Teenage Subway Aficionados Help With the Upkeep of Every One of New York City's 472 Subway Stations -- At Least on Wikipedia (nytimes.com)

The New York Times has a feature story about two incredible teenagers who work behind the scenes to improve all of the Wikipedia articles about the New York Subway system. An excerpt: Ryan Ng is a 19-year-old freshman at Baruch College in Manhattan. He studies finance, lives at home with his parents in Queens and is a member of the college's "League of Legends" video game club. But in the somewhat fanatical world of Wikipedia supercontributors, he is best known by his alias, Epicgenius. As Epicgenius, Mr. Ng has made over 180,000 edits to Wikipedia and created more than 17,000 pages for the site. Most of his work is in the service of his particular fixation: updating the articles associated with all 472 stations of the New York Subway system.

"Sometimes I edit before I do homework, which is not a good thing," Mr. Ng said. But he finds his hobby satisfying. "When I improve an article, I feel like I've accomplished something. I see my editing as more of a mission." Mr. Ng discovered Wikipedia editing when he was 13. He recalled wanting to collaborate on the page for "Gangnam Style," the hugely popular 2012 hit by the South Korean performer Psy. Shortly thereafter, Mr. Ng decided to specialize in public transit, which he considered a somewhat more useful pursuit. He knows his hobby can become obsessive because it's happened before.

Comments

Ng implies South-Southeast Asian.

[Anonymous Coward]

So given his parents likely first or second generation upbringing being an aspie probably comes with the territory, based on individuals I knew through my college years with similiar names and ethnic backgrounds.

Having said that, good for him, we need somebody to contribute to American academic pursuits, even ones sometimes seen as banal, like subways in New York. Personally I find this quite interest and hope to read up on these pages more when I have time. So long as he's being relatively impartial in his research and documentation of these stations it seems like a net benefit to society, especially for historical purposes if he can find publicly available photographs, maps, etc of the tunnel systems for when sections inevitably are replaced, fail, or remodeled, so that future generations will have a snapshot of the subway system of the current generation in the future. I only wish more had been documented about the earlier subway lines, and hope that some of the abandoned but still existing lines get excavated, photographed, and otherwise documented for future generations exploration.

Re:I didn't get the headline

[Kjella]

There's a couple of guys who spend most of their time on Wikipedia writing about subway stations. Apparently they're "incredible".

More like half crazy but it's obsessive people like this that makes Wikipedia have huge, detailed articles on an absurd number of things. I mean how much would you pay someone to write on the New York subway for an encyclopedia? Even online where printing cost is not an issue you'd probably pay someone a buck or two for a tiny subsection. Instead you have a guy who'll write hundreds of articles for free out of some sense of public service. Some other dude will be an astronomy nut and write articles on stars and so on for every event, time period, area, species and whatever. Of course the downside is that many of these will treat their area as their own fiefdom, but the good crazy mostly outweigh the bad crazy.

Just the facts

[Frosty Piss]

Ryan Ng is a 19-year-old freshman at Baruch College in Manhattan. He studies finance, lives at home with his parents in Queens and is a member of the college's "League of Legends" video game club.

And has a fixation on Wikipedia subway articles...

The is certainly one thing we can say for sure: Young Mr. Ng is not getting laid.