User:Hindustanilanguage/Rich Farmborough

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rich_Farmbrough_20100529.JPG

1. Can you please elaborate about yourself.

I am interested in everything. I have a degree in Mathematics, have worked in industrial control, car insurance, networking, e-commerce, printing, local government and academia. I live in a small market town in the Midlands of England, with my wife. My children are grown up students.

2. Where do you come from? Tell us about your native place / places where you spent your childhood and teen years.

I was born and brought up in the London Borough of Enfield, a relatively leafy suburb of London, and a diverse place, even then, and educated at a comprehensive school - or to be more accurate in the local library, and by reading under the desk during lessons.

3. How did you first discover English Wikipedia?

Suddenly search results were filled with Wikipedia disambiguation pages!

4. When did you realize that you could edit and contribute significantly to Wikipedia?

Almost the first time I went to Wikipedia there was information missing. I was previously active on some bulletin board systems, so was confident in contributing to public knowledge.

5. What are the projects you have mainly used Wikipedia for?

I use Wikipedia all the time, I have produced some analysis on Wikipedia itself, for example to show that the percentage of pages (and bytes) in article space dropped to 40%, and to show the percentage of female editors has grown over the years.

I am currently engaged in a few content oriented projects: 1. Redirects from pseudonyms, a somewhat tedious task. 2. Creating articles for a number of monuments and statues in southern England 3. Improving the coverage of the Abbots of Shrewsbury

And on the back burner 4. Scientific synonyms 5. Viruses - there are only a few thousand named viruses, we should cover them all.

On the "meta" side I am very interested in systemic bias issues, and have read a lot (and written a little) about the gender gap, or as I prefer to call it the gender balance.

6. You have 1,026,433 edits on English and are still active on the project.. What motivates you?

I believe knowledge should be freely and readily available. As Wikipedia is one of the key ways this is happening, it's important that the quality be as good as possible.

7. What’s the most interesting thing you have used Wikipedia for?

While I was working at Oxford I was able to contribute to research on the geographical coverage of and contribution to Wikipedias in various languages. It was interesting to see how this varied, and in particular how the dedicated work of one or two people could change these results.

8. You are very proactive on English Wikipedia – How do you balance your work life and Wikipedia edits.

From about March 2012, with some gaps, I have been a full time Wikipedian. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your perspective) I will be resuming paid employment fairly soon.

9. Do your near and dear ones support your Wikipedia pursuits?

Yes, they don't really know what's involved, except that I have piles of books all over the place, and occasionally pop off to a meet-up.

10. Tell us briefly about the Wikipedia outreach activities that you have been part of.

I regularly attend meet-ups, partly to encourage any new or potential editors who turn up. I also contribute to Tea-House and have a mini-research project under way on the effect of welcoming new users.

11. Tell us about your technical editing skills..

I work extensively with templates, re-writing some of the most-used in more efficient ways, and making others much simpler. For example the template "Monthly clean up category" needs no parameters, and yet it creates a complex page, including a dynamic progress box. I have also done a great deal of bot-related work, much of it standard tidying (for example identifying and sorting out problem ISBNs), but also specific improvements requested by various editors and projects. I worked with the Hindi Wiki, where one of my bots made just over 55,555 edits.

I also did some missing template provision for various wikis (not just WMF ones), in particular the Nepali, Nepali Bhasa and Swahili Wikipedias.

I currently spend a lot of time on Edit Filters, there is scope for making them much more useful combating vandalism. I might also get pulled into improving the PHP that runs them, although I know there are many Wikipedians who know more about PHP than I do.

12. How do you feel as the leading contributor on English Wikipedia?

If you are talking about edit count, I don't think that edit count is terrifically important - as far as I can tell, that view is widely shared. I had the "top spot" from some time in 2006 until about 18 April 2012, for a good deal of that time, I chose to have my name blanked, so as not to add to any false value attached to edit count.

There is a certain satisfaction that there is tangible evidence of the effort one has put in, but it's important to be aware that others are contributing as much if not more.

13. What are your future Wiki goals and ambitions?

I would like to see a dynamic content project, that knowledge in a more interactive way. We have some baby-steps such as "did you mean?"

I'd like to see more streamlined procedures for the "back-office" functions, to help people be more productive in content creation and curation. Particularly I'd like to see Wikidata leveraged to provide internationalised content.

I'd like to see help provided to editors on how to handle conflict, and descalate it to disagreement, and how to resolve those disagreements. I think we have some of the building blocks in place.

I'd like to see more of the drudge-work automated, especially where different projects interface. I think we can gain so much from using the infrastructure we already have.

14. What other Wiki projects do you patronize?

I do occasional edits on Wiktionary, and have do a reasonable amount of work on Wikisource. I am interested in the synergy between Wikisource and Wikipedia, and have brought a few dozen articles from the DNB into Wikipedia.

I have also helped out some Wikia wikis and a few miscellaneous wikis that work to provide open knowledge.

15. How do you see the role of English Wikipedia vis-à-vis other Wikipedias?

English Wikipedia should be considered storehouse of resources. Given the ubiquity of the language, any-one with reasonable command of English and fluency (or even a passable command, for some of the smaller languages) in one of the other languages can make valuable contributions to the other Wikipedia. However it's not just articles, many other wikis have taken policy and guidelines from en:WP. And there is very wide re-use of templates, saving perhaps thousands of hours.

Conversely it is potentially useful to every other wiki to translate articles into English.

16. Can you elaborate a bit on your English Wikipedia colleagues?

It is a large community, and I know only a few dozen colleagues well.

On the positive side most are here to contribute to the encyclopaedia and there are some very clever technical folk, some extremely well informed and capable content creators, including experts in specialised fields, and a goodly number of generalists.

On the down-side a significant number of people are not patient with other contributors, and would rather see them sanctioned than resolve an underlying problem. We have lost a number of significant contributors this way.

17. Do you feel that the English Wiki users as Community need more coordinated approach for community growth - given the fact other regional languages are placing more emphasis on their languages and communities?

It's hard to say, community growth is not an aim in itself. It has not been established that spending volunteer effort on recruiting pays more dividends in content than spending it on content creation. Indeed the majority of Editathons indicate that the opposite is the case (though there may be other benefits).

It's also important to realise that the community is not in silos according to the type of project and language they work on. Many of the more dynamic contributors work with other projects or languages to some extent.

It might be worth looking at retention, as Tea-house and mentoring, including the CO-op programme do), indeed I am hoping that we can have a community based retention program working with the strengths of Neurotypicals and Aspies.

18. Tell us about the translation efforts on Swahili Wikipedia?

That's still very much in progress. To investigate the difficulties of working with other languages I needed a language that I didn't have any familiarity with, and I have always been interested in Swahili, but knew virtually nothing about it. I found the Swahili community small but very welcoming and we managed to resolve a few outstanding issues on sw:WP, and I was able to create some stubs for Tanzanian politicians, and later for places in Botswana. Actual translation, even in a limited way, will need some significant work.

19. Tell us about “Filling in gaps” in other projects you have talked on your userpage.

I have worked on many minor projects, sometimes it has been necessary to move on before they are complete, often it would be nice to return and finish them. Sometimes I find that someone else has done some work, or even completed it. A few small examples:- documenting the winners of the Queens Award to Industry and finding anniversaries for "Today in Trinidad and Tobago" (Trinidad and Tobago Portal), covering each of the genetic codes listed at en:List of genetic codes. A larger one is ensuring coverage of every person in DNB, ODNB and ADNB.

20. Please elaborate on your other significant contributions not covered in the above questions.

It's hard to say what is significant. I have done a lot of vandal fighting, over the years. I have contributed to community discussion, and, I hope, lowered the temperature in some of them. I have helped tag pages for a few projects, recently WikiProject Ghana. I built an index for all issues of The London Gazette. I was part of a huge project to get articles about people listed in the correct order in categories (including talk page categories). I tagged a few thousand GFDL maps with the correct license. I have done a fair amount of spelling fixing, including some across all Wikipedias. I have tried to ensure we have an article for all of the OCLC top 1000 works, ( http://www.oclc.org/research/top1000.html) and a number of ALA award winner listed books. I set up most of the infrastructure for supporting dated maintenance tags (and did most of the dating for a number of years). I cleared up a lot of the non-notable minor planets. I filled in as many gaps in the Rainbow List (most influential LGBT people in the UK) as I could. I overhauled the portal links system across the encyclopaedia. I have also worked on "missing articles" lists produced by other people. I produced lots of article lists for people - either missing articles, or articles with certain problems, or that could benefit from a particular type of addition. I built the current infrastructure for the "Articles contain text in other languages" - and fixed a large number of incorrect ISO 639 codes. I created the first exhaustive list of viruses on Wikipedia. In the dim and distant past I completed the move of AfD's from their former homes at VfD and elsewhere. I did two complete clean-ups of the ISBNs in articles, getting the formatting and hyphenation correct. One nice little project was to tag all the citations of "retracted" academic papers on Wikipedia. I ran a bot to regularise the capitalisation of many thousands of standard headings.

There must have been hundreds of other projects over the years, as well as everything from minor copy-edits to new articles.

21. What is your message for new Wikipedians?

Be bold, be patient and be kind.