Stroika is from England, or loads of other places. If you leave him a message he will reply on your user page, unless otherwise asked. When he asks for help he always says thank you.
I was a Wikipedia reader first. I started editing because I was worried it was all take, take, take - and that seemed rude. So I signed up and tinkered here and there, removed some typos and corrected the odd bit of Latin. I even started one article (not counting redirects ect ect). If I had noticed the starry-eyed idealism before I signed up I might have steered well clear. From the sayings of James Donal Wales esq.: "Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing." Wikipedia is an attempt to get the monkeys to write Shakespeare. Not. Gonna. Happen.
Every article needs to be guarded from the malicious, the heedless and the ignorant. That's 1,221,050 articles and every single one needs to be guarded. All 1,221,253 of them. Yup you read that right 1,221,277 separate articles need to be protected from those who want to insert rubbish, those who don't know any better, and those who just don't know.
Lots of people believe - I mean they really believe - in this project. I don't.