Wikipedia editor
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 | This user has been on Wikipedia for 16 years, 7 months and 1 day. |
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Hi, I'm Liam Riley, known here as Sillyfolkboy or the acronym SFB for short. I have lived in Manchester, UK, for most of my adult life, drawn here by the desire to study Spanish (via Manchester Metropolitan University and Universidad de Valladolid). I grew up in Skelmersdale, where both my parents worked in local politics and the community. I currently work as an IT professional for Barclays. In over ten years editing at Wikipedia, I have written nearly 2500 articles from scratch, expanded many more, and made over 100,000 edits.
I formally joined Wikipedia in 2008, following a period of anonymous editing (mainly fixing typos and filling out biographies). My username was chosen to reflect a childhood love of folk music (some of which can be heard here), though over time this handle has become a bit misleading in terms of both the topic matter I work on and the manner of my contributions!
In my first year of editing, I created my first article (Honeyman: Live 1973, a Tim Buckley album) and contributed to Wikipedia's front page for the first time through a Did You Know...? factoid about John Milton (composer) (father of the poet). That year I brought a variety of topics to Good Article status: Jeff Buckley (an American musician), Poohsticks (a children's stick racing game), Xabi Alonso (a Spanish footballer) and Usain Bolt (a Jamaican Olympic sprinter). The latter article proved to be the starting point for my writing about the sport of athletics. Spurred on by my enjoyment of the 2008 Summer Olympics, I joined the Olympics WikiProject to work on improving Olympic content alongside fellow sports enthusiasts.
In 2009 I founded the Athletics WikiProject to bring together a community of editors interested in the sport and to provide a central point of discussion. Members of the project have brought over a dozen more articles to Good Article status, including track and field – a Wikipedia Vital article. Beyond the formally-recognised content, many editors have since worked to profoundly develop coverage of athletics from a low base – writing biographies on important historic figures like Lon Myers (as well as every world and Olympic medallist), adding statistics such as national record lists for all countries, and documenting nearly every international competition of note. I am a strong believer in the power of these informal information communities – both as places to find support and advice, and as a route to achieving common goals that would otherwise not be possible (or even imaginable).
Personally, I have worked on improving all elements of Wikipedia relating to athletics: from writing biographies on everyone from humourously-named Seychellois runners to Belarusian athlete-professors, from coverage of 1930s fascist-approved gatherings of women athletes to the 100 metres at the Olympics, down to the very nuts-and-bolts of categorisation and coded templates that underpin the organisation and presentation of Wikipedia articles.
I am interested in improving the coverage of under-represented subjects and people – a lot of my work extends into coverage of the developing world and women's sport. I joined WikiProject Women in Red in 2015, which is an initiative to create new biographies about important women who are not yet covered – it is amazing what this community has achieved and I'm proud to be a part of it.
As of 2018, I am looking to develop a data model for athletics and Olympics statistics at Wikidata. I hope to make this interoperable with other major institutions and provide public access to data for re-use at Wikipedia and as a resource for researchers.
