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.

Comments

Skeptical of the quality of his contributions

[Solandri]

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.

Re:Skeptical of the quality of his contributions

[ranton]

You could just look at his edit history if you want to see what those 3 million edits consist of. It appears that many of the edits are very small, and so far today he mostly added and edited categories on a few dozen articles. For instance he edited four soccer game articles and changed the category from "August 19xx sports events" to "August 19xx sports event in Europe". That consisted of 6 edits in 6 articles within 2 minutes. Another half dozen edits were editing dashes on various articles he had previously edited using a script (changing "1911-12" to "1911–12").

I have only looked at 20 of his edits which mostly took place in a 10 minute period, but it at least shows how his total edit count can get so high after only 13 years. He made 15 edits in a 6 minute period earlier this morning.

Jack of All Trades - Master of None

[nukenerd]

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.

Re:Jack of All Trades - Master of None

[monkeyxpress]

It's possible, but on the other hand someone who is prepared to search out hard references is pretty valuable. There are plenty of subject experts who will type out the information they know, or amend an incorrect point, but can't really be bothered to go and find a proper reference for their edits. Having someone who will go through and do that helps make the system more robust.

I am very wary of what you are saying though. I contribute on stack exchange on engineering questions relevant to my expertise, and I've found it is really common for the SE god contributors to turn up at an extremely specialist question, bash out an waffly answer with errors, get up voted by their buddies, and before you know it the answer is accepted. Meanwhile I might write out a detailed answer and it gets buried in the system as the question is to obscure to get much further attention. It has made me very suspicous of many of the answers on that site. I think that either way it is healthly to approach these sources as starting points, and not become too dogmatic about something based on a crowd sourced article.

Re: If you're going to be eccentric

[Oswald McWeany]

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.