One Man Has Deleted "Comprised Of" 50,000 Times — and He Isn't Finished

Most edit wars are two armies fighting over one article. This is the opposite: one man, at war with two words, across the entire encyclopedia.

The minor edit

Since 2007, a software engineer editing as Giraffedata has performed the same ritual: search Wikipedia for the phrase "comprised of," and delete it. Not the sentence — just the sin. "The team is comprised of twelve members" becomes "the team is composed of twelve members," or "consists of," or is quietly rewritten altogether.

− The committee is comprised of nine members.

• The committee comprises nine members.

edit summary: "fix 'comprised of' — see my user page"

Each edit is tiny. Many are flagged as minor. There have been tens of thousands of them, executed with metronomic weekly discipline.

The major consequence

Dictionaries shrug at "comprised of" — plenty accept it. That's what makes the crusade fascinating: it isn't enforcement of a rule so much as one editor's sustained act of stylistic will, defended in a famous multi-thousand-word essay on his user page addressing every objection ever raised.

The project earned international press coverage, its own fan club and detractors, and a permanent place in Wikipedia folklore as the ultimate "wikignome" — proof that on a wiki, a single patient person with a search box can out-edit the crowd. It is the quietest edit war ever fought, and he is winning it two words at a time.