Headline: "Steven Pruitt, who is widely regarded as the most prolific Wikipedia editor, has made more than six million edits to the site, and, by extension, has quietly shaped the raw material that every major A.I. chatbot was trained on."
I haven't read the article yet (will do so later) but my immediate reaction as someone who was active on wikipedia for a while, is that people with that many edits usually have been running unauthorized bots doing so-called "cushion straightening" (making formatting tweaks etc). If you run an authorized bot, you're supposed to use a separate account for it, and then the edits get counted for the bot account instead of your personal one. Even if you manage to make 6 million edits non-robotically they're usually insubstantial. And there's a long dreary history on Wikipedia of unauthorized bot operators claiming their edits were made by hand, thus bypassing the bot policies. The modern-day version of that (on and off of wikipedia) is claiming that your text wasn't written by an LLM.
The beginning of the article did say that the person had mostly been fixing typos and stuff like that. Anyway the real brains of Wikipedia are the people who write the articles, and they tend to have edit counts in the many thousands, but not in the millions.
Headline: "Steven Pruitt, who is widely regarded as the most prolific Wikipedia editor, has made more than six million edits to the site, and, by extension, has quietly shaped the raw material that every major A.I. chatbot was trained on."
I haven't read the article yet (will do so later) but my immediate reaction as someone who was active on wikipedia for a while, is that people with that many edits usually have been running unauthorized bots doing so-called "cushion straightening" (making formatting tweaks etc). If you run an authorized bot, you're supposed to use a separate account for it, and then the edits get counted for the bot account instead of your personal one. Even if you manage to make 6 million edits non-robotically they're usually insubstantial. And there's a long dreary history on Wikipedia of unauthorized bot operators claiming their edits were made by hand, thus bypassing the bot policies. The modern-day version of that (on and off of wikipedia) is claiming that your text wasn't written by an LLM.
The beginning of the article did say that the person had mostly been fixing typos and stuff like that. Anyway the real brains of Wikipedia are the people who write the articles, and they tend to have edit counts in the many thousands, but not in the millions.
https://archive.ph/lGLan