How one man made six million Wikipedia edits (and counting)

If you’ve ever looked something up on Wikipedia (and who hasn’t?), there’s a fair chance you’ve read the work of Steven Pruitt. Known online by his operatic pseudonym 'Ser Amantio di Nicolao', Pruitt has made more than six million edits to the English-language site and created over 33,000 articles – more than anyone else in its near 25-year history.

Since he began editing in 2004, Pruitt has quietly become one of the web’s most influential figures. He’s made at least one edit to a third of all English-language entries, ranging from historical biographies to fine-tuning grammar, citations and layout. 

In 2017, Time magazine named him one of the 25 most important people on the internet, alongside the likes of Donald Trump and Kim Kardashian, no less.

So foundational to Wikipedia is Pruitt that Jimmy Wales, the site’s founder, says he’s met him and describes him as “a very prolific editor”.

But Wales was also keen to stress that Wikipedia’s strength lies not just in its most active contributors, but in the diversity of editing styles that keep it running.

“We try to discourage what we call ‘edit countitis’ – looking at how many edits someone has as a measure of who’s the most active,” Wales tells BBC Science Focus.

“Obviously, with six million edits, you’re a very active Wikipedian. But there are also people who edit much more slowly – they might go off and do research for a day and a half, then come back and write a paragraph. And that’s also really important, as opposed to just maintenance work or using scripts and tools to keep the site running.

“All types are needed to put together this compendium of knowledge.”

Born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1984, Pruitt grew up in Virginia and studied art history at the College of William & Mary. His first Wikipedia entry was about his distant relative, Peter Francisco, a Revolutionary War hero known as the “Virginia Hercules”.

Today, Pruitt spends several hours a day editing, often using software tools to streamline repetitive maintenance work. He’s also been an active member of the Women in Red project, which aims to close the gender gap on Wikipedia by creating pages about notable women missing from the site.

“I sometimes see weird stuff about how a third of Wikipedia was written by one guy,” Wales says. “Well, no. One guy’s touched a third of it – which is amazing, absolutely incredible – but he’s mainly doing grammar fixes, spell checking, fixing up references and the technical details of making it nice, which is wonderful.”

When asked on CBS Mornings in 2019 why he’s dedicated so much of his life to Wikipedia, Pruitt simply responded: “The idea of making it all free fascinates me. My mother grew up in the Soviet Union ... So I'm very conscious of what it can mean to make knowledge free, to make information free.” 

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