Crickel was born on September 28, 1978, and is a security analyst working for a large managed co-location hosting provider in the Midwest. After lurking on Wikipedia for several years and relying on it heavily for reference material, he began actively contributing to the community in February of 2009. He is a strong proponent of 'What Wikipedia is not' and believes that the usage of bots to add thousands of stub articles from primary sources (such as geographic locations from atlases) without human review or input has damaged the usability of Wikipedia, particularly where these articles contain one or no references.
Crickel's favorite page on Wikipedia is Special:Random.