Washington: As grammatical errors go, it is perhaps so obscure that most people would read on without giving it a second thought. But the misuse of terms bother one obsessive Wikipedia editor so much, he spent nearly a decade correcting the mistake 47,000 times.
Bryan Henderson, 51, a software engineer known as Girrafedata on Wikipedia, has taken the time to make 47,000 corrections on the site – all regarding the phrase ‘consists of.’
He has explained in this 6,000-word essay why ‘comprised of’ is misused so often, arguing the phrase is a result of ‘comprised’ and ‘composed of’ being confused.
The first edits by Giraffedata were made in 2007 and after many nights of corrections, the account is now one of the most prolific editors on the site.
“I really do think I’m doing a public service, but at the same time, I get something out of it myself. I don’t have any plans to quit, but I guess eventually, I’ll have to find a way,†Henderson said.
“It’s hard to walk away, especially when I’ve actually accomplished something,” he added.
Using software he has designed, he sends a request to Wikipedia’s server for articles containing the phrase.
Pages containing the phrase are then extracted and compared to a database of articles he has edited in the past six months.
Any matches between the two sets of results are then removed from his list, in order to avoid bothering editors who have become overprotective of their pages.
Links for the remaining articles are then presented for him to click through, edit and upload – a process which takes approximately ten seconds for every correction.
Nearly eight million English Wikipedia articles are visited every hour.