How the most prolific Wikipedia editor is expanding what we know about the world.
In the third-floor office of a beige brick townhouse just a few miles from George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate, Steven Pruitt ’06 is demonstrating how he uses AutoWikiBrowser, a tool that allows him to make editing changes to multiple Wikipedia entries with one command. This semi-automated tool has helped him to reach his current total of more than 2.5 million Wikipedia edits as of July 2 — the most of any Wikipedia editor.
About a year ago, Pruitt’s work caught the attention of Time magazine, which placed him on its third annual list of the 25 most influential people on the internet, with “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling, President Donald Trump and reality TV star Kim Kardashian, among others.
The Time article noted Pruitt’s efforts to address Wikipedia’s gender imbalance by writing articles about 212 influential women (that number has since increased to more than 600) in addition to his efforts to make the platform easier to navigate by improving the organization and format of entries. In the print version of the article, Pruitt’s entry appeared first. And his favorite part? He was on the page opposite from Russian activist Alexei Navalny, who has been using YouTube to circumvent censorship.
He also uses the tool to correct typos and grammar mistakes, and to code maps so that someone reading an article on, say, Pohick Church in Fairfax County (one that Pruitt worked on) can choose between a regional, state or national map.
During the workday, Pruitt is part of the records and information governance team at U.S. Customs and Border Protection in Washington, D.C. “That’s everything from discussing policy to making recommendations to actually processing movement of records,” he says. One thing his team does is help the agency’s offices transfer records to the National Archives. And while he does his Wikipedia work for free on a volunteer basis, Pruitt believes it helped get him the job at Customs two years ago.
He began dabbling in Wikipedia when he discovered the online encyclopedia while he was attending William & Mary as an art history major. The first article he wrote was about Peter Francisco, a Portuguese-born Revolutionary War hero known as the “Virginia Giant” who was also Pruitt’s great-great-great-great- great-great grandfather on his father’s side of the family. Since that first contribution, he’s written more than 31,000 other articles — some, he acknowledges, with the aid of a template.
In addition to his own writing and editing, Pruitt leads training sessions to help others learn how to edit, and he’s interested in getting more women involved, says Brookshire. A staff writer for Science News for Students, published by the nonprofit Society for Science and the Public, she is also the subject of a Wikipedia article — though Pruitt didn’t write it, because he considered that a conflict of interest. He is driven to give underrepresented populations a presence on Wikipedia, Brookshire says. “He’s passionate about bringing unknown people to light.”
That interest sparked Pruitt’s involvement in Wikipedia’s Women in Red project (the “red” reference highlights the goal of turning red links to blue by adding articles about accomplished women).
The project co-founder, Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight, says she met Pruitt about five years ago after they crossed paths collaborating on Wikipedia articles. In 2014, she asked him to help with a project titled Women Writers, which involved about 5,000 articles.
Examples of those categories include historical novelists, crime writers, and writers from Lesotho, Botswana and Eritrea.
The categories helped point out where articles were lacking, she says. “Then we tried to do something about it, by creating articles to fill these categories.”
When Stephenson-Goodknight founded Women in Red, Pruitt again stepped up to create thousands of new categories and write hundreds of articles.
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