"Meet the man behind a third of what's on Wikipedia" CBS article is wrong

A couple days ago my mother emailed me a link to this article:

Already I had some major suspicions about the article just by looking at the headline. "A third of what's on Wikipedia"? What?!

It wasn't until I started seeing links to the article pop up elsewhere on the Internet that I decided to write a response to that email (yes, as you can see, I am an evil and ungrateful son that doesn't respond to half of his mother's emails). I wrote it in a jiffy without much editing or polish of any sort, so it may be rough around the edges, but I hope I got the point across. Here's what I wrote in the email:

The article's title is very misleading. 3 million edits to Wikipedia is not the same as 3 million articles, and an edit is counted as whenever you make changes to an article and then click the "Publish changes" button. An "edit" on Wikipedia is considered a technical term and not one of work ethic or merit. It does not take into account the quality of the changes actually made or where the page is located on Wikipedia. An edit to an internal administration page is counted the same as an edit to an encyclopedia article, and you can make three edits to an article that do nothing but add and remove blank spaces while a single edit that adds new information is worth [less in terms of edit count].

The user described in the article has ~2.9 million edits right now, but this does not mean that he has edited a third of all the articles on Wikipedia. You only need to go through [his] contributions history to see that many of his edits are maintenance edits, not edits that actually add significant content. For example, on the Kenroy Peters article, you can see the page history to see three edits made by this user, all of which are maintenance edits [...].

The first edit, located at the bottom (made on 19:51, 30 January 2019) removed a category from the article. His next edit, made at 20:03, added a new category. His third edit, made in the same minute as the second, filled in a citation. Notice how none of his edits have actually added any significant content to the article and [have] only been minor, maintenance edits that most readers will not notice (as you can see here). Remember that each one of these edits counts as an edit in his total edit count, which means that he [had] made three edits to the same article. If you scroll through his contributions history, you will see that in many cases he edits the same article multiple times; each one of those [revisions] counts as an edit in their edit count. This means that it is in theory possible to get 3 million edits on Wikipedia simply by doing nothing but editing the Wikipedia sandbox 3 million times, and you will have edited zero Wikipedia articles and have made zero meaningful changes, but have a very large edit count to boast about.

This article's title is highly misleading and the content in it shows that the writers of this article do not know how Wikipedia actually works. They do not know the difference between an edit and an article; they are not aware that you can edit an article multiple times and it will all count towards your technical edit count; they are not aware that the edit count treats all edits equally, so a useless edit is treated the same as a meaningful edit that adds content; and they have no evidence whatsoever, aside from their ignorance on Wikipedia's technical terms, that Pruitt really did edit a third of all of Wikipedia's articles.

Pruitt is a well respected editor and a Wikipedia administrator as well. I would be shocked if he knowingly allowed this article to be published with all of its factual errors now being leaked to the public without contacting the editor to make corrections.

I am aware of the serious factual errors in this article because I am a Wikipedia administrator myself.

I respect journalists. I admire them and I believe that their work is absolutely essential to society. But I just can't help but feel very ill on the inside when their reports on Wikipedia show glaring ignorance of the wiki's "inner workings" that aren't even private to begin with. Might I strongly encourage people to please read up on Wikipedia's help pages before they assume things, lest they misuse Wikipedia's glossary of commonly used technical terms.

I believe their ignorance is in good faith. That doesn't make ignorance harmless.

Edited on February 1, 2019, to correct some mistakes in the text. The original argument has not been modified.