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.
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.
If you're going to be eccentric (Score:4, Insightful)
This seems a great thing to be!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
It's not a waste because he's helping us all, even if lamers like you can't appreciate that.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Even those morons benefit.
Re: (Score:1)
Yup, I am. Looking back in history, it's usually been a better life for morons before compared to after any revolution.
Re: If you're going to be eccentric (Score:2, Interesting)
Damn lamers should not be involved. I read a lot of his contributions and they are easy to identify. Also he always sources them correctly. I have also seen where others have tried to modify his updates without understanding them and it has made an awful mess. Incredibly laughable stuff people try to co opt from him. I cannot imagine anyone would be fooled by some of these fake Wikipedia updates. I have emailed him directly when I had a question and he replied right away and told me what was accurate and wh
Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)
Re: If you're going to be eccentric (Score:5, Interesting)
Wikipedia's a joke, but they must be desperate for publicity. Donations are falling because their admin corps are a bunch of narcissistic psychos
Wikipedia is flush with cash, don't be fooled. Their donation drives may make it sound like they're a modern day PBS always struggling to stay alive; the truth is, they've got the funds to last them for decades already. Their goal with the donation drives though is to reach a high enough money flow that they can survive on interest on their current wealth and weather any financial down-turns etc. Essentially they want to become financially independent and be able to last forever as a free standing institution, eventually never having to ask for money again.
That's the goal at least. They're not going to collapse any time soon.
Re: (Score:2)
You were going really really good, and then you put that laugh-line at the end and it totally destroyed your efforts.
Nobody suddenly stops asking for money, and nobody credible is going to even say it.
Re: (Score:2)
> The plural of anecdote is not data.
It is if you're measuring anecdotes per second (a/s).
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:If you're going to be eccentric (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:If you're going to be eccentric (Score:5, Insightful)
By now, all of us in here should be aware that autism is a requirement for certain jobs. And it always was. How is this guy any different from the monks who spent their medieval lives illuminating manuscripts?
Re: If you're going to be eccentric (Score:2)
He doesn't have a nifty robe, and hippies don't swoon over his wisdom.
Re: (Score:2)
Still, you make a good point... we should all chip in to buy this guy a nifty robe!
3 million edits in 13 years is about 3 per minute. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think these can be "well researched".
3 million / 13 = 230,000 per year.
assume he edits 300 days per year
769 per day
assume he works 4 hours per day after his day-job on this
769/4 = 192 per hour
that's 3.2 per minute.
When does he read the books he uses?
Re: (Score:2)
My thoughts exactly, can someone explain how this is even possible to do that many or how wikipedia counts "an edit"
(and congratulation to this guy, he probably does great stuff, but this number defies credibility )
Re:3 million edits in 13 years is about 3 per minu (Score:5, Informative)
Most of his edits are very minor, like updating "1911-12" to "1911–12" (notice the difference?). He made 16 edits in a 2 minute period earlier this morning mostly with a script updating dashes and changing article categories from "Sports Events" to "Sports Events in Europe".
I have no idea how impactful his bigger edits are, and TFA and other articles written recently have shown pages he did considerable work on, but I would assume the vast majority (99%+ possibly) are very minor edits. Granted even minor changes can be helpful; perhaps it will be easier to search for those soccer games now that they are labelled as occurring in Europe (I doubt it, but I don't know for sure).
Re: (Score:2)
I have no idea how impactful his bigger edits are, and TFA and other articles written recently have shown pages he did considerable work on, but I would assume the vast majority (99%+ possibly) are very minor edits.
It's Wikipedia. I assume 99%+ of his edits are reverts of other peoples' corrections.
Re: (Score:2)
Isn't most soccer with results published in English played in Europe anyways?
So ones not labeled that way, it will often still be the case. So if you're doing research, it only went from low quality to low quality.
The dashes are probably more useful, because uniform dates improves automated parsing.
Re: (Score:2)
It sounds like he a polisher, not a source of information. It is a useful and desirable thing, but leads to some very weird numbers.
Re: (Score:2)
An ndash helps to distinguish a collaboration of two scientists from a single researcher with a double-barrelled surname.
This is a difference in the meaning, although a small one.
I fix this all the time on Wikipedia, but mostly when I have other reasons to edit the article, as well, such as some metric-challenged American writing 32KB instead of 32 kB.
Now perhaps you're geeky enough to think I should have written 32 kiB, instead. Wrong!
kilobyte has the abbreviation kB, whereas kibibyte has the formal abbrev
Re: (Score:2)
An ndash helps to distinguish a collaboration of two scientists from a single researcher with a double-barrelled surname.
You're trying to claim that 1911 and 1912 collaborated on something, so it's right to use anything but a standard hyphen when indicating the range of years?
such as some metric-challenged American writing 32KB instead of 32 kB
There is a difference between KB and kB. One is "1000", one is "1024". Just as there's a difference between B and b.
Now perhaps you're geeky enough to think I should have written 32 kiB, instead. Wrong!
No, I'm geeky enough to think you should have left it alone, because either one can be right. Since the number is a power of two, I'd lean toward K being right -- as in 32KB of RAM. Nobody makes a 32kB RAM.
kilobyte has the abbreviation kB,
Depends on whether it is a metric
Re: 3 million edits in 13 years is about 3 per min (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
can't get documentation buy in...
Re: If you're going to be eccentric (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
They will revert and block him eventually (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:1)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I had over 5000 edits before i was banned, so I know the way Wikipedia really works so I criticize Wikipedia as much as I can.
Re: (Score:2)
I agree, the notability guidelines are crap.
Re:They will revert and block him eventually (Score:4, Informative)
Whinging bastard.
They didn't have an article on Donna Strickland because she wasn't notable UNTIL SHE WON THE PRIZE. She was the 2013 president of the Optical Society, whoop-de-do. Her predecessor, Mark Heinz, doesn't have an article either. It's not about men-vs-women, stop stirring shit up.
Someone added her article in 2014 but fucked up because they just copy-pasted someone else's article about her, so it was immediately deleted for copyright violation. They couldn't be bothered to try again and write even one original sentence about her.
They didn't have Bowsette or Instagram egg articles either "until the media pointed it out", i.e. THEY BECAME NOTABLE TOPICS.
They don't censor schools, there's just fuck-all to say about PRIMARY/ELEMENTARY schools because there are millions of them, and very few of them have anything distinguishing about them. Almost every SECONDARY/HIGH school, and university/college/polytechnic has a Wikipedia article, and they don't get deleted unless they don't exist.
They delete WANNABE cryptocurrency articles because they're scams hoping to get famous quick and find suckers to invest in them. They want to hijack Wikipedia's influence, trust and SEO power for their private gain. The rule is simple - first become notable WITHOUT Wikipedia's help. Then, ONCE you're notable, you can have a Wikipedia article.
You sound like a butthurt loser with an overly high estimation of your own importance. I also have thousands of edits, and over the years I've seen Wikipedia evolve and get better at reining in the deletionists' whims, while also putting in the necessary deletions and bans to stop the place becoming nothing but spam.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
As someone who had an article about me deleted from Wikipedia I can say that they are thorough in their review. An article was written about me by a colleague, along with a number of other people in my field. It was marked for deletion almost immediately on notability grounds, which I would not dispute. I am not very well known outside my own field. The deletion was disputed (not by me.) It went to review and after a reasonable and fact based discussion the deletion was upheld.
I have no problem with it and
Re: (Score:2)
They don't like factual information, especially when it comes from the source itself, in plain language, contradicting a bad secondary/tertiary source that gained popularity.
Re: They will revert and block him eventually (Score:1)
Could you care to give some links to articles and references. I'd like to see the lies.
Re:They will revert and block him eventually (Score:5, Insightful)
Which country puts religion on passports? Maybe Iran? Probably not...
I suspect you've had your edits pulled because you're a racist fuckwit, not because of "the evul libruls."
Re:They will revert and block him eventually (Score:5, Informative)
India doesn't have the information ON the passport but it is/was required in the forms when getting them.
Re: (Score:3)
Good to know, I know some ME nations ask for it on forms too, Israel has it on some ID systems. But I'd wager the vast majority of nations don't...
Re:They will revert and block him eventually (Score:5, Interesting)
An admission that you already knew that various countries put religious affiliation on IDs, then moving the goalposts after someone backs up the claim that some countries print religion on passports (e.g., https://blogs.tribune.com.pk/s... [tribune.com.pk]).
The AC may be a fuckwit, but you're hardly better.
Re: (Score:2)
On _forms_ (eg when entering the country, or various forms for citizens) - it's not on the KSA passport, nor Israeli, and I've not seen a Pakistani passport so I legitimately didn't know. Goalposts firmly in place, mofo.
Re: (Score:2)
Oh ffs I meant I didn't know - not that I didn't believe you.
Re: (Score:2)
Good to know, I know some ME nations ask for it on forms too, Israel has it on some ID systems. But I'd wager the vast majority of nations don't...
Yeah, asking for religion only seems like a pertinent question if you're looking to persecute/put-down a group of people.
Re: (Score:2)
"Of all the active/hot/shooting armed conflicts around the world right now (over 100), Muslims are involved on one or both sides in the vast majority of them."
Citation needed.
Re: (Score:2)
Pakistan does/did. Was news back in early '00s.
India doesn't have the information ON the passport but it is/was required in the forms when getting them.
I'm curious if it matters what you put on your passport as your religion; and I presume they have no verification. If I were Pakistani, I'd probably put Islam as my religion just to avoid potential persecution if the wrong people get in control. In India, I'd probably pick whatever was the dominant religion in the state I was in, not that India on a national level has religious issues, but certain areas occasionally get the wrong people in charge. Not that I think potential persecutors would ask to see m
Re: (Score:3)
In Saudi Arabia if you were there as a resident and put Islam there's a chance you may be held to that eg "encouraged" to go the mosque etc. For sure, some friends who were legitimately Muslim (although generally quite secular) were called out if they didn't regularly attend prayers.(source - I lived there in the 80s/90s). I suspect other theocracies may act in the same way.
If you were a citizen you _were_ Muslim - KSA does not allow its nationals practice another religion. Apostasy carries the death penalt
Re: (Score:3)
I don't know about Pakistan, but was happened to be reading a bit about Egypt, where you do usually put religion on their ID and if you're not one of the 3 Abrahamic religions, you had to perjure yourself or be disenfranchised and couldn't get any ID until a 2006 court decision that allowed not putting your religion on your national ID. Without the national ID, no other ID was possible.
Seems this is common in Islamic countries.
Seems really weird living in a secular country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
h [wikipedia.org]
Ignited by a fascination (Score:1)
with his own navel.
Not a fan (Score:1)
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.
Skeptical of the quality of his contributions (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Skeptical of the quality of his contributions (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re:Skeptical of the quality of his contributions (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
1 edit every 17 seconds, one article every 24 mins (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:1 edit every 17 seconds, one article every 24 m (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
7 articles a day is a lot (Score:3)
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.
Jack of All Trades - Master of None (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Jack of All Trades - Master of None (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe he's the guy that creates those stub articles that are waiting for someone who can provide some actual content.
IMPOSSIBLE! (Score:1)
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.
Re: (Score:1)
Conclusion: so called Steven Pruitt is a collective.
Man behind 80% of Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
Curiously, he is behind 80% of the postings and 80% of his postings are about his behind.
Re: (Score:2)
That's HIS behind?
OMG, poor Mr Coward.
Russian hackers are having apoplectic fits. (Score:1)
Get a job (Score:1)
Universal income FTW (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
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
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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?
Re: (Score:2)
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
Re: (Score:2)
Can't believe it (Score:2)
all translated ? (Score:5, Informative)
"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.
Re: (Score:3)
Fundamental flaw in how Wikipedia works (Score:1)
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
Re: (Score:2)
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.
disturbing? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Sigh (Score:2)
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.
Meet the Man behind 0.6% of Wikipedia (Score:2)
How is this a "third"? (Score:1)
Wikipedia has 876,258,552 edits and 5,792,931 Content pages. He has a third of what?
plagiarist (Score:1)
Smart man (Score:2)
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
Re: (Score:2)
ditto (Score:2)
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
And THIS is all you need to know! (Score:2)
How this is possible (Score:2)
Despite volunteers... (Score:2)
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)
Wow... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
He would not have enough time even if he is doing at work. So he is doing is not what we are trying to understand by it. So there is no point in launching a tirade against "govt" in ignorance of what is really happening here.