Meet the Nunavut grandpa who has made over 250,000 Wikipedia edits

Whether you know it or not, you're probably familiar with the work of Alan Sim.

The Cambridge Bay, Nunavut resident has made over 250,000 — and counting — edits to Wikipedia articles. He's edited just about every article on the site relating to the Northwest Territories or Nunavut.

His contributions range from starting the Wikipedia entry on Kátł'odeeche First Nation, making sure that all different spellings of the Inuktut word amauti direct people to the same page, and adding an article for every single airport in the North.

He has also become one of only 440 active Wikipedia editors in the world trusted with administrator access to English-language articles.

"I'm hoping that people will find what I've put on there interesting," he said. "They'll learn something about the North, I hope."

Sim, 68, grew up in the United Kingdom, and entered the workforce during a serious economic downtown. He originally moved to Canada because he was struggling to find work in the U.K.

"It ended up a choice between coming to the Arctic or going to Australia and living on a sheep farm," he said.  "I wasn't sure I really liked sheep that much."

It ended up being a good decision — he has lived in N.W.T. and Nunavut for almost 50 years.

Sim's first job in Canada was at the Hudson's Bay Company in Taloyoak in 1978. After a year there, he moved to Ulukhaktok, where he met his wife and got married. He lived there for 19 years before moving to Cambridge Bay, where he has lived ever since. He and his wife have since divorced, but his grandkids and extended family are almost all still in Cambridge Bay.

Sim discovered Wikipedia in 2005, while looking for online articles to read on his palm pilot.

"I sort of look at it and think, maybe they can't be serious that people can just do what they want with it, edit it," he said, recalling.

So he created a username — CambridgeBayWeather, in honour of his job working at the weather station in the local airport — and tried it out.

Almost as soon as he signed up, he started spending hours each day on the site.

His first project was to try and add a Wikipedia page for every airport in Canada, no matter how small. Then he moved on to weather monitoring equipment.