CCL Home > Newsroom > Profiles in Learning
“I was never all that great a student,” admits Pulsifer. “I spent far more time reading encyclopedias and books on my own, than paying too much attention to the actual assigned work.”Photo: Geo Perdis
It started with the Panama Canal. On the morning of Dec. 10, 2001—he remembers the exact date—Simon Pulsifer logged onto Wikipedia.org and wrote the internet encyclopedia’s first entry about the Central American waterway. His 253-word brief covered the basics: “The Panama Canal cuts through the isthmus of Panama and connects the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.... When the canal openend [sic] in 1914 it was a technological marvel.... The canal was an important strategic and economic asset to the US and one that revolutionized world shipping patterns.”
Later that same day, Pulsifer, who was born in Halifax and raised in Ottawa, returned to edit Wikipedia’s existing entries about antimatter, the House of Sforza (a ruling family of renaissance Italy), William Hershel (the composer and astronomer who discovered Uranus) along with more than a dozen other subjects. It’s fair to say he was hooked.
Wikipedia, founded in 2001, is famous—some say infamous—for its open-source, user-generated content. Since anyone is welcome to contribute to its pages, the sprawling encyclopedia is in a constant state of improvement. In the past six years it has grown to include over 8.2 million articles in 253 languages. The English edition’s contents comprise more than 600 million words, or about fifteen times as many as the largest version of Encyclopaedia Brittanica.
Since making his first contribution, Pulsifer, a University of Toronto history graduate, has written almost 3,000 Wikipedia articles and helped edit some 94,000 more. He has created eleven “featured articles”—entries that appear on the encyclopedia’s main page, where they attract millions of readers—on topics ranging from the history of Central Asia to mercantilism to voter turnout.
For his efforts (all unpaid) the 26-year-old has been hailed as the Wikipedia Wonder Boy, a Wiki-wizard and the Duke of Data.
“The summer of 2003 was probably when I really became hyperactive [on Wikipedia]. The entire year before that, I probably had 500 or 600 edits to the encyclopedia. It was something that I did occasionally, but it certainly didn’t have a major role in my life,” says ‘SimonP’, as he is known to other Wikipedia users. “But then I had a fairly boring summer job and access to a computer. I started spending a lot of the time watching the data flow by in Wikipedia.”
Simon Pulsifer's path from average student to world-renowned internet personality, is a testament to the benefits of self-directed (or informal) learning. Once considered a relatively minor aspect of education, self-directed learning has earned a much higher profile in the past few years thanks to the widespread use and availability of the internet.
The internet has begat a host of new technologies, from videoconferencing and web-based instruction to weblogs and wikis, that have come to be grouped under the term “e-learning.” To read more about the effects of technological innovations on both traditional and e-learning, see CCL’s report Review of E-Learning in Canada: A Rough Sketch of the Evidence, Gaps, and Promising Directions. (PDF 555 KB)
Most of these new learning opportunities require two things: a current computer and broadband internet connectivity. According to a 2006 report by The Economist magazine, Canada ranks in the Top 10 in terms of countries with the highest “e-readiness” or internet connectivity.
To learn more about the how learning is affected by the rates of internet connectivity across Canada, see our fact sheet on Broadband Access (PDF 583 KB) from the 2007 Composite Learning Index. To read more about how this connectivity is affecting the day-to-day lives of Canadians, see Statistic Canada’s November 2006 report “Our Lives in Digital Times”. (PDF 231 KB)
Pulsifer is seated in the living room of his Toronto apartment. His building is immediately north from the city’s landmark R.C. Harris Water Treatment Plant. By coincidence, he wrote the first few versions of Wikipedia’s article about the plant shortly before he moved in. There’s a laptop computer on the floor near Pulsifer’s feet and a digital camera on the mantlepiece beside him: many of his recent articles and edits are about buildings in Toronto; he enjoys biking to their locations to snap a few pictures, which he then uploads with his text.
A few years ago, when Wikipedia first became known to mainstream culture, Pulsifer, who is tall and retiring, was its most prolific contributor. The title earned him copious coverage in The Globe and Mail, Ottawa Citizen and several other newspapers, who praised his dedication to the encyclopedia. Time magazine included a short profile of him in its 2006 “Person of the Year” issue (the person was “You”). The media appearances have made Pulsifer a celebrity among the world’s “Wikipedians,” the community of several thousand users who scour the encyclopedia for errors and edit the bulk of its new content.
Pulsifer’s path to the website was somewhat predetermined. His mother is a librarian; his father is a historian at the Canadian War Museum. (Simon also has a younger brother, Andrew.) As a result, reading was a constant companion in Simon’s youth. “There were always an awful lot of books around,” he says. “With your mom being a librarian, you could put in orders every morning, and she’d come home in the evening with a bag full of whatever books you desired.”
The Pulsifers kept a copy of the World Book Encyclopedia in the house, which Simon read in sequence from A to P before giving it up. “It was a discard from the Ottawa Public Library, so there were various pages torn out and such. I quite enjoyed reading it when I was going through most of grade school,” he says.
Pulsifer learned about Wikipedia during his second year of university in Toronto. By the time of his 2003 heyday, he was spending eight or more hours per day on the site, making contributions all the while. Then as now, he found most of his source material on the internet (he has a handful of go-to sources he trusts for accuracy), and visited libraries to fill in any missing information. He’s never minded the workload.
“It was a good way to spend my time. I’ve always enjoyed writing and reading, so I liked the activity.” he says. “And there’s the added benefit of spreading knowledge through the world, which is a somewhat noble end.”
Over the next couple of years he kept a feverish pace; researching and writing for the site while volunteering for several election campaigns both during and after university. During this period his notoriety began to grow, even as his family secretly worried about his future. (Late last year, Simon’s mother confided to a reporter that while she was pleased with her son’s newfound fame, she would be happier if he got himself a paying job—and moved out of the family home.)
“I was never all that great a student, it must be said. I spent far more time reading encyclopedias and books on my own than paying too much attention to the actual assigned work,” he adds later. “I’ve always been more interested in certain areas of the humanities and science, and less interested in rote learning of mathematics or things like that.”
Though there is insufficient information to give us a clear picture about the role of such informal learning across Canada, Pulsifer’s self-directed brand of e-learning is gaining interest among both students and educators. And while he had originally expected his political volunteerism would win him a job, it was his high-profile “hobby” that bore fruit.
His 2006 “Person-of-the-Year” write-up in Time caught the attention of Quillsoft, a Toronto company that designs software for children with learning disabilities. He was contacted late last year and moved out of Ottawa (and his parent’s house) in February 2007 for his new job, researching and writing content for Quillsoft’s programs.
Ironically, the job has decreased Pulsifer’s time on Wikipedia to one or two hours per day: he likes checking in the morning to see what changed while he was sleeping. As a result, he has been surpassed as the site most prolific contributor; though he remains among the site’s top ten contributors and is undeniably the most famous. Of the few users who have climbed above him, one lives in Toronto. The two Wikipedians have never met, although Pulsifer say he’d welcome the opportunity.
“Oh, I’m certain we could talk quite a lot about Wikipedia. We could get into the behind-the-scenes policies of the encyclopedia that no one else knows or cares about.”
Hardly: Wikipedia is currently the world’s ninth-most popular website. Everything about it fascinating. The current Panama Canal entry, for example, now runs beyond 4,000 words. It includes photographs, graphics, a map and three dozen cited sources for its facts. The article has been edited more than 500 times since Simon created it, and will only continue to evolve. The Wiki-king still casts a long shadow.