Giraffedata, aka software engineer Bryan Henderson, is the sworn enemy of the grammatically awkward phrase “comprised of”. And he deletes it from Wikipedia the old-fashioned way – by hand. Via Medium.
You know that feeling when you see something wrong on the internet? One man has corrected the same error in Wikipedia almost 47,000 times since 2006 – and each time he did it manually.
Giraffedata, aka Bryan Henderson, a 51-year-old software engineer from San Jose, California, doesn't add content to Wikipedia or correct factual errors. He does one thing: He corrects the phrase "comprised of".
BuzzFeed / Patrick Smith
Many people do not accept "comprised of" as a valid English phrase for any meaning. The argument goes that "to comprise" means to include, as in "The 9th district comprises all of Centerville and parts of Easton and Weston." And thus, "the 9th district is comprised of ..." is gibberish.
By 2010 only 150 remained, in quotation marks. But a further 70 appeared every week, so at that point Henderson "entered a mode of editing the new occurrences as they were introduced", he writes.
Henderson says he edits "about 100 articles a week, typically within two weeks of the article being created or edited to require it".
An average edit takes him 10 seconds, he says.
A big problem is that some people don't like having Wikipedia pages they created edited or changed at all and some of Henderson's changes can be reverted. He says he even attracted "a stalker" who reversed 30 "comprised of" edits in a row.
