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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)
he'll then go in and manually corrects them
(Sorry, couldn't resist.)
I will write software to find every instance of "consists of" or "composed of"...and change it to "comprised of".
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.
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?
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?
Not as pathetic as this "anonymous coward" person saying sh*t like that here on ./.
No. All of his edits have already been reverted by crazy Wikipedia editors.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Yes, very crazy of him to be focused on the cause of his own crazy rather than yours!
I suppose that is his.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
what happens when oxford announces that "comprised of" now also means "made up of" ? Is he going to revert all his edits?
No. Some people feel that there is nothing wrong with "comprised of", and it should be tolerated, but nobody claims that it is actually superior to the alternatives. So there would be no reason to revert.
When you decide what to do in your free time, do you prefer things you enjoy, or do you worry about making a bigger contribution to the educational level of the country ?
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 "
I think his post was comprised of an insult, a comment and a rebuttal.
Anything on this level is a complete waste of time and one's limited lifespan.
...says the person commenting about his activity on an internet forum. ;^>
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?
I see this a lot. People know one thing, and want to make sure that everyone else are made miserable.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
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.
To a sufficiently advanced intelligence, anything that any human does is pathetic.
To someone not born with the natural drives of a human, anything that a human does is pathetic.
If you were to draw a spectrum of feasible behaviours, the part occupied by all humans is so ridiculously narrow, and it's only our lack of self-awareness that causes us to think our position on that narrow segment is of any consequence.
tl;dr Enjoy your life and let others enjoy theirs, because we're all worth the same in the end, ya dig?
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.
what happens when oxford announces that "comprised of" now also means "made up of" ?
All existing copies of The Oxford Dictionary will burst into flame, the Seven Seals will be opened, the Four Horsemen will arrive, and the Apocalypse will ensue.
Pro tip: when you're tempted to write a grammatical booger like comprised of, think for a moment and use something else.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
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.
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.
Just curious: What's wrong with medium.com?
I look at it once in a while, but don't know much about it other than what I've found to be a fairly attractive layout.
Aside from that, it's just a blog platform, right? Anyone can write an article and if it gets any traffic, Medium's editors or algorithms promote it, if I understand correctly
Am I missing something?
-- My Weblog.
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!
...
Challenge accepted: I will write a script that locates ambiguous usage of commas, and will replace them with the correct oxford comma usage. I bet I can surpass his edit count in a couple of weeks. :)
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
"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.
Sir, that is uncouth, uncivilized and incorrect.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
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.
Challenge accepted: I will write a script that locates ambiguous usage of commas, and will replace them with the correct oxford comma usage. I bet I can surpass his edit count in a couple of weeks. :)
A panda bear walks into a bar; eats, shoots and leaves.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
He's a lone soldier, taking a stand against proletariats that use terms such as "literally" and "basically" incorrectly. This man should be praised and lauded for his dedication. Also, my daughter is an aspie, so fuck you.
I think I will go on a quest to get rid of as many occurances of "X times LESS than ..." as possible.
what happens when oxford announces that "comprised of" now also means "made up of" ?
They already have.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
on /. these days are copy/pasted submissions from Hacker News anywhere from a few hours to a few days later.
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.
Sir, that is uncouth, uncivilized and incorrect.
There are legitimate grammar and usage debates, with cogent arguments on either side. But the Oxford Comma is the One True Way. The best argument I've ever heard against it is, "Well, it saves a few drops of ink on the printed page." Anti-Oxford Comma heathens should be drawn, quartered, and burned at the stake for befouling the language.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
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.
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...
I know. It's so damn painful, isn't it?
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
I'll write one that will fix all mistakes of "begs the question". I'll smoke all of you.
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.
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.
The best argument I've ever heard against it is, "Well, it saves a few drops of ink on the printed page."
And yet you place the period inside the quotation marks. Foolish American!
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
"Lone soldiers" are usually paranoid nutjobs fighting a reactionary war to recreate a past that never existed.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
No, it's strange to get a kick out of it. I had someone pop up on a page I frequently edit to "correct" "neither... or..." to "neither... nor..." It really, really pissed me off that some guy with no interest in the topic would drop in and do a bit of "drive-by" condescention, taking there archaic minority usage to be somehow superior to that of us "commoners".
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
If you can write a script that correctly identifies truly ambiguous uses of commas, why waste that talent on Wikipedia when you could instead be making millions coding semantic analysis algorithms for Google?
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Pro tip: when you're tempted to write a grammatical booger like comprised of, think for a moment and use something else.
Ah yes? Which profession is that? My pro tip as a language teacher is never to declare something is wrong when people use it all the time. I'm happy to advise against "comprised of" on the grounds that some egotistical shit-for-brains will look down on you for using it, but I'll never call it "wrong".
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
[eom]
I am american.
i guess i don't actually know the proper way it is supposed to be done. but it is my personal opinion that punctuation shouldn't be inside the quotation marks unless it is part of the quote. putting the punctuation inside the quote just makes certain sentence constructs rather awkward.
it is difficult to think of a good example at the moment.
I'm ROFL right now that you capitalized "the One True Way."
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
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.
It is eminently logical. It helps tell the difference between "The Vegas after party was comprised of my friends, Beance, and The Beeb" and "The Vegas after party was comprised of my friends, Beyonce and The Beeb"
In the first example, "my friends" are nobodies at the same party as Beyonce and the Beeb. In the second example, the party was even smaller, just Beyonce and the Beeb who happen to be "my friends".
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...).
(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.
I don't find ants to be pathetic. They are just ants doing ant things. Predictable != pathetic.
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.
I was just thinking he was applying the Unix mentality to his life. Do one thing, but do it well.
Humans are slow, innaccurate, and brilliant; computers are fast, acurrate, and dumb; together they are unbeatable
I'm going to do the same for Wiki articles that use "real" as an adverb instead of "really".
If you aren't part of the solution, then there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
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.
While you're at it, can you make a script to filter out hosts file spam? It makes reading at -1 more uncomfortable than it should be.
I would have capitalized the "T" in "The" but that just because I use English the way it was meant to be used.
You are welcome on my lawn.
How is it a "proper edit" to "correct" something that isn't wrong to start off with?
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
...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"?
I'm going to slightly disagree about the motivation of drive-by wiki editing. If I'm reading a wikipedia entry and notice a problem (awkward phrasing, incorrect usage, comma usage, etc.) I might fix it, that's kind of the point of a wiki. It isn't, at least in my case, meant to be condescending; it's meant to be helpful.
Also, I've never thought of neither...nor... as archaic it just sounds better to me, so I might fix neither..or if I saw it.
--
JimFive
Please stop using the word theory when you mean hypothesis.
mod this thing up.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
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.