But he's edited a "third" of en.wikipedia according to his article which is genuinely astounding to me. Surely much of that has to have been automated?
If I fix a typo, I've edited an article. I used to search for common misspellings and fix them. It was useful, but very different from having actually written anything.
Same for adding an article to a category or adding links between en:Albert Einstein and de:Albert Einstein.
If my memory was correct, a third of the edits is from him, not editing a third of it. There are a large and small edits. I think lot of it is mechanical and automated.
The problem with AI on Wikipedia is that the reason I've noticed it is because I've just seen blatantly incorrect stuff, mentioned breezily in passing, with no references. It's shitting up a thing that was already pretty easy to shit up if you had a motive, and your changes often wouldn't be noticed for months or years if an article wasn't well-trafficked.
AI doesn't even have a motive, it's just dumb - so you can't even track the mistakes to specific motivated users or networks of users. There's no way to clean it up.
Although I have to agree with you (probably, because I'm going to put words in your mouth) that this is a basic problem with wikipedia and how it is structured and governed, rather than a problem with AI. Anybody could always just put nonsense anywhere at any time; AI is just a chaos monkey. Wikipedia can't rely on groupthink to maintain itself, it has not worked and will not work, chaos monkeys are needed.
> Much of wikipedia is written by one person, Steven Pruitt. He has created more than 33,000 Wikipedia articles.
There are over 7m articles in English Wikipedia.
But he's edited a "third" of en.wikipedia according to his article which is genuinely astounding to me. Surely much of that has to have been automated?
If I fix a typo, I've edited an article. I used to search for common misspellings and fix them. It was useful, but very different from having actually written anything.
Same for adding an article to a category or adding links between en:Albert Einstein and de:Albert Einstein.
EDIT: For your consideration, here's his contributions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Ser_Aman...
> 2026-10-27T06:18:49 diff hist +20 Parsifal bell →External links: - add Commons link current thank
> 2026-10-27T06:18:04 diff hist 0 Parsifal bell →Construction thank
> 2026-10-27T06:17:08 diff hist +4 Parsifal bell →Need thank
> 2026-10-27T06:16:20 diff hist −23 Lotte Lehmann Removing from Category:Lohengrin not defining using Cat-a-lot current thank
> 2026-10-27T06:16:20 diff hist −23 Heinrich Lefler Removing from Category:Lohengrin not defining using Cat-a-lot current thank
> 2026-10-27T06:16:19 diff hist −23 Wilhelm Hauschild Removing from Category:Lohengrin not defining using Cat-a-lot current thank
> 2026-10-27T06:16:19 diff hist −23 Ferdinand Leeke Removing from Category:Lohengrin not defining using Cat-a-lot current thank
> 2026-10-27T06:14:55 diff hist +52 Maria Müller added Category:20th-century Czech women opera singers using HotCat current thank
Again, useful, but obviously very different from writing (or even modifying) the contents of an article.
If my memory was correct, a third of the edits is from him, not editing a third of it. There are a large and small edits. I think lot of it is mechanical and automated.
Maybe when Steven Pruitt starts hallucinating facts we can make the "both sides" argument. But until then....
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Note that Pruitt has the highest number of edits on Wikipedia, but not the highest number of created articles.
The problem with AI on Wikipedia is that the reason I've noticed it is because I've just seen blatantly incorrect stuff, mentioned breezily in passing, with no references. It's shitting up a thing that was already pretty easy to shit up if you had a motive, and your changes often wouldn't be noticed for months or years if an article wasn't well-trafficked.
AI doesn't even have a motive, it's just dumb - so you can't even track the mistakes to specific motivated users or networks of users. There's no way to clean it up.
Although I have to agree with you (probably, because I'm going to put words in your mouth) that this is a basic problem with wikipedia and how it is structured and governed, rather than a problem with AI. Anybody could always just put nonsense anywhere at any time; AI is just a chaos monkey. Wikipedia can't rely on groupthink to maintain itself, it has not worked and will not work, chaos monkeys are needed.