Meet the man behind a third of what's on Wikipedia | Hacker News Reader

Meet the man behind a third of what's on Wikipedia

cbsnews.com

34 pointshellofunk15 comments

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‘History is written by the vict..err..a huge history buff’

Pretty 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-m...

Still that's the only video of him I could find, pretty interesting.

Latest contributions: 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.

Categories are part of the content (at the bottom of each page) and actually require a lot of Wikipedia-specific knowledge.

I don’t get it- the title is totally incorrect. He hasn’t written a third of what’s on Wikipedia.

Well, 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.

I 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.

Yeah, that makes sense. But it’s still wrong!

Actually, 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-Wikip...

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/meet-the-m...

CBS 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_...

He is on those top-contributors lists. His username is "Ser Amantio di Nicolao" per article.

His username, Ser Amantio Di Nicolao, shows up on both of those lists.

yeah you're right, its not even a little bit accurate.

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