Dhrubajyoti Roy, Rashtradhyaksh (monarch) of Vishwamitra, is a prolific editor of the collaborative micronational wiki MicroWiki. Editing under the username “Oritsu.me,” Roy has overtaken Zed (now known as Zabelle Skye and ZabelleNB on the wiki) as the editor with the largest number of edits on the website upon having reached 53,840. Roy is now at over 53,970.
The Indian-born micronationalist registered an account on MicroWiki on 5 August 2020, and was the most frequent editor on the entire wiki during 2021 and for most of 2022. Roy was the fastest user to reach 40,000 and 50,000 edits, beating Skye by achieving the milestones in 727 and 819 days respectively after registering his account—Skye claims to have achieved these milestones in a still impressive 894 and 1,324 days. According to the MicroWiki article listing users by their edit count, Skye had held the record for most edits for over 1,100 days – since 7 November 2019 – after he reached 18,607 edits to overtake John of Baustralia, who himself now has over 30,000. Unlike previous record holders, English is only Roy’s third language, his native being Bengali and second languages being Hindi and Assamese.
When the Penn Press asked Roy what he thought of this achievement, he stated he was elated, adding “I am still a new editor as compared to the others who are editing on the site for 4-5 years. I only completed 2 years in August and it’s probably the shortest period by an editor to reach almost 54000 edits.” But Roy maintains that an edit count is not distinctive of editor value, stating that “many consider this as a competition but it actually is not. The edits need to be valuable and not merely to increase your counts.” We asked Roy if he thinks he could maintain the top spot, and he told the Penn Press: “I am a full time student in my final year of graduation and am looking to pursue my masters next year. So those factors might possess a threat on my edits. My biggest friendly rival is Zed who is really a great editor and someone who’s inspired me to edit in this large scale.”
Skye reacted positively to Roy beating his record, with Roy telling the Penn Press “he seems to be very happy.” When we asked Skye what he thought of Roy having overtaken him he stated: “I am not all that bothered in the slightest—he definitely deserves it! We have frequently worked together, and Roy is a great editor whose contributions have been tremendously helpful, especially the flag standardisations he did in March and April [2022].” Questioned about whether or not he believes he would once again regain the title of most prolific editor, he told us: “I suppose it is possible, but Roy is incredibly active and dedicated to the wiki. It would take some hard work in order to pull that off.” Roy elaborated on our question on Skye’s thoughts: “I know he will not take this as a rivalry. He’d support me and actually he has helped me a lot. I am an admin on MW [MicroWiki] and it’s not possible to edit and take care of each and every small thing on the site for me so I often delegate some work to him and he does it very well in a quick span. […] It’s not just uploading and deleting the files, it’s all about fixing the links to the various articles so that those don’t break and much more.”
Most of Roy’s edits resemble what some editors might call “maintenance” like maintaining and adding categories to pages, deleting and renaming pages and files, and modifying wikilinks. Roy has also made extensive edits towards articles related to his native Vishwamitra and its micronational allies, and has even authored of two “good articles” – a coveted status obtained through a peer-review by fellow editors. These maintenance-like edits are what allows Roy to skyrocket his edit count, small fixes enabling the micronationalist to easily make an edit at least every minute if he wanted.
The Penn Press first reported on Roy’s wiki activity in April of this year, when he made nearly 6,000 edits in March to standardise filenames of national flags on the wiki. When we interviewed Skye in April, he stated: “I already consider myself semi-retired, [and] so I would love to see another user who is really dedicated to editing MicroWiki overtake me”, adding that he thought Roy made significantly high quality contributions. At that point, Roy told the Penn Press he was unsure if he would be able to overtake Skye’s edit count.
Roy was promoted to Patroller – a role below administrator mainly concerned with marking articles for deletion and approving or rejecting edits made by newly registered accounts – on 14 May 2021, just before the position of Patroller was formally removed on 19 May following an administrator consensus. Nevertheless, Roy retained his role on the wiki in order to continue to perform its functions. On 26 November of that same year, Roy was promoted to the status of administrator. He ostensibly made his 10,000th edit on 4 March 2021, making his 20,000th in November and 30,000th – as the Penn Press reported – on 7 April 2021.
Though MicroWiki was registered in May 2005, according to Skye – who also calls himself a “MicroWiki historian” – all edit data prior to 7 November 2013 was erased following a complicated domain move. Before this Aldrich Lucas, retired since February 2012, had 31,526 edits after importing tens of thousands of articles following MicroWiki’s move away from Fandom at the end of 2010. According to the “list of MicroWiki users by edit count” article, this would mean that Skye only beat Lucas’ record as the top editor of MicroWiki in late June 2020. Lucas still remains the third most prolific editor, followed in fourth by John of Baustralia with 30,677 edits. Three editors have 20,000 edits, including the Penn Federal Republic’s own former Vice-President Thomas Jacobs (editing as CaptainGalway), who was impeached in October of this year following racist remarks.
According to MicroWiki’s official statistics page, over 1,347,000 edits have been made since 7 November 2013, and Roy is responsible for 3.99% of them.
