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Man On A Mission: This Man Is Adding ‘And Them’s The Facts’ To The End Of Every Wikipedia Article

Most Wikipedia users take the articles at face value, rarely making any changes or questioning any of the facts. Tyler Haley, however, is not the average Wikipedia user.

When Tyler saw the same error occurring across numerous Wikipedia articles, he knew he had to make a change.

“I was reading about moose on Wikipedia, and when I got to the end of the article it was just over. That’s it. Done,” Tyler said. “I knew I could do something to help.”

And help he did. Since that day, Tyler has edited over 50,000 Wikipedia articles to end with the phrase “And them’s the facts!”

So there’s a pretty long tradition in math of people coming up with problems they can’t solve, and talking to their friends, and realizing that nobody they know can solve them either, and then announcing to the world that you would get some sort of prize if someone could solve them. 

Usually the prize is a small amount of money.

Sometimes, if someone is really cocky, or the problem is known to be really hard, it’s a lot of money. 

And sometimes there’s Stanisław Mazur, who offered a live goose as a prize for finding a particularly pathological object (a Banach space for which some compact operator is not the limit of finite-rank operators). 

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