But dark news has recently cast a shadow over Koavf’s door. Today he is only number two in the charts. He’s been dramatically eclipsed by Ser Amantio di Nicolao, who’s made 3,756,703 edits. By the time you read this it is likely that Ser’s total will have exceeded 4 million. Even the world’s most prolific authors do not come close to writing 4 million words in their lifetime. But 4 million edits?
By now you may be thinking: Who are these people? How do they find the time? What qualifies them to do this? And why should they want to, given that they often receive vituperation for their work (and no money)? What complex combination of altruism, oneupmanship, ego, deep learning and extreme pedantry would make people like Rich Farmborough (1.7 million edits and counting) and BrownHairedGirl (2.04 million edits) stay up until 2.37 a.m. to make an encyclopaedia and the world it informs a slightly more accurate place?
The wub’s real name is Peter Coombe. He began editing Wikipedia on his gap year before university and describes his first contributions as ‘essentially vandalism’, messing around with deletions and stupid additions. He found the site increasingly interesting when he saw how quickly his comments were corrected. It was as if he was being looked after.
Coombe was born in 1987 and looks like an ageing cherub, his light-brown fringe and beard framing a gentle round face. His Zoom background shows rolling hills and the bluest sky, but I think that’s wishful thinking: most of his waking hours are spent with screens and software. He says he was a quiet child, finding books and computers faithful companions. He was entranced by his Encarta CD-ROM before his teens, not least the videos and interactive features. ‘We only got the Internet quite late in our house, so that was the encyclopaedia I grew up with. I loved it, and I still feel really bad that Wikipedia killed it.’*
At Cambridge he studied natural sciences, and met other people who shared his enthusiasm for Wikipedia as a concept: the reliability and depth of the articles were beginning to improve, but the greatest delight was still to be had in the practical elements and the open-source idealism, the fact that a community could indeed create its own encyclopaedia from scratch, the fact that a twenty-one-year-old could sit in his bedroom and write useful additions to one’s online knowledge of Zürich’s Hauptbahnhof, and useful deletions to mischievous entries on obscure railway stations in Australia.
‘I looked behind it and saw that there were all these systems,’ Coombe says, delighting in the site’s machinery as much as the content, the ability for certain software programs to detect possible vandalism and refer it for discussion. These tools have become more sophisticated over the years, but are still far from foolproof. In October 2020, for example, Coombe spent much of his month making hundreds of edits made by the benign invasion of a rogue bit of software that could only be corrected manually. The Bloomberg.com news agency had erected a wall on its website preventing automated programs being able to link directly to its site; a human user had to complete a CAPTCHA test to prove they weren’t a bot. And so the wub spent many days correcting hyperlinks to articles on Eduardo Bolsonaro, Justin Trudeau and the 2020 floods in Jakarta – more than 600 edits in all – on each occasion removing more than 600 insertions of the line ‘Are you a robot?’ ‘It’s a pretty simple, mindless task and I can do it while I’m listening to a podcast.’
Many established editors on Wikipedia have their own User page, a biographical diversion in which to reveal as much personal information as they feel comfortable with. At the foot of the wub’s page is a list of ‘Barnstars’, accolades awarded for various achievements, each accompanied by a different badge, illustration and description. He has fourteen in all, ranging from the simple (‘Excellent new help pages, well done!’) to the historical (‘The true mark of great character is defending someone when there is no possible benefit to such actions – your comments on the ANI [Administrators noticeboard/Incidents] today were brave and selfless’) to the cryptic (‘Your assistance was Eaten By A Bear [from Karmafist]’). The wub’s page also contains a display of wind-blown flags of all the countries he’s visited: Sweden, Iceland, Hong Kong, the United States and many others.
There was one other reward. Coombe was now a ‘Looshpah Laureate of the Encyclopedia’, which meant he was able to display a photograph of the battered cover of The Complete Compendium of Universal Knowledge from 1891. This volume, printed in Philadelphia by the Franklin Square Bible House, and running to 833 pages, was fully titled: The Complete Compendium of Human Knowledge, containing All You Want To Know of Language, History, Government, Business and Social Forms, And a Thousand and One Other Useful Subjects.*
At 19.58 GMT on 31 July 2020, fifteen years after mistyping ‘revisted’ in his line about Philip K. Dick, The Anome created a brief article called ‘Thank you NHS’, describing a heart-warming collective act in the early bewildering weeks of Covid-19. The Anome wrote:
‘Thank you NHS’ was a social phenomenon in the United Kingdom in 2020, in which people and organizations posted messages of support for the National Health Service for its efforts in the COVID-19 epidemic in the United Kingdom.
Organizations supporting the campaign include the British Labour Party and Hull City Council.
That was the entirety of the entry, fewer than 100 words. The Anome actually entered his text much as one would write an email, in a simple text format that enabled those quite unfamiliar with programming to make their own additions. The format placed it in line with all other Wikipedia entries, and enabled links to other Wikipedia pages and external sources. But behind the curtain there was:
““Thank you NHS”” was a social phenomenon in the United Kingdom in 2020, in which people and organizations posted messages of support for the [[National Health Service]] for its efforts in the [[COVID-19 epidemic in the United Kingdom]].
Organizations supporting the campaign include the British [[Labour Party]]<ref>{{Cite web|title=On the 72nd birthday of the NHS we say thank you.|url=https://action.labour.org.uk/page/content/thank-you-nhs|access-date=2020-07-31|website=action.labour.org.uk|language=en}}</ref> and [[Hull City Council]].<ref>{{Cite web|date=2020-04-24|title=City’s thank you message to NHS staff|url=https://www.hey.nhs.uk/news/2020/04/24/citys-thank-you-message-to-nhs-staff/|access-date=2020-07-31|website=Hull University Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust|language=en-GB}}</ref>
One minute later, The Anome made a revision, replacing the word epidemic with pandemic.
And a few seconds after that he changed the title of the page from ‘Thank you NHS’ to ‘Thank You NHS’.
Eight minutes later, also in simple text code, he added: ‘Other sponsors included sports teams such as the Hibernians.’
Less than a minute later he added: ‘Large number of private individuals placed home-made signs in their windows to thank the NHS workers.’ He also added a ‘See also’ link to the article ‘Clap for carers’ that had been created four months before by Philipwhiuk, a user who had earned the respect of his peers fourteen years earlier by reinstating hundreds of words of text about Bletchley Park that had been deleted by an anonymous user and replaced with the two words ‘Miss Grimley’.
Three minutes after that The Anome extended this to: ‘Large numbers of private individuals placed home-made signs in their windows and outrside their homes to thank the NHS workers.’
Two minutes later he changed ‘the Hibernians’ to ‘Hibernian F.C.’
Fifteen minutes later, at 20.27, he made two additions: ‘The handmade posters frequently featured drawings of rainbows’, followed by: ‘Some media outlets released poster artwork for people to print and display.’