Derek Ramsey (Wikipedian)

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Derek Ramsey
Derek Lee Ramsey Photo.jpg
Derek Ramsey, 2016
Born (1980-05-22) May 22, 1980 (age 35)
Ephrata, Pennsylvania, United states[1]
Nationality American
Other names Ram-Man (Wikipedia username)
Alma mater Rochester Institute of Technology (B.S. and M.S.)
Occupation Software engineering manager
Known for Wikipedia bot

Derek Lee Ramsey (born May 22, 1980) is a contributor to the English-language Wikipedia, who is known most for his activity in October 2002, where he created a bot to create stub articles for every missing county, town, city, and, village in the United States, based on free information from the United States Census of 2000. He thus increased the number of Wikipedia articles by up to 36,973.[2] This has been called "the most controversial move in Wikipedia history".[2] An article in Wired News in 2005 referred to him as the "No. 1 most active Wikipedian".[3][4]

Wikipedia[edit]

Ramsey joined Wikipedia on September 8, 2002,[5] having first heard about Wikipedia and Nupedia on Slashdot.[6][7] He became an administrator in June 2003.[8] He has logged nearly 200,000 edits altogether (including the bot edits).[9]

A template originally created by Ramsey for citing sources to websites, was the subject of an xkcd comic.[10]

Rambot[edit]

Immediately upon joining Wikipedia, he started working on articles related to geography. Realizing that articles on many places in the U.S. did not exist, he turned to the Census Bureau and other public sources of geographic data.[9][11] The data was compiled into a unified database from which text for 3,141 county articles was generated and he manually copied and pasted them into new Wikipedia pages.[2][12] After generating the data for over 30,000 cities, it became apparent that manually creating articles would take too long, perhaps months,[2] prompting Ramsey to put his Java programming skills to use and making a bot that would upload each article one by one.[2][3][4][13]

The "rambot spike" in late 2002 into early 2003

Starting with the article on Autaugaville, Alabama on October 5, 2002, he started manually adding the city articles one by one. On October 18, 2002, he ran the bot for the first time, creating the article on Fort Defiance, Arizona. The bot added thousands of articles per day until it completed its first run on October 25, 2002 with the article on Upton, Wyoming.[14] Over this time it increased the article count of Wikipedia by approximately 60%.[13] It continued to run into early 2003 creating articles that could not be created during the first run due to naming problems and generating disambiguation pages. The result was the "rambot spike" shown in Wikipedia article count and growth graphs.[2]

As the article count climbed, so to did the criticism. Some compared the article content to entries in a phone book,[15] citing the the generally accepted principle that Wikipedia is not intended to be a directory of information.[2] Some worried about it degrading the overall quality of Wikipedia.[13] Some community members complained that the articles made up too high a percentage of the total article count, although later this became a non-issue as local residents and others improved the bot's article and increase in other content meant that the articles now constituted only a small proportion of all articles.[16] The "Random article" feature was rendered useless because it would return a boilerplate city article about half the time.[11] Some of the articles created had incorrect data.[17][18] The rambot also uncovered a bug in the article counter that had inflated the count of the number of articles in Wikipedia.[2][11]

A more serious problem was with the "Recent Changes" listings and editor watchlists.[13] Such lists were used by editors to check for and revert vandalism and other forms of degrading edits, but were now less able to do so because such edits tended to be interspersed with hundreds of bot edits. The bot had to be slowed to as little as 6 transactions per minute, which also had the further benefit of cutting down the server load.[13] Eventually the Wikipedia software developers created a "bot flag" that allowed bot changes to be hidden from recent changes listings by default. After demands from the editing community that bots be regulated, Ramsey contributed to the creation of an official bot policy which laid down the rules and restrictions in connection with use of automated bots.[11][13]

Deletionists thought that the articles on minor cities should be outright deleted, while the inclusionists argued to keep them.[13] Eventually a consensus was reached that none of the articles on cities be deleted.[2][11] The outrage generated broad discussions on policy that would ultimately turn into Wikipedia's notability policy.[11]

In early 2004, a Wikipedia user, SethIlys, started a project to add maps to the pages created by rambot.[2][3] Ramsey signed up to do Pennsylvania, uploading more than a thousand maps.[19][20]

Photography[edit]

A painting by Sarah Barr based on one of Ramsey's photos.

Ramsey joined Wikimedia Commons on November 4, 2004. He has taken and uploaded more than 1,000 photos for use in Wikipedia articles.[9][21]

Ramsey has taken many photos of monarch butterflies and milkweeds to illustrate Wikipedia articles. The photos have been used to illustrate an academic paper,[22] a cover article for the American Botanical Council HerbalGram peer-reviewed journal,[23] a Xerces Society conservation group website,[24] the cover of a book,[25] and articles by Popular Science,[26] National Geographic,[27] and the Associated Press.[28]

In 2013, Sarah Barr made an oil painting based on one of Ramsey's monarch butterfly photos. The painting was created for Rally on the Runway to auction to raise money for childhood cancer research.[29] It has sold twice at auction, in 2013[30] where it raised $3,750,[31] and again in 2015.[32]

Personal[edit]

Ramsey received his computer science education at the Rochester Institute of Technology.[2] He worked as a software engineer for many years,[4] and has preached part-time in the Church of the Brethren.[33]

Derek resides in Aston, Pennsylvania with his wife Julie Ramsey, an occupational therapist and four children: two boys and two girls. The girls were both adopted from China and have special needs.[34]

References[edit]

  1. ^ Ramsey, Derek L. "Ram-Man". www.rit.edu. Archived from the original on April 8, 2016. 
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Lih, Andrew (March 17, 2009). The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia. Hachette Digital, Inc. pp. 99–108. ISBN 9781401395858. 
  3. ^ a b c Terdiman, Daniel (March 8, 2005). "Wiki Becomes a Way of Life". Wired News. Archived from the original on April 8, 2016. Retrieved March 14, 2014. 
  4. ^ a b c Pink, Daniel H. (March 1, 2005). "The Book Stops Here". Wired Magazine. 
  5. ^ "User:Ram-Man". Wikipedia. September 8, 2002. Retrieved April 11, 2016. 
  6. ^ "Britannica and Free Content". Slashdot. 26 July 2001. 
  7. ^ "Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Ram-Man". Wikipedia. 
  8. ^ a b c Anderson, Jennifer Joline (January 2011). Wikipedia: The company and its founders. ISBN 978-1617148125. Retrieved April 16, 2016. Ramsey has also uploaded more than 1,000 of his own photographs to illustrate Wikipedia articles. 
  9. ^ Munroe, Randall. "Citogenesis". xkcd.com. Retrieved April 10, 2016. 
  10. ^ a b c d e f Livingstone, Randall M. (January 4, 2016). "Population automation: An interview with Wikipedia bot pioneer Ram-Man". First Monday 21 (1). doi:10.5210/fm.v21i1.6027. 
  11. ^ User talk:Rambot: Rambot FAQ
  12. ^ a b c d e f g Livingstone, Randall M. (September 2012). Network of Knowledge: Wikipedia as a Sociotechnical System of Intelligence (PDF) (Ph.D. dissertation). University of Oregon. Retrieved April 8, 2016. 
  13. ^ Frederic Kaplan, Professor in Digital Humanities at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne [frederickaplan] (April 1, 2015). "Derek Ramsey develops the first Wikipedia bot called rambot in 2002. Rambot created 33000 articles, at a rate of thousands of articles/day." (Tweet). Retrieved April 8, 2016. 
  14. ^ Bot policy discussion
  15. ^ Ayers, Phoebe; Matthews, Charles; Yates, Ben (2008). How Wikipedia Works: And how You Can be a Part of it. No Starch Press. p. 8. ISBN 9781593271763. 
  16. ^ Niederer, S.; van Dijck, J. (2010). "Wisdom of the crowd or technicity of content? Wikipedia as a sociotechnical system". Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. 
  17. ^ van Dijck, Jose (Mar 21, 2013). The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media. Oxford University Press USA. ISBN 978-0199970780. 
  18. ^ "08 March 2005". Great Map. March 8, 2005. 
  19. ^ "Category:Images by Derek Ramsey". Wikimedia Commons. Retrieved April 18, 2016. The following 200 files are in this category, out of 1,139 total. 
  20. ^ "Category:Photographs by Derek Ramsey". Wikimedia Commons. Retrieved April 16, 2016. The following 200 files are in this category, out of 2,028 total. 
  21. ^ "BC's Coast Region: Species & Ecosystems of Conservation Concern Monarch (Danaus plexippus)" (PDF). University of British Columbia. March 2011. Retrieved April 10, 2016. 
  22. ^ Mader, Lindsay Stafford (February 2014). "Milkweed: Medicine of Monarchs and Humans". HerbalGram (American Botanical Council) (101): 38–47. Retrieved April 10, 2016. 
  23. ^ "Western Monarch Count Resource Center". Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. 2016. Retrieved April 10, 2016. 
  24. ^ López-Hoffman, Laura; McGovern, Emily D.; Varady, Robert G.; Flessa, Karl W. (eds.). Conservation of Shared Environments: Learning from the United States and Mexico. ISBN 978-0816528783.  . Cover
  25. ^ Diep, Francie (November 5, 2013). "Americans Would Pay $4 Billion To Save Monarch Butterflies". Popular Science. Retrieved April 10, 2016. 
  26. ^ Yong, Ed (January 25, 2013). "Chinese Mantis Guts Its Toxic Caterpillar Prey". Phenomena. National Geographic. Retrieved April 10, 2016. 
  27. ^ Flaccus, Gillian. "How California’s Drought Is Helping Monarch Butterflies". kqed.org. Associated Press. Retrieved April 10, 2016. 
  28. ^ "Sarah's Journey: Crystal Clear". journeywithsarah.wordpress.com. April 17, 2013. Retrieved April 11, 2016. 
  29. ^ "Runway-23". Flickr. Rally Foundation. May 17, 2013. Retrieved April 16, 2016. Oil painting, titled "The Longest Journey", by 16-yr-old Rally Kid, Sarah. 
  30. ^ "Sarah's Journey: Rally on the Runway & Sarah's Painting". journeywithsarah.wordpress.com. May 9, 2013. Retrieved April 11, 2016. 
  31. ^ "I80A5689". Flickr. Rally Foundation. April 24, 2015. Retrieved April 16, 2016. 
  32. ^ "Philadelphia First Church of the Brethren: Sermons". churchofthebrethren.com. 2013. Retrieved April 11, 2016. 
  33. ^ Hochman, Anndee (October 7, 2015). "The Parent Trip: Julie and Derek Ramsey of Aston". The Philadelphia Inquirer. p. C3. Retrieved April 10, 2016. 

External links[edit]

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