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This user has been on Wikipedia for17 years, 7 months and 6 days.
This editor is aLooshpah Laureate of the Encyclopedia and is entitled to display thisBook of All Knowledge with Secret Appendix, Errata Sheet, and Author's Signature.
Hi, I'mLiam Riley, known here as Sillyfolkboy or the acronymSFB for short. I have lived inManchester, UK, for most of my adult life, drawn here by the desire to study Spanish (viaManchester Metropolitan University andUniversidad de Valladolid). I grew up inSkelmersdale, where both my parents worked in local politics and the community. I currently work as an IT professional forBarclays. 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 ofmy contributions!
In 2009 I founded theAthletics 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, includingtrack and field – aWikipedia 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 likeLon Myers (as well as every world and Olympic medallist), adding statistics such asnational record lists for all countries, and documenting nearly everyinternational competition of note. I am a strong believer in the power of theseinformal 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).
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 andwomen's sport. I joinedWikiProject 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 atWikidata. 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.
