"Be bold, be patient and be kind": Rich Farmbrough – Diff
Skip to content
Rich has made more than a million total edits to Wikipedia.
Photo
by
Stephen B Streater
, freely licensed under
CC-BY 3.0
The English Wikipedia should be considered a storehouse of resources. Given the ubiquity of the language, anyone with even a passable command of English can make a valuable contribution to Wikipedias in other languages. Not just in articles, policies, and guidelines, but also in the wide reuse of templates—saving thousands of hours.
In my effort to interview leading Wikipedians in different languages, I approached
Rich Farmbrough
, a leading English Wikipedian in terms of edit count with over a million edits to his personal credit, in addition to several million bot-assisted edits.
Rich developed a passion for English Wikipedia the moment he discovered the project as early as 2004. A supporting factor for Rich was his prior experience on bulletin boards. “From about March 2012, with some gaps, I have been a full-time Wikipedian,” he says.
Born and brought up in the
London
borough of
Enfield
, Rich holds a degree in Mathematics. His professional pursuits resulted in diverse roles such as a professional in car insurance, e-commerce and academia. On the personal front, Rich is a family man with a wife and grown up children.
As a proactive contributor on Wikipedia, Rich has made several analytical studies related to the project. He’s looked at the number of pages under different namespaces and the percentage of source bytes in each namespace. He is especially concerned about the ratio of male to female editors on Wikipedia over the years.
As well as his studies, Rich is of course heavily involved in editing Wikipedia. He has created articles for monuments and statues in southern England, improved the coverage of
the Abbots of Shrewsbury
, and still creates redirects from pseudonyms. He is technically sound, and has worked on bots and templates for Wikimedia projects as well as external sites. And it’s not just English that Rich is interested in.
“To investigate the difficulties of working with other languages, I needed a language that I didn’t have any familiarity with,” he says. “I have always been interested in Swahili, but knew virtually nothing about it. I found the
Swahili community
small but very welcoming. 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.”
He also helped in providing missing templates, especially for the
Nepali
Newari
and Swahili Wikipedias.
Rich has heavily contributed to a variety of different projects across Wikimedia sites, and is keen on working further. Some of these include his work on
WikiProject Ghana
, tagging
GFDL
maps with the correct license, filling gaps on the
Rainbow List
(a list of the most influential
LGBT
people in the UK), correcting
ISO 639
language codes, creating an exhaustive list of viruses, cleanup of
ISBNs
in articles, as well as fixing spellings, combating vandalism, and correcting formatting and hyphenation.
But despite everything Rich has achieved on Wikipedia, he remains a humble and open-minded person. He is keen on enlisting new editors, and has participated in a number of meetups and outreach events. Rich ended his interview in true Wikipedian style, with a message for new editors: “Be bold, be patient and be kind,” he says—the three quintessential traits which inevitably lead to initiative, cooperation, and a constructive approach to any Wikimedia project.
Syed Muzammiluddin
Wikimedian
Share this:
Share on Mastodon (Opens in new window)
Mastodon
Share on Bluesky (Opens in new window)
Bluesky
Archive notice:
This is an archived post from blog.wikimedia.org, which operated under different editorial and content guidelines than Diff.
Can you help us translate this article?
In order for this article to reach as many people as possible we would like your help. Can you translate this article to get the message out?
Start translation
Related
Related
Welcome to Diff
Welcome to Diff, a community blog by – and for – the Wikimedia movement. Join Diff today to share stories from your community and comment on articles. We want to hear your voice!
Subscribe to Diff via Email
Wikimedia News
Wikimedia Foundation News
“Cinematic intensity”: The winners of Wiki Loves Earth 2025
2 March 2026
by Wikimedia Foundation
Wikimedia Technology Blog
A Tech Blog Diff
24 February 2026
by LGoto
Down the Rabbit Hole
Announcing Wikipedia’s top 25 most-read articles of 2025
2 December 2025
by Wikimedia