In April of 2012, after 7 years of tireless dedication to his craft, Knapp became the first Wikipedia Editor to surpass 1,000,000 edits, a feat so Herculean that Jimmy Wales, the site’s founder, proclaimed April 20th “Justin Knapp Day”: It was not uncommon for him to make over 1,000 edits in the course of a day. Oftentimes, he’d learn something in a book or on the radio, then go to the Wikipedia page of whatever that information pertained to and add it. For up to 16 hours a day, Knapp would surf around various pages looking for inaccuracies or missing information. “Editing Wikipedia became my hobby - and for a while, it was basically all I did,” he says. These jobs, which he deemed to be “of little importance,” left him with plenty of time to make edits. Most of his early edits were simply grammatical corrections, or small additions, but eventually he graduated to creating entire “portals” ( Western Sahara) and drastically re-writing major pages (George Orwell, Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz, Kurt Vonnegut).īy 2009, Knapp had earned two Bachelor of Science degrees (one in philosophy, and another in political science), and decided to “stick around campus” for a few years, where he worked intermittently as a pizza delivery guy, a bookstore clerk, a computer lab assistant, and a research assistant. He began with a few of his interests: international relations and conflicts (specifically relating to Western Sahara), Chinese history, country flags, and music. Shortly thereafter, he created a username, “koavf”, and devoted himself to a life of Wikipedia martyrdom. The following winter, Knapp realized that if he started making edits, he could “play a substantial part in creating and maintaining the site’s content.” From an anonymous IP address, he made his first contribution: an addition to the “Political Status of Taiwan” wiki. “I didn’t have Internet, or a computer, at home,” he recalls, “so I’d print out Wikipedia articles on campus, then read them at home.” To the young intellectual, Wikipedia was a treasure trove of accessible information. Back then, there were only around 100,000 articles, but the content was growing at a rate of 200 new pages per day, largely thanks to a growing team of community contributors.Īt the time, Knapp was three years into a college degree at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, and had an insatiable appetite for new knowledge. Though he’d used Wikipedia once before for a high school project on India, Knapp first became a regular reader of the site in 2003, two years after Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched it. Zachary Crockett, Priceonomics Data via Wikipedia What’s life like as Wikipedia’s most prolific editor? And what has compelled this man to dedicate thousands of hours of his time, knowledge, and energy to an online encyclopedia for absolutely no compensation? We gave him a call to find out. He has made an astonishing 1,485,342 edits (an average of 385 per day), ranging in topic from Taylor Swift to the history of blacksmithing. Since joining Wikipedia a decade ago, 32-year-old Justin Anthony Knapp (username “koavf”) has established himself as the the site’s most active contributor of all time. And of these selfless few, one man is king of the domain. Of these 125,000, only some 12,000 have made more than 50 edits over the past six month. Of Wikipedia’s 26 million registered users, roughly 125,000 (less that 0.5%) are “active” editors. Bush as a “sexually-transmitted disease”), and improving the breadth and accuracy of each and every page. It is also user-policed: the site requires constant maintenance from a massive pool of unpaid editors, who do things like fix typos, remove instances of vandalism (like de-categorizing George W. If these were printed and bound into books - each 25cm tall by 5cm thick, like Britannica - there would be 2,207 volumes, each containing 1,600,000 words.Īll of this content is, of course, user-submitted. As of this morning, the English-language Wikipedia contains 4,985,975 articles.
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