Singaporean receives one of Wikipedia's highest honours

When Mr 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.

- Teo Kai Xiang

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 is run and edited by volunteers. The non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, a separate entity, supports it.

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

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

Mr 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 Back then, he noticed that many Singapore-related articles were outdated, frozen in time after an initial wave of enthusiasm to create entries in the 2000s fizzled out.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.