Singaporean Robert Sim receives one of Wikipedia's highest honours for his work on online platform

SINGAPORE — When Robert Sim first pressed the "edit" button on Wikipedia as a secondary school student in 2006, he was simply fixing spelling mistakes and broken links.

Nearly two decades later, the 37-year-old digital analytics consultant would go on to receive one of the online encyclopaedia movement's highest honours: the Wikimedian of the Year award.

Wikipedia, supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, is run and edited by volunteers.

The Wikimedia Foundation award was presented to Sim by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales on Aug 6 during the annual Wikimania event, which was held in Nairobi, Kenya.

"It's surreal," says Sim, who has made more than 79,000 edits to Wikipedia. "I didn't expect myself to be considered in the first place."

Sim tells The Straits Times that he started getting serious about contributing to the platform only in 2019. Back then, he noticed that many Singapore-related articles were outdated, frozen in time after an initial wave of enthusiasm to create entries in the 2000s had fizzled out.

One of his key achievements was updating the "Index of Singapore-related articles". Running a custom script to consolidate them, what he initially thought would be 7,000 articles jumped to more than 11,000 — which meant Singapore's editors had their work cut out for them.

Today, that index stands at over 14,000 articles, a modest slice of the over seven million articles on English Wikipedia. Sim, a Singapore Management University graduate, estimated spending around 10 hours a week to edit Wikipedia.

His other achievements include helping to launch the Wikimedians of Singapore User Group — which organises meet-ups for local editors — co-creating the Wikimania conference in Singapore in 2023, and becoming one of English Wikipedia's now-837 administrators in 2024.

While the editors here sometimes have in-person meet-ups, Sim says the usual profile of a Wikipedia editor is an introvert — meaning that much of his or her interactions take place online over messaging platforms Telegram and Discord.

Though now lauded for his Singapore-related editing, one of the articles that first got him "hooked" on Wikipedia was the page for K-pop singer Goo Hara. The star's death in 2019 sparked public outcry, activism and legislative changes in South Korea — a legacy that Sim was keen to capture in her page.

He spent two years meticulously improving the article and updating its sources before it achieved "Good Article" status, a designation used by Wikipedia for articles that are well-written, verifiable and have undergone peer review.

He was also the user who first created the article for the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation (Pofma) Act. This led to one humorous exchange in 2023 when someone asked him if he knew about Pofma by sharing a link to the Wikipedia article.

"Yeah, I wrote this article," Sim quipped at the time.

In Sim's eyes, the online encyclopaedia — which turns 25 in 2026 — has only grown over the decades since its inception. The site now represents "the first log of information in our world", says Sim, being one of the most frequent top search results that one sees when googling any subject.

"It's like a window, a snapshot of what the world understands," he adds.

Still, gaps remain on the website. For one, much of the public does not understand how reliant on volunteers Wikipedia is.

"You mean we can edit on Wikipedia?" is one response that Sim says he often encounters when discussing the platform with others. "The more people that we have contributing on Wikipedia, the more complete the information that we have."

For those interested in contributing, Sim's advice is to start small by amending errors when they see it. Those who prefer not to write can also find other ways to contribute, such as uploading photos on Wikimedia Commons, a repository of freely usable media files, so that images can be used on articles and elsewhere.

One such picture was even used during the Aug 17 National Day Rally.

When Prime Minister Lawrence Wong made mention of a time when young Singaporeans would visit Changi Airport to watch planes as a pastime, the image used was first uploaded by a Wikimedia Commons user named Sengkang in 2005.

According to Wikimedia Statistics, Singapore ranked eighth globally for English-language Wikipedia in pageviews in July. With 101 million views, the Republic trailed behind the United States, United Kingdom, India, Canada, Australia, Germany and Brazil.

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This article was first published in The Straits Times. Permission required for reproduction.