Steven Pruitt spends his evenings identifying errors that most people never notice and making fixes that hardly anyone ever thanks him for. He toils at a desk in a town house in Alexandria, Virginia, surrounded by books—the kind of working clutter that suggests a long relationship with paper rather than a fetish for screens. And yet his work is necessarily digital; after dinner, and sometimes late into the night, he uses his desktop computer to correct dates, clean up syntax, standardize categories, and occasionally write entire biographies of people on Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia.
Wikipedia is not his employer, of course. Like all editors on the site, Pruitt is a volunteer. “At this point, I won’t say I don’t have any skin in the game,” he told me. “But it’s a lot lower stakes than a job because if I get something wrong, it’s fairly easy to fix it. I can fix it myself. I can do what I want to do on my own time.” Still, he holds himself to some rules: “I do try to get in at least one edit a day.”
According to public tallies, Pruitt has made more than six million edits to Wikipedia and created more than thirty thousand articles. He is widely regarded as the most prolific Wikipedian in the entire world. (“It depends on how you’re counting,” he said. “Different tools count different things.”) In 2017, Time magazine included him on its list of the most influential people on the internet. But outside of a small circle of editors, researchers, and obsessive readers on Wikipedia, the recognition has barely registered.
On the site, he is known by his username, Ser Amantio di Nicolao—a reference to a minor character in “Gianni Schicchi,” Giacomo Puccini’s comic opera. Pruitt’s interest in opera is genuine, but the flourish is misleading. He avoids drama, which means that he avoids writing Wikipedia biographies of people who are still alive, whenever possible. “I generally don’t do a lot in the realm of current events,” he told me. “Not just because the stakes are too high but sometimes because there’s so much editing going on on a subject in a particular moment that it can take me five or ten minutes just to break in with one edit.” He prefers biographies of what he calls “fairly obscure dead people.”
“They’re settled,” he explained.
In 2001, Jimmy Wales, an internet entrepreneur, and Larry Sanger, a philosopher, launched Wikipedia as an experiment in collaborative knowledge creation, allowing anyone with an internet connection to contribute. Pruitt first encountered the site in 2003, when he was still in college. “I didn’t quite understand what it was,” he recalled.
For more than a year, he did not edit at all. He would stumble upon Wikipedia pages through search results or links, and then move on. Between late 2004 and early 2005, though, his relationship to the site began to change. The encyclopedia had reached what he described as a critical mass: “There was enough stuff on the site that there was always something to do,” he said. “But it wasn’t just a blank slate.” The difference mattered. A completely empty encyclopedia was intimidating; a partially filled one invited correction and expansion. [...]
Wikipedia’s hierarchy is deliberately difficult to see. Editors work under pseudonyms. Articles appear collectively authored. There are no bylines, no salaries, no masthead. Pruitt was granted administrative privileges, after another editor nominated him through Wikipedia’s standard Request for Adminship process, where the editing community supported his candidacy. These privileges allow him to block users and close discussions, but he is careful about what that power does and does not mean. Wikipedia discourages editors from reverting—“undoing”—one another more than three times, regardless of correctness. “You can be blocked for twenty-four hours,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if you’re right.” He likes the rule. “It keeps things from turning personal.”
Inside Wikipedia, reputation accrues through time rather than visibility, and it “comes as much from longevity as anything else,” Pruitt said. “You stick around. People know you.”
Among the people who stick around—and who make consistent contributions to the site—are the Wiki-obsessives known colloquially as “super editors.” These individuals are responsible for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of edits. Although there are more than a hundred and thirty-two million registered accounts on Wikipedia, a study found that one per cent of these users are responsible for roughly eighty per cent of the site’s content. [...]
In 2021, Stephenson-Goodknight was elected to the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, a position that she held through late 2024. Her tenure coincided with a fundamental shift in the role that Wikipedia plays on the internet. As the site entered its third decade, and artificial-intelligence algorithms grew hungry for data to learn on, Wikipedia articles were no longer just read; they were scraped, summarized, licensed, and folded into systems designed to answer questions elsewhere. In other words, Wikipedia had become infrastructure.
Pruitt was vaguely aware of the change before he fully grasped its implications. “Friends in tech would mention it,” he recalled. “They’d say, ‘You know Wikipedia is being used for this now.’ ” He did not follow developments in A.I. closely. “I don’t understand half of what Silicon Valley does,” he said. What he does understand well is reference works.
In October, 2025, when Elon Musk’s company xAI launched Grokipedia, an A.I.-generated encyclopedia that is often compared to Wikipedia, Pruitt approached it the way he would any new compendium. He searched for articles on subjects he knew well, such as nineteenth-century opera singers. “They weren’t there,” he said.
But what unsettled him was not what was missing from Grokipedia but what was slightly off. “Nothing was exactly wrong, but it was just less right than I would have made it,” Pruitt said. He described reading an entry that repurposed information from Wikipedia while subtly distorting it. In one instance, the entry summarized part of a person’s life in a way that struck him as careless, describing a seven-year period as “brief.” “I don’t think that’s brief,” he said.
The problem, as Pruitt saw it, was not the errors themselves—there are plenty of mistakes on Wikipedia—but rather where the responsibility for those errors lay. “Wikipedia can be fixed,” he said. Errors are corrected publicly, and editors can debate them. Responsibility is shared, and each edit can be traced. Grokipedia, on the other hand, and A.I.-generated information more broadly, obscured the information-gathering process. It generated text that sounded authoritative without revealing exactly how it arrived there. “It sounds right,” he said. “And that’s worse.”
by Carson Griffith, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Asya Demidova
