust.

      I am very wary of what you are saying though. I contribute on stack exchange on engineering questions relevant to my expertise, and I've found it is really common for the SE god contributors to turn up at an extremely specialist question, bash out an waffly answer with errors, get up voted by their buddies, and before you know it the answer is accepted. Meanwhile I might write out a detailed answer and it gets buried in the system as the question is to obscure to get much further attention. It has made me very suspicous of many of the answers on that site. I think that either way it is healthly to approach these sources as starting points, and not become too dogmatic about something based on a crowd sourced article.

    • Maybe he's the guy that creates those stub articles that are waiting for someone who can provide some actual content.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    3M edits, if every one of them took only just 1 minute, is 3M minutes, or 50000 hours, or, 2083 days, or 5.7 years of continuous editing. I do not believe this is possible in current physical model of human/internet/universe.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Conclusion: so called Steven Pruitt is a collective.

  • by 140Mandak262Jamuna ( 970587 ) on Wednesday January 30, 2019 @06:14AM (#58044654) Journal
    Wondering when the MSM will get around to covering one Mr A Coward, responsible for 80% of the postings in Slashdot.

    Curiously, he is behind 80% of the postings and 80% of his postings are about his behind.

  • It is so easy to take over western institutions, amateur Russians are doing it for free on their spare time. Russian hackers are worried if their bosses knew their pay will be drastically cut.
  • What a bum.
  • by bazorg ( 911295 ) on Wednesday January 30, 2019 @07:33AM (#58044870)

    Imagine all (or a lot of) the people... earning enough money to cover their needs and then spending time advancing free projects. A lot of rubbish would be produced, but occasionally we'd get something as good as Wikipedia.

    • Imagine all (or a lot of) the people... earning enough money to cover their needs and then spending time advancing free projects. A lot of rubbish would be produced, but occasionally we'd get something as good as Wikipedia.

      (a) if this idealised scenario is your argument for UBI, then you're just setting it up to fail. Most people will do nothing useful with their time. The real question is why that is neccessarily a problem if the alternative is having them do made-up-jobs.

      (b) UBI is an interesting idea, but in my view not neccessary at this point. What needs to happen is for the middle class to be able to recapture the benefits of productivity growth in the economy - something that stopped happening 30 years ago. The real cr

    • A lot of rubbish would be produced, but occasionally we'd get something as good as Wikipedia.

      You forget. Any system that creates so many free people that they can create "Wikipedia" also creates so many free people who can make crap edits and participate in edit wars to any "Wikipedia".

      In Usenet terms, it's the "Eternal September" from AOL. Lots of new smart participants, but a lot more wankers.

      • Perhaps it makes more sense to do it in stages; use a free, open system until you have crappy articles on everything, and then eventually fork it and slow the pace down and restrict it to careful edits.

        Maybe 10 years open, 20 years closed, repeat.

        • and then eventually fork it and slow the pace down

          Yeah, they called it Usenet2, and it was a smashing success. Has anyone heard of it?

          • A name like that describes exactly the opposite of what I said, so if you're right and somebody did what I said and called it that, of course it wasn't popular.

            But also, if you're using a system like I describe, you wouldn't actually have to care about if it is popular, because it is only the most recent wikipedia updates you wouldn't have; you'd be starting with many times more content than a full set of printed encyclopedias have. Just improving the quality of the existing content takes less work than whe

  • I'd like to know how any human being can possibly make 3 million edits. That doesn't seem possible.
  • all translated ? (Score:5, Informative)

    by krouic ( 460022 ) on Wednesday January 30, 2019 @07:58AM (#58044914)

    "The online encyclopedia now boasts more than 5.7 million articles in English and millions more translated into other languages"
    Sorry to break your english-centric point of view, but a good part of the non English articles of Wikipedia are not just translations of existing English articles, but original articles directly written in "foreign" languages.

  • The fundamental flaw in how Wikipedia works is that to add information, you're expected to provide links to other sites that already have that same information (subject to any editors liking the information, true or not). But there's no good way to add truly new information to Wikipedia, turning it into a true source of information, instead of it just being a derivative source. That's sad. So instead of being the place for domain experts to provide the world with new information, everything is just a reh

    • The fundamental flaw in how Wikipedia works is that to add information, you're expected to provide links to other sites that already have that same information

      Yes, but I understand why Wikipedia does that. They couldn't possibly offer to watch every video that someone might have. Whereas, it sounds like you had very legitimate information; some people could be playing them. It's certainly a flaw on their side but unfortunately maybe a necessary one.

  • Am I the only one that finds it a little disconcerting that 1/3 of the information on a worldwide information hub was penned by one man?
    • by DavenH ( 1065780 )
      I would if it were true. 35k / 5.7m is 0.6%
    • 1/3 of the information on a worldwide information hub was not penned by one man. It's click bait based on a poor understanding of statistics and a logical fallacy. 3 million edits of 5.3 million articles does not equal 1/3 of the information.
  • by dcw3 ( 649211 )

    And people here blame Fox for all the fake news. The article doesn't even give you a chance to give them feedback or the name of the idiot who wrote the article.

  • But 1/3rd makes for more impressive clickbait.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    Wikipedia has 876,258,552 edits and 5,792,931 Content pages. He has a third of what?

  • Sounds like civil and criminal actions may be overdue.
  • With everything I use Wikipedia to look up It is crazy to think this man was able to make so many edits, he must be a genius

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • The most intolerant group WINS in the end with enough numbers and a half decent strategy. Everybody else is less motivated and as long as you don't upset them (give sufficient motivation) they will bend in tolerance to the group. Maybe not actual tolerance as much as not being bothered to pick a fight with a more motivated group.

      This is how social behavior works; even with animals on a simple scale. THINK about it.

      Wikipedia being run by humans is bound to show such things. Some fanatics will out do all th

  • Still living with his parents in the home he grew up in, Pruitt has always remained true to his interests.
  • I see a lot of threads here (and elsewhere) 1.) calling BS or 2.) saying "he edits [x] times per hour--no way that he is fact-checking"... etc. Take a look at his edits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] You can see that a really common thing he does is splitting up categories, so take (e.g.) all of the actors in Colorado and split them into male actors from Colorado and actresses from Colorado. This doesn't really require a lot of fact checking and semi-automated tools can make this virtually instantaneous
  • Just remember, despite the fact that volunteers contribute millions of edits to Wikipedia, for free, Jimmy Wales desperately needs your money! If everyone in the world would just donate the cost of a Wednesday afternoon cup of coffee, Wikipedia could earn tens of millions of dollars in 2019 and stay free from advertisement and other corporate and government influence, for at least all of 2019! Heck, Wikipedia might also come close to solving world hunger! (at least for its corporate staff)

  • ...and I thought _I_ didn't have a life!

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