Medium:
Giraffedata—a 51-year-old software engineer named Bryan Henderson—is among the most prolific contributors, ranking in the top 1,000 most active editors. While some Wikipedia editors focus on adding content or vetting its accuracy, and others work to streamline the site’s grammar and style, generally few, if any, adopt Giraffedata’s approach to editing: an unrelenting, multi-year project to fix exactly one grammatical error.
Henderson has now made over 47,000 edits to the site since 2007, virtually all of them addressing this one linguistic pet peeve. Article by article, week by week, Henderson redacts imperfect sentences, tightening them almost imperceptibly. “I’m proud of it,” says Henderson of the project. “It’s just fun for me. I’m not doing it to have any impact on the world.”
You’ve got to admire the dedication if nothing else.
Would someone please write this guy a script?
Clarity is good. In a publishing economy where editors are starving for work, we’re lucky to have a guy like this.
It sounds like he more or less has one, but is carefully considering each sentence’s replacement.
For various reasons, “bot editing” or technically-assisted editing comes with some caveats and restrictions on Wikipedia. Bots can run amok, scripts can mangle edge cases (and leave someone else to deal with the cleanup.) Some editors have been outright banned from using such tools, or from editing entirely, because they refused to consider the damage their edits made while they adjusted other errors. As such, that’s probably why he stresses the manual nature—he’s assisted in finding those articles via his own programs, but he manually makes the edits to avoid the aforementioned problem.