The Secret King of Wikipedia

[Music] the guy you're looking at is the world's biggest wikipedia editor he is the guy who is in his room editing wikipedia more than three million times who is he and why is he doing this and how much knowledge does he have for the first time ever i want to introduce you to stephen hi i'm stephen and i have made the largest number of edited wikipedia in the world this guy is single-handedly responsible for millions of wikipedia edits and he lives here in a small town in virginia usa and he has a normal job and a normal life [Music] you see 16 years ago when stephen was still in university he came across a small unknown encyclopedia that anyone can contribute to so he had the idea to write about his great great grandfather peter francesco who fought in the american revolutionary war i thought it'd be fun to write about peter because i know about him and the family knew about him but he wasn't in any mainstream encyclopedias so stephen wrote about his ancestor published it and then from that one article he got excited because now he could educate the world from his basement what i love about wikipedia is it allows you to cover topics not usually found in the mainstream western media it allows anybody in the world to have their voice so he wrote another article and another and another and before he knew it he's written thousands it started and it was sort of like oh well that's cute and then when i started getting a lot of edits for it there comes a point when it goes from that you tell people you have how many wow so far he has edited over 3 million and written more than 35 000 articles and the best part he's been doing this for 16 years three hours a day and he wasn't even paid a single dollar to do it why am i doing it for free um to be perfectly honest i've never been very good at making money my mother grew up in the soviet union and from the stories that she's told me i understand what it's like to live in a place where access to information is so heavily guarded if you make this information free then the more people that have access to it can do more with it and it it makes for a free or better and ultimately stronger society but the question on everyone's mind is how accurate is wikipedia and how can a guy like this help edit three million articles well turns out wikipedia is more accurate than you think for every article every paragraph even every sentence someone like stephen has to fact check that it's true like super fact check the potential is practically limitless for how you can redefine who is worthy of being included in the canon of knowledge you can create an entire ecosystem in that language online and it's user generated the potential for where we are now is huge the potential for where we can be in 100 years is massive and 500 years and even a thousand years out is it's huge if you want to take the long view which i kind of like to do that's why steven yes this guy in the basement was chosen as one of the most influential people in the world by time magazine and i'm pretty sure you never knew that before [Music] stephen doesn't write based on feelings or hunches or guesses he only writes based on facts with multiple sources and lots of evidence i never depend on just one source i'll look for books encyclopedias websites anything i can get my hands on the world needs to thank people like stephen who give up their free time and their family time just to share information to the world so a kid in a village 5 000 miles away can open up their phone load up wikipedia and learn something new entirely for free people like steven are the reason humanity is beautiful youtube if you like this video then i think you're gonna love nas academy it's a new online school we just started to give you a voice yes making videos has given me a voice and with this voice you can reach millions of people on the internet tell them stories that you care about and actually change their opinion this skill of making videos changed my life and i think it can change yours nasa academy has a lot of courses that are live they're not pre-recorded so there's real people from the nas daily team that teach you how to make videos like we do give you your voice that you so desperately need in today's world you're a business if you're an entrepreneur if you're a family person you need a voice on the internet and nas academy helps you get that voice click on the link below if you want to see the courses that we offer we have very limited spots so grab yours today thank you so much and i'll see you tomorrow for another video

Channel: Nas Daily

Views: 759,237

Keywords: Nas Daily, Nasmeanspeople, 1minute, Travel, Nuseir Yassin, Nas Studio, 英語学習, people, Wikipedia, Nas Academy, Volunteers, Facts check

Id: Dd7WRcm1oZY

Length: 5min 51sec (351 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 23 2020