Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
"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.
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.
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.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
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