6 ms·
Meet the man behind a third of what's on Wikipedia
- SHAKEDECADE 8y ago‘History is written by the vict..err..a huge history buff’
- ptest1 8y agoI don’t get it- the title is totally incorrect. He hasn’t written a third of what’s on Wikipedia.
- yesenadam 8y agoWell, to be fair, the title doesn't say he wrote it. Just that he's behind it. Which to me doesn't have any clear or even vague meaning. If someone asked, I couldn't tell them. But it is vaguely arguably true, I think. I've seen much worse.
- lkbm 8y agoI assume they're dividing his "almost 3 million edits" by the "more than 5.7 million articles" on en.wp. It's obviously extremely wrong, but their incentives aren't for being sticklers on accuracy. It's on being sensational.
- ptest1 8y agoYeah, that makes sense. But it’s still wrong!
- lkbm 8y agoActually, to follow up on that, there've been a few articles about him, and on Quora[0], the author of a WaPo article[1] says "Of the site's nearly 5.7 million pages, Pruitt has edited a staggering one third." If this guy is correct, the edits are sufficiently spread across different articles for him to have touched 1/3 of them. Still obviously not the same as writing, but it puts the headline in a slightly less absurd light. [0] https://www.quora.com/Who-is-Ser-Amantio-di-Nicolao-of-Wikipedia https://www.quora.com/Who-is-Ser-Amantio-di-Nicolao-of-Wikip... [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/meet-the-most-prolific-contributor-to-the-english-version-of-wikipedia/2018/10/02/a6497a74-9411-11e8-a679-b09212fb69c2_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/meet-the-m...
- StevePerkins 8y agoCBS News. I don't even really notice sensationalized or misleading headlines so much these days, until they're pointed out to me. Perhaps this guy's contribution count represents one-third of a top-contributors list, and the author conflated that with "all of Wikipedia" out of laziness? Curious that "Steven Pruitt" (or any usernames that look like they might be owned by him) doesn't even show up on any of Wikipedia's own lists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_Wikipedians_by_article_count https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_Wikipedians_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_Wikipedians_by_number_of_edits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_Wikipedians_...
- wheelerwj 8y agoyeah you're right, its not even a little bit accurate.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- hztqh 8y agoHe looks like he sits on a park bench and eyes little girls with bad intent. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0jMPI_pUec https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0jMPI_pUec
- colordrops 8y agoWhy is this the top comment?
- dooglius 8y agoLatest contributions: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions/Ser_Amantio_di_Nicolao&limit=500 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contribut... Not all edits are of equal weight; most of it looks like non-content-based edits, like adding/reorganizing categories. Not to say these contributions aren't valuable--this sort of thing is certainly important--but the article quite overstates his impact.
- aboutruby 8y agoCategories are part of the content (at the bottom of each page) and actually require a lot of Wikipedia-specific knowledge.
- aboutruby 8y agoPretty annoying how such an interesting person gets so badly interviewed and kind of mocked by the show. Here is a much better article about him: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/meet-the-most-prolific-contributor-to-the-english-version-of-wikipedia/2018/10/02/a6497a74-9411-11e8-a679-b09212fb69c2_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/meet-the-m... Still that's the only video of him I could find, pretty interesting.