Man’s Wikipedia Edits Mostly Consist Of Deleting ‘Comprised Of’

Man’s Wikipedia Edits Mostly Consist Of Deleting ‘Comprised Of’

How far would you go to correct your pet peeve? Would you create a computer program just to find it? Would you build a weekly, scheduled habit around curating those results? Would you, ultimately, manually edit tens of thousands of Wikipedia articles to obliterate that pet peeve from the face of the internet? One man has, and he’s my hero.

Medium has a great profile of Grammar Crusader In-Chief Bryan Henderson: by day, a mortal 51 year-old software engineer; but for an hour every Sunday, he’s a Wikipedia editor dedicated to the internet-wide extermination of the phrase “comprised of”.

“It’s not grammatical,” he says. “It’s not English at all.” He’s been debated on that before (it is in a few dictionaries), but argues in a lengthy, 6,000 word essay that the phrase is a new, accidental combination of “composed of” and “consists of.” The essay is a pretty good read in of itself (and a direct contributor to this article’s headline), but if you want to know more about the man himself and his grammatical obsession, check out Medium. It’s also a hell of a read. [Medium]


The Cheapest NBN 50 Plans

It’s the most popular NBN speed in Australia for a reason. Here are the cheapest plans available.

At Gizmodo, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.