Slashdot Mirror
One Man's Quest To Rid Wikipedia of Exactly One Grammatical Mistake
An anonymous reader writes with this Fascinating profile of one particular Wikipedia editor Giraffedata (a 51-year-old software engineer named Bryan Henderson), who has spent the last seven years correcting only the incorrect use of "comprised of" on Wikipedia. Using a code to crawl for uses of "comprised of" throughout all of Wiki's articles, he'll then go in and manually correct them (for example, using "consists of" or "composed of") and has made over 47,000 edits to date.
Comprised of the ability to withstand the urge of doing anything else but this.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
I suppose if you find an autistic grammar nazi on the internet fascinating, this article is truly fascinating.
Otherwise, one might use the word "pathetic".
What is his software solution comprised of?
The lengths some people will go to enlarge their e-peen on Wikipedia...
he'll then go in and manually corrects them
(Sorry, couldn't resist.)
another fucking medium.com link
I will write software to find every instance of "consists of" or "composed of"...and change it to "comprised of".
I love the fact that the slashdot description for this contains a grammatical mistake.
This twitter account is similar: Correcting users on Twitter who type "sneak peak" with "sneak peek", we have "Stealth Mountain". https://twitter.com/stealthmountain
Not sure either of these qualify as 'news', but what the hell, it's a slow news day anyways.
Materialscientist has blocked an entire ISP for 3 months for no reason other than abusing checkuser.
It's a common enough idiom.
http://dictionary.reference.co...
verb (used with object), comprised, comprising.
1. to include or contain:
The Soviet Union comprised several socialist republics.
2. to consist of; be composed of:
The advisory board comprises six members.
3. to form or constitute:
Seminars and lectures comprised the day's activities.
Idioms:
4. be comprised of, to consist of; be composed of:
The sales network is comprised of independent outlets and chain stores.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Hasn't anyone tried to verbalize that to him?
what happens when oxford announces that "comprised of" now also means "made up of" ? Is he going to revert all his edits?
My quest is now to break every correct usage of "consists of" or "composed of" by replacing it with "comprised of."
. . . I wasn't aware of this and have been misusing that phrase forever! Great that this dood, Henderson, would spend valuable time doing this instead of normal stuff like understanding what a completely fraud-based society he exists in today!
Next up: The Wget Guy manually downloads a "hand-tailored" copy of wikipedia and sells it for living on DVDs.
Oh wait.
From the definition of comprised:
Idioms
4. be comprised of, to consist of; be composed of:
"The sales network is comprised of independent outlets and chain stores."
And I certainly pray that was the correct usage?
Using a code to crawl for uses of "comprised of" throughout all of Wiki's articles
Wikipedia is not "Wiki." Wikipedia is a wiki. There are many wikis in the world, and they are not all Wikipedia. Wikipedia is the publication, and wiki is the medium. "All of Wiki's articles" is like saying "All of Newspaper's articles."
Maybe I can get away with this offtopic pedantic comment since this whole article is about a guy spending years trying to fix small errors. :)
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Maybe he could've made a bigger contribution to the educational level of the country by volunteering to teach people to read, or computer science to poor kids in a rural or urban setting, or something more useful than this. Fine, make a blog post about it, then shut up and move on. Anything on this level is a complete waste of time and one's limited lifespan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Good intentions, but I hope he doesn't accidentally correct a mistake on an admin's pet page, fixing even typographical mistakes on the wrong article will get you banned.
I suppose that is his.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
How about getting rid of "this light bulb uses 3 times less power than this other one!". It's not mathematically correct to say. You can day "bulb a uses 30% of the power of bulb b" or "bulb b requires three times the power of bulb a", but saying that something is three times less just makes no sense.
You realize what you've done by calling attention to this, right?
"he'll then go in and manually corrects them "
English is constantly changing. If everyone through history was a grammar nazi, we'd still be speaking some proto-germanic language. One recent English change in the last 100 years: switching from using "they started to walk" to "they started walking", which used to be considered incorrect grammar.
How many of those edits were accepted fixes, and how many were epic edit war battles fought tooth and nail over 100 reverts with the Wikirati elite editor brigade?
This guy must be comprised of many lady admirers.
The above comments are correct. Language does change. (I'm a linguist.) 'Comprised of' is now considered acceptable usage by, among others, the Oxford Dictionary.Don't believe me? Look at the usage examples for the word at http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/comprise?searchDictCode=all.
Although I am a moderate in the prescriptive/nonprescriptive grammar debate, this man is clearly a pedant.
I hope he doesn't read any U.S. patent claims - he'll go insane.
I've known for many years that "comprise" (usually used as "comprised", "comprises", or "comprising" depending on context) means the same as "composed of", so that "comprised of" means "composed of of" which is ridiculous.
BUT, this has been so heavily misused for so long, and increasingly even in respectable publications that should know better and by otherwise skilled and educated writers, that I'm starting to give up. Not to the point of ever saying "comprised of" myself, but to the point of not bothering to correct anyone who does. These days, "composed of" is starting to become a rarity, as is "comprised" on its own, so I'm starting to see "comprised of" as the most commonly accepted usage. Not willingly, but I don't have much choice.
So, some Aspie is on a nerd quest and this is news worthy?
I bet the women swoon, and he's fun at parties -- or, possibly, the other one.
Dude, seriously, have you not learned to not broadcast this stuff in 51 years? If you're high functioning to hold a job, surely you've figured out to dial back the "dork" a little in public.
Now, excuse me, I have to go sort my pencils and re-stack the toilet paper.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
For all intensive purposes, the guy should get out more.
compromises and has the inability to be comprised of the compromise to which the compromisation is comprised of.
comprise, v.
8. Of things:
c. pass. To be composed of, to consist of.
1874 Art of Paper-Making ii. 10 Thirds, or Mixed, are comprised of either or both of the above.
1928 Daily Tel. 17 July 10/7 The voluntary boards of management, comprised..of very zealous and able laymen.
1964 E. Palmer tr. A. Martinet Elements Gen. Linguistics i. 28 Many of these words are comprised of monemes.
1970 Nature 27 June 1206/2 Internally, the chloroplast is comprised of a system of flattened membrane sacs.
Wikipedia is supposed to be the encyclopedia anyone can edit. And the editors of the articles chose to use comprised of. No one editor should be exerting such undue influence on the whole of the Wikipedia articles.
It is not spam.... but I would put it on equal footing to an editor deciding they don't like links to articles on a certain website, then searching for every article referencing it in order to move the link to the bottom of the list.
Clearly the widespread usage means there is not any broad agreement that comprised of shouldn't be there as a nice stylistic choice.
I feel like there should be a 1000 edits per person per day limit; unless the broader community has accepted a proposal to provide an affirmative consent to a specific large-scale change assisted by automation.
While I find some agreement that the phrase comprised of comprises a phrase that editors should probably want to avoid.
There are clear cases where Comprised Of is not wrong and it is better than any of the alternatives.
The unsung heroes who can't help but correct people. Obsessively. I've been following a similar person on imdB who consistently corrects people's plot theories about Memento and Primer (and a few others): http://www.imdb.com/user/ur128... He's been doing it, routinely, for years.
undoing all his edits.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Reminds me of those faggots who scour articles to look for places to put in "portmanteau"
The Wikipedia Typo Team has a lot of people who "adopt" particular misspellings by periodically searching for them and fixing them. I've been doing it since 2006 and I'm a little short of 100,000 edits. Of course I am not quite so fixated as Giraffedata - I also work on other projects, collect interesting vandalism, and create the occasional article.
There's plenty of room to contribute in small ways. People who mainly do things like this are referred to as WikiGnomes.
Promote proofreading. Don't mod up sloppy posts.
...you can (and should) be replaced by a RegEx.
This is a mistake many programmers (like Mr. Henderson) make. Human languages are not like programming languages, where there's a compiler that either accepts it or doesn't. There are no rulebooks for English, and many (if not most) of the supposed "rules" you may have been taught actually have more exceptions than exemplars. The only real rule is that your target audience understands you without being distracted by your weird way of saying it.
So I'm sorry, but pretty much any change that requires reference to some supposed authorities, comes as a surprise to most long-term practitioners, and requires scripts to keep track of all the hundreds of occurrences of it happening daily, is in fact in clearly in common usage, and is by definition, correct English.
In the interest of fairness, here's Giraffedata's argument against "comprised of". He also makes one point I wholeheartedly agree with:
Many writers use this phrase to aggrandize a sentence -- to intentionally make it longer and more sophisticated. In these, a simple "of", "is", or "have" often produces an easier to read sentence. (Example: "a team comprised of scientists" versus "a team of scientists").
He's dead on there. If you are just using the phrase (or any other rhetorical flourish) to pad out a sentence, please stop.
Languages come in two types: Living and Dead. Dead languages have solid grammatical rules that must be obeyed. Living languages are in flux, constantly evolving. What this person did is NO different than a British person going through all of Wikipedia and replacing the word Humor with Humour or Favorite with Favourite.
Words and Grammar CHANGE. Enough people use the word AINT, it gets imported into the language.
Why? Because living languages are comprised of words and phrases that take their meaning from the common usage, not from a book. If people understand a meaning, that is the meaning.
There is no language police outlawing people, no punishment - except for public disapproval and opinion - for misuse. This guy is not the public and has no right to disapprove of how the public uses the language.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Yep. I work in patents, where a small incorrect use of grammar or terms of art can mean losing millions of dollars. The classic case in point:
Patent A:
"A vehicle comprising 3 wheels and a motor."
Patent B:
"A vehicle consisting of 3 wheels and a motor."
Assuming it is 1700 or something and no prior-art exists,
Patent A can go on to claim 4-wheeled motorized vehicles (since a 4-wheeled vehicle does after all have 3 wheels), 3-wheeled vehicles with shark fins, whatever. "Comprising" is open-end and interpreted as "it has at least this," or as you say, "including."
Patent B is strictly limited to 3 wheels and a motor, no more and no less. If a competitor uses 4 wheels, or adds shark fins, or two motors, then it isn't covered by the patent. "Consisting of" is a closed phrase interpreted as "having exactly."
The incorrect grammar "comprised of" would be an ambiguity, and as such, interpreted in the strictest way -- limiting as in Patent B.
It may seem worrisome that scientists and engineers of all people -- some of the absolute worst butchers of language and grammar out there! -- are the ones who become patent agents or patent attorneys, but all-in-all, the ones who do so tend to be some of the smartest folks I've met. You need to be well-rounded to do the job.
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
Now that this is publicly known you can be sure there will be trolls who will mess with the guy.
This just called for a meme. Link below:
http://cdn.meme.am/instances/500x/58778630.jpg
What bothers me most is the apparent symmetric relation of this word. For example, you can say the US comprises 50 states. Or you can say the 50 states comprise the US. It can mean "be made up of" or "make up". I don't get it. Are there any other words like this where the order of articles doesn't matter? Isn't this a transitive verb? What's the object? Fill in the blank: Alaska and Alabama are two of the states ______ the United states is comprised. Isn't the answer "of which"?
But but but, "comprised of" is Vogon Poetry!
...
"Grammar Nazi" springs to mind, especially as language evolves to support things like this. Apparently the Oxford dictionary allows it anyway.
I would have to say that a venture like this is (at least) a massive waste of time. For all its good, there are loads of problems, quirks, inconsistencies, and unnecessary complexities within the English language already. Nit picking a minor aspect such as this is like worrying about the quality of the window washer fluid you use for a car whilst ignoring the increasing amounts of rust underneath along with the 1mm tread on the tyres.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Global search: "utilize"
Replace with: "use"
Global search: "baited breath"
Replace with: "bated breath"
I could do this ALL day, man.
-Styopa
My pet peeve would have to be using "compliment" and "complement" interchangeably.
I like my dinosaurs feathery, and my pterosaurs hairy (or is it pycnofibery?)
With the proviso that he turn the usually butchered summaries into actual English sentences! We're not asking for much, just an actual summary that doesn't contain more than 30 errors.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
I'll find all occurrences of "then" and "than", and correct them, if they have been mistaken. That really pisses me off...
If something gets used often enough, it becomes an accepted usage. Languages change all the time.
17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
This is not a grammatical mistake. It is correct grammer and has been correct grammer for hundreds of years. See
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/comprise
In particular, definition 3 of comprise is "compose, constitute". Merriam-Webster's Dictionary then notes that
I've spent way too long thinking about this and I've read the documents and I am not convinced he's entirely correct.
Surely comprised is correct when used in the past tense.
For example, "The Beatles were comprised of John, Paul, George and Ringo." Consists and composed just don't seem right in this instance.
Not all of the corrections in [] were grammatical errors, but this writer needs to go back to school. I also didn't know how I should designate the text I removed, so it's just gone.
[This is a] fascinating profile about one particular Wikipedia editor[,] Giraffedata (a 51-year-old software engineer named Bryan Henderson), who has spent the last seven years correcting only [one common mistake;] the incorrect use of "comprised of" on Wikipedia. Using [some] code to [search] for uses of "comprised of" throughout all of Wiki's articles, [once found] he'll manually correct them[. Typically they are replaced with] "consists of" or "composed of." [He] has made over 47,000 edits to date.
... for Climate Change?
Global Edit: Climate Change => Climate Scam ....
KGO-Radio (810AM San Francisco) had an afternoon talk show host in the 1980's who declared war on the word, "basically," because people were abusing it all the time. After a while, he basically gave up.
We need to create a wiki page to understand what the edited pages are comprised of.
"Comprised of" is not grammatically incorrect, strictly speaking. It's an older usage that is alive and kicking in patent law usage as an open-ended descriptor. Learning the difference between "comprised of" and "composed of" is a key point in learning patent law, but they're both grammatically correct.
http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/comprised.html
Although “comprise” is used primarily to mean “to include,” it is also often stretched to mean “is made up of”—a meaning that some critics object to. The most cautious route is to avoid using “of” after any form of “comprise” and substitute “is composed of” in sentences like this: “Jimmy’s paper on Marxism was composed entirely of sentences copied off the Marx Brothers Home Page.”
There’s a lot of disagreement about the proper use of “comprise,” but most authorities agree that the whole comprises the parts: “Our pets comprise one dog, two cats, and a turtle.” The whole comes first, then “comprise” followed by the parts. But there’s so much confusion surrounding the usage of this word that it may be better to avoid it altogether.
I think I will go on a quest to get rid of as many occurances of "X times LESS than ..." as possible.
You're language is comprised by a principal coconut head.
on /. these days are copy/pasted submissions from Hacker News anywhere from a few hours to a few days later.
Just write a Wikibot to do the edits. Soon there would be millions of them, fighting each other and Wikipedia would become inaccessible.
I applaud this man's efforts. Copy editing and proper English have gone down the tubes in writing today. It's become so bad that even major news outlets are publishing egregious errors in headlines and teasers, as well as in article body content, daily and at an alarming rate. Sad to see that there is no higher standard anymore and everyone writing like a 14-year old, C-level English student.
are some people compelled to respond to every instance of a word or phrase whose meaning has changed in their lifetime?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Some activist idiot ran a script on Wikipedia changing all references non-trans to CIS destroying the integrity of articles discussing historical TransJordan and non-TransJordan prior to the 1967 war with Israel.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
...is my hero.
An while he's at it, can he adjust his code or sell the algorithm to Zuckerberg) to correct the following crimes-against-English on Facebook:
Loose - lose
You're - your
whose - who's
etc.
(I have to stop, my eyelid tourettes is kicking in again)
I feel like I am doing the same on Reddit, teaching people the difference between it's and it's.
It's shameful what passes for acceptable typing these days.
Amazing how people choose not to master the difficult and challenging task of third grade English.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
It is so concerning that wikipedia is comprised of these sort of mistakes.
Therefore there cannot be anything wrong with it.
http://www.stephenfry.com/2009/07/04/americas-place-in-the-world/
END OF ARGUMENT
Did he remember not to correct the article on the incorrect use of "comprised of"?
This one doesn't bother me much. It's always pretty obvious what's being said, and it's not like you're losing a useful meaning of something in the process, as is the case with "literally" and "begging the question."
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Comprise: to be made up of (something) : to include or consist of (something)
http://www.merriam-webster.com...
Comprise: to have as parts or members, or to be those parts or members:
http://dictionary.cambridge.or...
to include; contain
to constitute the whole of; consist of
http://www.collinsdictionary.c...
So much for my efforts to spread my german grammar and spelling into the english / us wikipedia :-/
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I can understand his obsession with one particular grammar error, because I have a little bit of an obsession myself with people mixing up affect and effect. It's very, very common. I would say that up to about half the time I see someone use one of those words or derivatives (i.e., +ing, etc) they should have used the other word. Although I haven't spent hundreds (thousands?) of hours of my time to correct every instance of it that I find.
to me, I mean languages are living and changing, as is grammar.
Being both an occasional contributor to Wikipedia (admittedly a long time ago) and terrible at grammar I would have thought that people would be happy to have their sloppy grammar fixed to save them the time and/or mild embarrassment. What's the problem?
Tomorrow on Slashdot: one editor's quest to rid Slashdot of mixed-tense constructions: "... he'll then go in and manually corrects..."*
Interesting fact: he initially was on a quest to rid wikipedia of "should of" and "could of" but the database crashed under the weight of the results. So we went with "comprised of".
* Just kidding. Slashdot editors don't actually edit. But a boy can dream...
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Let's set him loose on "do the needful" and incorrect usage of "revert" as well.
Try teaching the same people that can program in dozens of languages and understand long chains of gobbledygook, but can't tell its from it's.
[eom]
He has to much time on his hands or an unusual hobby.
Xkcd Duty Calls
It is not about the word "comprise", but about the phrase "comprised of".
And yet Wikipedia offers us a wealth of frivolous preferences, while not allowing the selection of Commonwealth or US English, which would be vastly easier than many of the other frills.
Can we create and entry in Wikipedia on him and what he does, then there will always be a single page with 'comprised of' returned to his search?
I applaud someone trying to do that. I correct grammatical mistakes on Wikipedia too, and point out others' misuse on other pages (e.g. of "begs the question" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...).
While he's at it let him fix "catch on fire" and "at a high rate of speed" as well.
(Applied) Semantics != (Applied) Syntactics.
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DarrenTomlyn/20110311/6174/Contents_NEW.php
'Stupidity is an often fatal disease' - R. A. Heinlein
http://www.merriam-webster.com...
Of particular note is the commentary on item 3.
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
The problem with English is not that it changes. The problem with English is that it changes via natural selection rather than through conscious decision. A lot of things in English don't make any sense. But rather than correcting these things, we simply add to the list of horrible things by allowing English to "evolve". It's time for some genetic engineering.
For example the following sentence:
He yelled, "Hurry up."
is grammatically correct in that it puts the punctuation in the quote according to the proper rules of English.
This however is ambiguous, because we don;t know whether the period is part of the actual quote or not.
Something like this
He yelled "Hurry up.".
Might seem dumb at first. We are not used to it, but it removes ambiguity and preserves encapsulation. We have a sentence of the form "He yelled X." which is a fully formed sentence where X is a quote (which happens to be comprised of another fully formed sentence).
This creates very simple language production rules:
sentence -> subject verb object punctuation
object -> quote or any other objecty thing
quote -> "sentence"
should of
Thank you for your service.
Can he turn his attention next to people using the phrase "titular character"? Wikipedia seems to be lousy with people who learned the word "titular" from seeing examples along the lines of "Bilbo Baggins, the titular halfling of Tolkein's 1937 novel" or "Mike Myers provided the voice of Shrek's titular ogre" – but failed to understand how the nuance of how the word was being used: in conjunction with descriptive nouns. Now they think that "titular character" is just a fancier (and therefore better) way of saying "title character", and the usage is threatening to repurpose a charming little-used word that was useful for a clever turn of phrase, into ... a redundant alternate spelling. There is nothing whatsoever wrong with "title character"; it's a simple, direct phrase whose meaning is perfectly clear and precise. Replacing it with "titular character" is both pretentious... and incorrect.
Because you're just so good with spelling and grammar COMMA you don't even need a dictionary PERIOD When you type a word itAPOSTROPHEs fucking gospel.
FTFY
Nice to meet you! I'm glad you're there making Wikipedia that much better in many small ways we don't assume in every day browsing. Thank you!
It changes as long as you don't know better. Now you've ruined it for yourself and everyone else. God DAMNIT.
With this story slashdotted, I wonder how long it will take 'till someone creates a bot that will crawl through Wikipedia articles, undoing all his changes.
If you post as an AC, don't expect me to spend a mod point on you.
to discover irregular vergs. Perhaps he will realize his work has been for naught and his brain will explode.
Come on, people. I dare you to open a real dictionary and read what it says as the third defintion of comprised. I don't mean Google it, I mean open a freaking dictionary. Maybe the confusion is because people sometimes use it in the active instead of the passive? As I understand it, the passive is correct, active is not. It's older usage of the word, but is in fact correct. Then again, "possessed of" used to be acceptable, became obsolete, and is now considered by some to be an idiom.
Can't you just pick they're/there/their if your aim is to be a Wikipedia stickler and play with code?
should have scripted his browser to do it automatically...
...before some schmucks out there decide that they're gonna devote their entire lives to crawling wikipedia for the phrases "consist of" and "composed of" and replace them with "comprised of"...
When you're done, can you rid the world of "alot"?
Is this the case of mistaken identity where having a preposition at the end of a sentence is perfectly legal and is fact part of the English language, English being a Germanic based language and not Latin!!!!!!!!!!!
Rock on.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gv0H-vPoDc
Everybody shut up!
You should know when it's less or it's fewer.
You've finished 2nd grade; I hope you can tell if you're doing good or doing well.
In the patent world, X "comprising" Y and Z means that X is made up of at least Y and Z, but more could exist [X>=Y+Z]. "Consisting" or "composing" means that X is made up of only Y and Z [X=Y+Z]. There is a tremendous difference, and getting it wrong could lose you a patent.