An Interview with the Wizard of Wikipedia

Editor's note: In a new series of interviews, Smith magazine unearths some of the people who have made many, many contributions to the Net, each in their own particular way, while remaining mostly under the radar.

Ever wonder who those people are who leave all those reviews on Amazon? Or who seem to find time to post 25 new YouTube videos a day, or link to story after story on Digg? Where better to begin than the wild, unwieldy, and wonderful world of Wikipedia? Meet Richard Farmbrough, a 45-year-old technology project manager living in Stamford, England -- and the man with the most Wiki entries since its launch on January 15, 2001. SMITH contacted him via email.

What's Stamford like?

Richard Farmbrough: Stamford is a pleasant market town in the East of England region, it is generally affluent, and near the city of Peterborough. It has good transport links and an interesting history -- see the Wikipedia article of the same name.

Why the urge to write and edit so many entries?

Farmbrough: Wikipedia is such a good resource, it seems a shame to let gaps remain unfilled, or errors go by uncorrected. This is also in keeping with a community value indicated by the neologism "sofixit" -- in other words, on Wikipedia, you are empowered to resolve problems, rather than relying on someone else to do it for you. Of course, some things require collaboration through talk pages and the many wiki-projects that cover everything from specialist subjects to article clean-up and helping new editors find their feet.

How did you get involved with Wikipedia?

Farmbrough: Like most Wikipedians, I started with a minor edit, on a "talk page" (a page where an article is discussed). In my case, I increasingly found that I was, at that time, in a position to add to, correct or create many articles. After some time, I started reading the documents about Wikipedia and how it works, and realized that we were creating good content but with lots of stylistic, spelling, grammatical and other gaffes.

Wikipedia has a Manual of Style, so I read that, and started fixing "violations" wherever I came across them -- such as by effectively proofreading, and to some extent, sub-editing. I became frustrated with finding the same errors again and again, and created tools to help find and eliminate them. Round about then, I came across Wikipedia "bots," or robots, and started using one to fix common errors. That's under a separate account and is, I believe, the Wikipedia editor with the most edits.

What was the first entry you ever wrote or edited?

Farmbrough: My first article edit was to Modafinil a keep-awake drug I was investigating at the time. It's pleasing to see the short article that was there then is now a substantial overview of the drug. The first article I created (you can't really say you "wrote" an article on Wikipedia, since they are never finished, and have many editors) was Projective frame which is about a mathematical concept that has also been improved substantially-and the same day (I must have been getting into my stride) Ohio House of Representatives with a couple of lines, that are now a reasonable article, Spaghetti House siege substantially as it is now, and Black Liberation Army which again has grown to a reasonable article from my couple of lines.

What do your mates think of how much time you spend on Wikipedia?

Farmbrough: Actually, I don't spend all that much time on Wikipedia. I rarely get involved in the behind-the-scenes stuff; although, as an "administrator," I get asked to help deal with vandals and disruptive behavior. Nor am I involved, at the moment, in anything that takes extensive research. Most of my edits (but by no means all) are minor clean-ups that take a few seconds -- that's the main reason I have so many edits.