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TO SOME he is a hero fighting a one-man crusade against grammatical sloppiness.

Others insist his work is "comprised of" 47,000 pointless "corrections" that make him the internet's most obsessive and irritating pedant.

To many whom he has edited, he is known only by his pseudonym "Giraffedata". But now he has been unmasked as Bryan Henderson, a 51-year-old software engineer from San Jose, California.

His target - his only target - is the two-word phrase "comprised of". Plenty of people - respected authorities on grammar among them - consider the phrase acceptable in contemporary usage, but Mr Henderson says it is wrong.

So, since December 2007, he has made it his mission to find every instance of its use on Wikipedia and edit them out.

Other Wikipedia users may have clocked up more than Mr Henderson's 47,000 edits - the encyclopaedia's most prolific editor has managed 1.45 million edits and counting. But, Mr Henderson says proudly, "I'm the only one who concentrates on one aspect [of grammar]".

He is also one of a select band whose dedication (or pedantry) once prompted a direct appeal for "intercession" to the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales.

"Even though numerous editors have objected to his obsessive removal of the grammatically acceptable term, he defiantly continues to do so," pleaded a disgruntled Wikipedia contributor in June 2009.

But Mr Wales did not intercede. "I believe that Giraffedata's arguments are persuasive," he said, while stressing: "I am expressing no opinion on how the change is being implemented."

Every Sunday before bedtime, Mr Henderson runs his own self-written software programme allowing him to hunt down the phrase.

Originally posted here:
Wikipedia editor hates 'comprised of', makes 47,000 edits

Ita projects like this that make us love the internet.

Paris-based engineering student Owen Cornec has taken Wikipedia, and all its pages of information, and turned it into a galaxy. Using HTML5, the student has turned the encyclopaedia website into an interactive visualisation that sees every page topic on the site become a star in a galaxy.

As technology advances, true 3D experiences are coming to our browsers. This brings us unprecedented opportunities for learning, discovery and creativity. I wanted to create something special I hadnt seen before, something I would have loved to see as a kid, said Cornec.

Ive always had a very visual way of thinking, and this is how I always pictured Wikipedia and the web as a whole.

As well as being able to fly in and out as you click on different stars, users can also read the full Wikipedia articles on different subjects. Each star also comes with a host of weaving lines stretching out into the virtual space these are the linked articles and a click on a line will carry you to the page. Press the Space bar and you can change the set of links shown on screen. Each star is colour-coded depending on the category it fits in to.

The page is fully animated, so keep a look out for other users whooshing past as they search this solar system for themselves.

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Wikipedia has been re-imagined as a galaxy

The patron saint of community-minded pedants must be Alexander Cruden. He had compiled a concordance to the Bible, listing each word alphabetically and arranging homonyms in clumps according to meaning. In the 18th century, the one in which he lived, this was a laborious task. I am not convinced that those labours alone deranged his mind, but it is likely that work on the concordance and hack-work as a proofreader (or corrector of the press as the phrase was at the time) influenced the expression of his madness.

He took to referring to himself as Alexander the Corrector. A mob whipped up by John Wilkes rampaged through London chalking on front doors the nuber 45 (the issue number of the North Briton for which Wilkes was prosecuted for seditious libel). Cruden ran behind them with a sponge, rubbing it off again.

He went further. Disliking, as some people do, profane swearing, Cruden, then in his fifties, was annoyed by a young man in the street, leaning on a shovel, who swore as he passed. By his own account, Cruden took his shovel and corrected him with some severity. As a consequence he was detained for 17 days in Peter Inskips private lunatic asylum at Chelsea (one of many such establishments).

Poor Cruden. Having begun as a corrector of misprints he had set his sights on correcting the morals of the realm but ended up classified by a defiant world as mistaken himself not quite right in the head, as theyd say a walking error to be laughed out of consideration.

By comparison, Mr Henderson, the Comprised Crusader, has suffered little for his cause. Yet even he was taken aback by the unenlightened. You jerk, its a matter of opinion! came one response to his Wikipedia corrections. Its completely valid, I looked it up in my dictionary! You have no right to mess with my article!

Mr Henderson knows that not everyone agrees with him. So he has constructed a syllogism to prove his point. Composed of and consists of are good alternatives to comprised of. But no one finds comprised of better than the alternatives. Therefore everyone should stop using it.

Fowler, that bible of modern English usage, even in its updated edition judiciously revised by the great Robert Burchfield, agrees, up to a point. The sheer frequency, of a related construction such as the four submarines comprising the nuclear deterrent, he wrote 20 years ago, seems likely to take it out of the disputed area before long.

Language changes, and at this rate Mr Henderson will soon be such an odd man out as to be wrong. But, like so many words, wrong is ambiguous. It means wicked as well as incorrect. Cruden may have been mad, but he was on to something. It is the work of the satirist to mock human follies, just as grammarians laugh at catachresis. Grammarians are martyred under the name of pedant; satirists are called seditious (or politically incorrect). Theirs is the higher calling, and the deadlier risk.

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Pedants of the world, we salute you

Wikipedia #ArtAndFeminism Google Hangout
Art and Feminism: For anyone anywhere ..! Please join us online! Even if you are present at any of the mothership locations, I hope to see you join us online as well [http://en.wikipedia.org/wi...

By: Addie Wagenknecht

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Wikipedia #ArtAndFeminism Google Hangout - Video

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Information Warfare: Catching Up With China

February 5, 2015: Wikipedia has become such a popular source of information that even many government and military personnel now use it a lot. This includes military planners and intelligence agency personnel. This despite, or because of the fact that Wikipedia entries can be edited by just about anyone. Wikipedia has an editorial system that seeks to keep the information as accurate as possible but a growing number of countries and organizations (government and otherwise) are finding that they can influence public opinion and perceptions by making subtle edits that are not noticed (and deleted) by Wikipedia editors. Wikipedia users will sometimes spot these changes and alert Wikipedia, which usually leads to removal of the change. Wikipedia can trace the location of those making edits and a lot of the politically suspect ones tend to come from government office buildings. China and Russia were pioneers in the area, which is not unusual because during the Cold War Russia was a major practitioner of international media manipulation. In China, the less regulated business world found that it was possible to get away with all sorts of media manipulation via the Internet as long as you stayed away from political subjects or criticizing the government. Many other countries have intel agencies and military staffs that are trying catch up to Chinese and Russian abilities to exploit the Internet for military and intelligence purposes.

Wikipedia and search engines in general have long been noted as useful to government agencies. For example in 2008 Google (the company) received a contract with the U.S. government to supply computer servers (hard drives) equipped with the software Google uses to run its popular Google search engine. The CIA, NSA and Department of Defense use these servers in closed (cut off from the Internet) systems that hold classified information, and allow espionage and intelligence personnel to more quickly find, and share, information. The data is generally displayed in Wikipedia type format, so that users can update it.

The intelligence agencies have found that Google search and the Wikipedia format are popular with their staff and analysts. Thus using Google and wiki type software was the easiest way to build a more efficient data storage and retrieval system. The only downside is that the data is only available at buildings where the special servers are located, and hooked up to a cabled (not wireless) network.

All these search (Google) and information (Wikipedia) tools are not always used as intended by the government employees assigned to do the work. Audits, at least when the results go public, reveal a lot of misuse. Government employees often mix business and pleasure. Thus google capabilities are used for personal matters and Wikipedia edits are often applied to things like the reputation of a civil servants favorite movie star. Again, China has been found to be far ahead of the West in this area.

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Information Warfare: Catching Up With China