I am Rich Wales, a retired computer systems analyst and network security expert living in California, USA.

    To the best of my knowledge, I am not related to Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales. My "Wales" ancestors lived in Redruth, Cornwall, England, and emigrated to northern California in the 19th century. Other ancestors of mine came from France (via Quebec), Norway, and the Ashkenazi Jewish population of Germany and Poland. I am a descendant of three Mayflower passengers — Edward Fuller, his wife (whose name is lost to history), and their young son Samuel.

I have been a Wikipedian since March 2005. The majority of my Wikipedia edits have involved the following topics:

• immigration and citizenship issues
• religion
• post-World War II Eastern Europe
• science fiction
• languages and linguistics
• history of Stanford University, my alma mater

Although the bulk of my work has been here, in the English Wikipedia, I have also made about 130 edits in the Romanian Wikipedia.

    In addition to a lot of "gnoming" and a modest amount of content creation, I try to spend time periodically reviewing new pages and articles proposed for deletion, as well as finding and fixing unconstructive editing (both good-faith mess-ups and outright vandalism). I have also been involved in various administrative roles on Wikipedia, such as:

• Administrator (Sep. 2011 – present)
• Oversight team member (Nov. 2014 – present)
• Sockpuppet investigations clerk (Feb. 2013 – Dec. 2024; on hiatus after Sep. 2018)
• Audit Subcommittee member (May 2013 – Aug. 2014)
• Ombudsman Commission member (Feb. 2017 – Feb. 2018)

I have received university degrees from Stanford and UCLA in mathematics, music, and computer science. A strong side interest of mine throughout my life has been linguistics. At various times during my life, I have studied Spanish, French, German, Norwegian, Czech, Hebrew, Hungarian, Romanian, Latin, and (most recently) Georgian — though, regrettably, I am not fluent in any of them. I have also studied phonetics, and I have been known to drive people crazy at times when I comment on minute details of their speech that they weren't aware of and "can't hear" despite my attempts at explanation.

    In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I wrote three spec scripts for Star Trek: The Next Generation and submitted them through an agent to the producers of the show, but none of them were accepted.

    Although I grew up in California, I lived in Ontario, Canada for several years during the mid-1990s, and I am a dual citizen of the USA (by birth) and Canada (by naturalization) — hence my long-standing interest in immigration and citizenship matters. While living in Canada (and intending at the time to stay there permanently), I lost my native California accent so thoroughly that even after moving back to the US, I never could manage to get it back (and eventually just gave up trying). This is also why I routinely use Canadian spelling (a compromise of sorts between British and American standards) — though I am still able to write 100% American English, with effort, where necessary.

    I am a believing, practising member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (commonly known as the "Mormon" or "LDS" church). Essentially all of my editing activity in the Romanian Wikipedia has involved the Church's article on that site. I have also been paying attention to the Church's article on the Georgian Wikipedia, and although I lack sufficient ability in Georgian to be able to work on that article directly, I managed to find a native speaker of Georgian who was willing and able to replace a very poor-quality, biased article (copied from an anti-Mormon source) with a brief, reasonably neutral piece. I am committed to the idea that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints should be treated in a balanced and even-handed fashion on Wikipedia — neither smeared nor whitewashed — in keeping with the "neutral point of view" policy.