Wikipedia’s #1 Guy
“Needless to say, the things most interesting to me about my life probably won’t be that interesting to you.”
Does the name “koavf” ring any bells? No? How about Justin Anthony Knapp? Still nothing? What about Wikipedia? Ever heard of that? If you have (and I’m assuming you have), you should probably know Mr. Knapp. He is the #1 contributor to the English language Wikipedia, topping the charts with an incomprehensible 1,355,713 edits.
Luckily for you, Knapp has one of the most detailed profiles available on Wikipedia, or anywhere for that matter.
His profile, divided up into several sections, is supplemented with columns of what I can only call bumper stickers — little tidbits of information on Knapp and his beliefs. There are four of these, entitled, respectively: Me, What I Do, What I Like, and Who I Am.
The first — “Me” — describes Knapp in somewhat arbitrary gloss. He is male, 32, speaks a few languages, has two bachelor’s degrees (one in philosophy, the other in political science), and lives in Indiana.
The second — “What I Do” — describes mostly his English usage habits, but also that he codes a little, and uses DuckDuckGo.
The third — “What I like” — ironically, does not have a Wikipedia badge, but instead contains: politics, Mariology, being drug-free, veganism, the color red, and recycling, among others.
The last column, “Who I Am”, containing 33 badges, is the longest of the columns, by about 11. Coupled with the paragraph just to its left — “Convictions” — offers a radical transparency (and a truly Wikipedian sense of meticulousness) that cuts against the usual grain of Wikipedia articles. In fact, if you were to even cursorily compare Knapp in his own words [hyperlink to user page] against Knapp on Wikipedia proper [hyper link to Wikipedia page], if nothing else, the brevity of the latter makes for an interesting deconstruction of Wikipedia.
Who is Knapp in his own words? Who is Knapp according to independently verifiable sources?
In this free realm of absolute subjectivity, Knapp spends just under a thousand words (for comparison, his Wikipedia article has about one third that number of words — only 300) describing everything you ever wanted to know (and most likely more) about his life convictions. Knapp is a devout Christian, a communist, a pacifist, pro-life, an organ donor, and supports a smattering of peaceful resolutions to world conflicts. Knapp believes in theophany, spiritual revelations, universal human rights, radically liberal politics, that the only useful philosophy is a holistic one — each of these of course, in proper Wikipedia fashion, links out to more descriptive pages, and one could easily spend a day poring over each and every one.
And yet amongst this deluge of beliefs and factoids about Knapp, both in his own words and those of Wikipedia proper, there is only one sentence that stands out as revealing something really essential to Knapp:
“I just try to help.”
