Bryan Henderson is an unusual fella. He’s annoying to some, and a grammar hero to others. He’s a software engineer. He wears the same red polo shirt every day (he owns eight of them), he eats a chicken sandwich in the company cafeteria every single day. And for nine years, every Sunday night, he sits down at his computer and corrects the same, obscure grammatical mistake on Wikipedia over and over and over.
Known as Giraffedata on Wikipedia, Henderson runs a software program he created to find all of the instances of “comprised of,” and he goes into each of those Wikipedia entries and manually changes them. Why? Well, the short answer is that, when people write “comprised of,” what they really mean is “consist of,” or “composed of.” The long answer? Henderson has a 6,000 word essay explaining exactly why “comprised of” is grammatically incorrect.
Why does he care? It’s not that he’s trying to change the world. As he said in a great profile on Wikipedia’s Ultimate WikiGnome on Medium, it’s just that he finds it satisfying. It makes him happy. Moreover, as he said in an interview on the Reply All podcast, in a small way, it physically pains him to see this mistake made over and over again. It took Henderson three years to get through the first 16,000 usages of the phrase, but since then, he’s been running a steady clip of 50-100 every week. He’s made the change about 48,000 times now.
In fact, there’s a lot of incorrect usages that he finds troubling — he thinks people should continue to use “luncheon” instead of “lunch,” for instance — and if it were up to him, the English language would remain static. In his opinion, people should stop using grammar that “sounds right” instead of grammar that is logically correct. But for now, he’s content with being Wikipedia’s “comprised of” overlord, at least until Wikipedia management changes its mind and concludes that “comprised of” is appropriate to their manual of style. Until then, however, editors on Wikipedia can rest assured that anytime they use the phrase, it will be changed by the following Monday morning.