This guy is the Secret King of Wikipedia. He is the World's biggest Wikipedia editor. He stays in his room editing Wikipedia more than 3,000,000 times!
Who is he and why is he doing this? How much knowledge does he have? Let's talk about it in this article.
His name is Steven Pruitt, he lives in a small town in Virginia, USA. He has a normal job and a normal life. When he was 16 years old, when Steven was still in university, he came across a small unknown encyclopedia that anyone can contribute to. So he had the idea to write about his great great grandfather PETER FRANCISCO, who fought the American Revolutionary war.
I thought it'd be fun to write about Peter because I knew about him and the family knew about him but he wasn't in any mainstream encyclopedias----Steven
So Steven wrote about his ancestor, publish it and then from that one article, he got excited! He could now educate the world from his basement.
What I love about Wikipedia is that it allows you to cover topics not usually found in the mainstream western media. It allows anybody in the world to have their voice.-----Steven
So he wrote another article and another and another and before he knew it he's written thousands.
It started...and it was sort of like, Oh well that's cute. And then when I started getting a lot of credits for it, there comes a point, it goes from that you tell people and they're like "You have how many edits?"----Steven
So far he has edited more than 3 million and written more than 35,000 articles. And the best part is he's been doing this for 16 years, 3 hours a day and he wasn't even paid a single dollar to do it!
Why is he doing this for free?
To be perfectly honest, I've never been very good at making money. My mother grew up in Soviet Union and from the stories that she's told me, I understand what its like to live in a place where access to information is so heavily guarded. If you make this information free then the more people that have access to it can do more with it, and it makes for a freer, better and ultimately stronger society.----Steven
But the question in everyone's mind is...How accurate is Wikipedia? And how can I guy like Steven help edit 3 million articles?
Well it turn out Wikipedia is more accurate than you think. For every article, every paragraph even every sentence, someone like Steven has to fact check that it's true.
The potential is practically limitless for how you can redefine who is worthy of being included in that canon of knowledge. You can create an entire ecosystem in that language online and it's user generated. The potential for where we are now is huge. The potential for what we can be in 100 years is massive. In 500 years or even 1,000 years out of this, it's huge. If you wanna take the long view, which kinda what I like to do.----Steven
That's why Steven, the guy in the basement was chosen as one of the Most Influential people in the world by Time Magazine!
Steven doesn't write base on feeling or hunches or guesses. He always write based on facts with multiple sources and lots of evidence.
I never depend on just one source. I look through books, encyclopedias, websites, anything I can get my hands on.
The world needs to thank people like Steven who give up their free time and their family time just to share information to the world! People like Steven are the reason humanity is Beautiful!
photo source: Wikipedia
information source: Youtube, Google
I absolutely love the way we think collectively about worldviews and knowledge. I think his idea is enough to inspire someone else's dreams and it's really amazing.