A simple statement and possibly a true one. Since he began contributing to Wikipedia on 24 March 2005, the wub has made thousands of similar entries. In fact, by the beginning of October 2021 he had made 85,788 edits to 64,283 pages at an average rate of 14.2 edits a day. He had created a great many original entries on subjects as diverse as Fitzrovia Chapel in London, the British rower Mark Aldred, the former Lord Mayor of London Ian Luder, the history and significance of the hotel rating, and the centuries-old concept of putting a message in a bottle. He has also made hundreds of contributions to Wikipedia’s Talk pages, a behind-the-scenes forum in which fellow Wikipedians discuss whether someone is notable enough to merit their own article and how best to deal with people who enjoy deleting paragraphs at random and adding ‘I am the King!’ in their place.
On some mornings the wub will make twenty small corrections an hour. Some of his longer edits reflect the diversity of Wikipedia as a whole: the 2019 North Korea–United States Hanoi summit, the M12 motorway, the British politician Claudia Webbe, the Worshipful Company of Pewterers. To accompany his sentence on the exploding duck, the wub included a link to the archive of the newspaper in which the fate of the animal was originally recorded. One clicks on the link and finds that on 31 January 1910, a reporter from Des Moines, Iowa, even managed to get the poor duck’s name:
Rhadamanthus, a prize-winning duck at the recent poultry show, is no more, having exploded into several hundred bits, one of which struck Silas Perkins in the eye, destroying the sight. The cause of the explosion was the eating of yeast, which was placed in a pan upon the back porch, and tempted his duckship, which was taking a morning stroll.
Upon returning from church Mr. Perkins discovered his prize duck in a somewhat loggy condition. Telltale marks around the pan of yeast gave him his clew. He was about to pick up the bird when the latter quacked and exploded with a loud report and Mr. Perkins ran into the house holding both hands over one eye. A surgeon was called, who found that the eyeball had been penetrated by a fragment of flying duck and gave no hope of saving the optic.
The wub is a big reader, as one might expect, sometimes managing a book a week, and his tastes are as wide-ranging as his edits: Oliver Sacks, John Steinbeck, Neil Gaiman, George Orwell, Ursula K. Le Guin and Sue Townsend. He’s read plenty of Philip K. Dick too, and that’s where he found his Wikipedia name, in the short story ‘Beyond Lies the Wub’. If you look up ‘Beyond Lies the Wub’ on Wikipedia you’ll discover that the story first appeared in the pulp magazine Planet Stories in July 1952, and has since appeared in more than a dozen anthologies. The story received its own Wikipedia entry on 6 February 2004, an article in which user 68.86.220.131 explained the fantastical plot, noting that the Wub is a large and intelligent pig-like creature capable of polite conversation and telepathy. More than a year later, on 15 July 2005, an editor called The Anome added that Philip K. Dick liked his creation so much that ‘he revisted The Wub in his short story “Not By Its Cover”’. The article then lay untouched and little read for three months, until, at 16.01 GMT on 14 October 2005, the wub changed the spelling of revisted to revisited.
The wub’s bookshelves also include A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson and the E.H. Gombrich classic A Little History of the World. One would be forgiven for thinking that both of those would have been of great use to him in his role as a Wikipedia editor, but most of his Wiki work – which began as an occasional glancing pastime and has since blossomed into what seems like a full-on obsession – is concerned not with great historical events but with minutiae.
Many of his amendments go unnoticed by the general reader. Commas, the addition of capital letters, correcting bad links, other things that add uniformity to the millions of articles. His first contribution in March 2005 involved the removal of a contentious comment in the biography of the motoring journalist and television presenter Jeremy Clarkson. (Another editor had written that Clarkson ‘is known for continually rubbishing MG-Rover, Britain’s last remaining volume car manufacturer, threatening thousands of jobs in the UK Car Industry.’ The wub removed ‘threatening thousands of jobs in the UK Car Industry’.) Three minutes later, the wub edited an article about the television series Grumpy Old Men, changing the word ‘was’ to ‘were’. Six days after that he italicised the film Vincent in the biography of the film director Tim Burton, and a day after that he contributed to Wikipedia’s April Fool’s Day hoax about the takeover of Wikipedia by Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Clearly, none of these items change the world. But with the exception of the last, they illuminate Wikipedia’s daily grind: the grand ambition, if it ever existed, has long been replaced by process. This is one of the few things it shares with every encyclopaedia that preceded it. There are a few necessary egomaniacs in the creation of every enterprise like this, but most of the work – and most of the things that make it work – are created by the largely unthanked, traddling away.
As well as being a Wikipedia editor, the wub is also an administrator, a janitorial role which allows him to block other users, protect pages from editing and delete pages when required. Because he is an experienced Wikipedian, he has also been granted certain privileges not available to a novice, such as the ability to change the biographies of very famous people, which are often the subject of vandalism: things like ‘Mozart wrote the symphonies of Beethoven and vice-versa.’
The wub receives no payment for his edits. In 2011, a survey into what motivates its users to contribute, found that the key reasons were: people enjoyed giving their time to share and improve available information; they believed information should be freely available; they enjoyed sharing their areas of expertise; it was fun; they appreciated Wikipedia’s policy of openness; they enjoyed finding and correcting mistakes – it was a quest, a challenge and a puzzle; they wanted to gain a reputation as an accurate and productive editor. But they didn’t like: being patronised by more experienced editors; having their edits deleted or reverted without explanation; heated arguments with other editors on discussion pages; seeing articles they were working on being spoilt by inaccurate or offensive information.
The number of the wub’s edits, while impressive, is not enough to get him into the Top 500 list of the most prolific Wikipedians. His 85,788 edits only puts him at number 880, just behind Tony Sidaway, Animalparty, Anythingyouwant, Rsrikanth05 and RogDel. Those who have made more than 90,000 edits include SuperJew, SNAAAAKE!! Bryan Derkson, Summer PhD and Edward. Edward must have got in really early to snag a username like that.
The first person to have made one million edits was a man calling himself Koavf, who got there, amid some fanfare, on 19 April 2012. The following day, Wikipedia declared 20 April should henceforth be known as Justin Knapp day, in honour of Koavf’s achievement and real name. Knapp, who was twenty-nine, was taking a nursing degree at Indiana University. He said he found his Wikipedia work both relaxing and rewarding; his proudest achievement on the site was his contribution to the entry on George Orwell, which he estimated took about 100 hours. But he didn’t stop there. As I write he’s made 2,098,059 edits. But wait – Koavf is online at this very moment, and the number has jumped to 2,098,061. He’s just added some details to the page concerned with the Bruce Springsteen song ‘Letter to You’, and the German technical pen company Rotring.