Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by ptest1 | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

ptest1

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

View on HN

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...

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.

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

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com