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Meet the Man Behind a Third of What's On Wikipedia (cbsnews.com)
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.
This seems a great thing to be!
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.
with his own navel.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pfffft. That's nothing. He's had over 12 billion of his edits reverted.
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.
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.
Curiously, he is behind 80% of the postings and 80% of his postings are about his behind.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
What a bum.
Yeah, I'm sure he's a real expert on all those things. Oh, wait - that's right, experts aren't welcome on shitopedia.
Yup, I am. Looking back in history, it's usually been a better life for morons before compared to after any revolution.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
I'd like to know how any human being can possibly make 3 million edits. That doesn't seem possible.
"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.
They hack the payment, with hacks. Hackers!
On the other hand he is doing more than most desk jockeys.
Let me try to explain it to you. It's a side effect: Morons (like you) are better in this world full of stuff useful people did just for the sake of bettering mankind.
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 rehashed version of other sites.
This affected me personally. I worked for many years in DOD research (on some very cool projects - "domain expert"). Related to that, I purchased a famous invention (the Ursus Mark VII from Troy Hurtubise), which I hoped to use for a DOD research project. I interviewed Troy several times (I took a professional documentary maker to north Canada to do so), and was present when he demoed other inventions for the military and media. When I tried to add information to Wikipedia years ago on Troy Hurtubise, my edits were rejected because I wasn't pointing to another web site that already has the information. But I truly was the source (lots of film to prove it, and a $150K invention I had purchased (for less)), yet I had no good way to submit (unless I published it all elsewhere, which wasn't the point; I was trying to add domain expert info, not a reference to another site).
So now, many years later, the Troy Hurtubise page is still very incomplete. My short documentary about him did well in film festivals (and it's listed on imdb.com), and I'm referenced by Troy in a book about him. So now I could probably get my information published on Wikipedia, but the information is as much as 15 years old now. Something needs to change on Wikipedia so it's more a source of information, less a compendium of copy-paste from other sites.
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?
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.
Just another day in Paradise
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?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
But 1/3rd makes for more impressive clickbait.
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 )
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).
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
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
Yep, Wikipedia is written by the obsessed or mentally ill. Good luck getting an objective story out of that. I still remember the anti-GamerGate obsession where the movement's viewpoint was not allowed to be expressed in favor of a hysterical media narrative about harassment. Then it turned out the main person responsible had contributed like 30% of all edits on this single page, and was so unbearable even "rational wiki" (the mirror image of conservspedia) eventually banned him.
Oh far from me to advocate any revolution, the Frech revolution and Russian revolution were catastrophic, which is why i was suggesting not trying to claim you are helping someone who doesn't want help.
Because I used to really support wikipedia and did my part, fixing spelling and repairing citations...until I ran into one of the deletionists and found out how many whack-a-doodles had high level control in that org.
That is when I did a little digging and from the Scientologist that was controlling the LRH page to the rabid fanbois controlling the pages of their TV shows I found quite a bit on there that was nothing but spin where anything that wasn't all puppies and roses was quickly deleted by those controlling the pages and if you tried to point out to higher ups the actual facts, complete with a dozen sources from a dozen places (including in the case of entertainment from the actual actors and writers of the piece) that "Yeah this is what actually happened"? You would be quickly shut down and blocked because that page "belonged" to one of the inner circle.
So these days if Wiki says the sky is blue I'd want a second opinion, I look at them no different than HuffyPo or FauxNews when it comes to having actual facts because...well you just never know when someone in the inner circle has "claimed" a page and is spinning like a record all over it. Its a damn shame as the original concept was quite sound, a giant crowd sourced encyclopedia where everyone could pool their collected knowledge for the betterment of all, but sadly it got quickly taken over by nasty people.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Still living with his parents in the home he grew up in, Pruitt has always remained true to his interests.
I fear when the endowment plan becomes complete a new crop of management will come in and kill the golden goose.
Like many endowment driven philanthropic enterprises, people will enter and see this big pile of cash, and being there to help other people they say "What else can we do?" Since they are so compassionate, surely they are good and not evil, thus their plan could not have any unintended consequences. Then the endowment will be over-extended on nonsense and the whole thing collapses.
Happens almost as often as it doesn't.
um, you do know bots are allowed on wikipedia, right?
he should go on game shows. He could handle a few weeks of championships on jeopardy to subsidize his wiki career.
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.
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 the truth seeking fanatics; it's a constant war and battles go either way depending on when you look. 1 dedicated fanatic can be worth dozens of 'good people.'
If you wish to play policy wonk in this natural balancing act, expect to lose because you are not as motivated or numerous as they are plus you are severely limited in what you can do since all policy games are generalized/remote; motivated humans are evolved to find solutions.
Example: Christians. tolerate others; but have lots of kids who MUST be raised christian; not tolerant on that. That is how they went from weak to powerful. How far they go is decided by how much opposition they stir up; when the numbers got high they could get away with more, then after really extreme times the backlash opposition wasn't worth their costs.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
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/... 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 (as pointed out in the article). He also does substantial edits but these kind of smaller, back-end, maintenance things obviously make up the bulk of his edits. (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...).
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.
Most of his edits are very minor, like updating "1911-12" to "1911â"12" (notice the difference?).
Yes, he replaces an en-dash with an em-dash, which 1) makes no difference in the meaning, and 2) is probably more correct as the former. It's a "hyphen" to normal folks, and either one works. Especially on /. where the em-dash shows up goofy.
and changing article categories from "Sports Events" to "Sports Events in Europe".
Because, God knows, sports events in Europe are not true sports events, so they need the additional clarification. Sheesh.
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).
If you're searching for soccer in Europe, you're probably already looking by league name and not just geography. I wonder, does he have a script just waiting to be run to change "Sports Events in Europe" to "Sports Events in the UK" for, e.g., BPL, the day brexit takes effect?
Did anyone notice? He's Russian (on his mother's side) working IN the US government, editing a source of data that many voters make use of when researching candidates? Has anyone looked for his meddling in data on Hillary?
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!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
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.
Soviet Union is not Russia. Does the word "union" give a clue perhaps? It was comprised of 15 separate "republics" which are now independent states. Of which 3 are the Baltic states (now part of EU) and 2 are at war with Russia (Ukraine and Georgia).
In the age of wikipedia only a moron can be that ignorant.
And finally, he's American for fuck's sake.
No, that's replacing a hyphen with an en-dash (not the same thing at all). An em-dash is longer.
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 abbreviation KiB.
Based on the above, I'm guessing that before the introduction of the kibibyte, few Americans were involved in metric standardization, though there could be other reasons for the inconsistent consistency, though I can't seem to think of any.
My thanks to Mr. Pruitt. I'm always glad to be helping to fund Wikipedia. Are you, dear reader, also sharing some $ with 'em?
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 kilo or a binary kilo.
I have accessed as a result of your post "KB" is an Imperial measurement, and a derivative of "kB". There may be some confusion as to the valuation of "kB". Is it 1,000 Bytes, or 1,024 bytes? KB, the Imperial measurement, is also known as KiB, and is 1,024 bytes. I'm not sure there is a difference between the Imperial "kb", and the metric (also "kb"?), as both are 1,000 bits.
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.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
Are you plain stupid or trolling?
So, this is the guy responsible for the Wikipedia bad reputation in accurate information then.
Thanks!!