Howdy. This is Emufarmers speaking: No need for any of that third-person rigmarole here.
The wiki is located at howdypedia.com.
I'll get straight to the point: The Howdypedia Crew is an extension of the people who develop the Howdypedia and its community (id est, IRC). It is also my private army. Bear both of these facts in mind.
There are no formalized requirements for joining the gang: It is invitation-only. However, because of the nature of the gang, certain persons have priority in terms of membership. In short, active contributors to the wiki and its community will probably be invited to join the gang. Thus, if you wish to join, the easiest way is to start editing the wiki productively and/or coming on IRC.
The rest of the members of the gang are friends or acquaintances of other members; they aren't necessarily involved in the Howdypedia community, but they have reasonable stats and produce a good number of aces, and thus contribute to the gang in a practical way.
Since we are in the Derringer weight class, the gang only has 20 membership slots. One of those slots is reserved for Wiki Cowpoke, and most of the others are already filled, so there isn't much room for people who can't pull their weight in some way.
If you ask me unbidden ingame I'll probably say no, but if you come on IRC, there's always a possibility.
There are three good answers to this question.
Our gang is the oldest in the game. Indeed, while gangs were released on March 30, 2007, our gang was created on February 3, 2007—almost two months earlier.
There's been a fair bit of misinformation spread on this subject, so I guess I should go ahead and explain what really happened. On December 31, 2006, my fellow Howdypedians and I discovered a way to gain access to the hideout and sheriff's office through reverse engineering the game files.
The hideout was essentially nonfunctional: I could see its interface, but the webserver for gang creation wasn't ready yet, so I couldn't actually do much. Similarly, there were no bounties at the sheriff's office (I figured out how to get them, but I still couldn't actually play them until they were officially released).
I went ahead and informed Sheriff Mike about this: He was surprisingly unperturbed by it; he said that it was alright to poke through the game files and report any potential issues.
Fast forward to February 3: There had been a patch just a few days earlier, and I reapplied my little tweak. This time, however, I found the gang creation process to be fully functional! I invited Conrad Istar, Folie A Deux, and Gender Neutral to the gang, and we played around with what was there. When we tried to go to ITP, however, to check out the hideout there, we got disconnected.
Soon, none of the people who had joined the gang could log in at all. I emailed Sheriff Mike again, and he said he would try to fix it, and to "look, not touch" in the future. We couldn't log in for several days until the next patch, but such is the risk run by those who tinker! When we were able to log into the game again, OOO had added a little check to keep us out of the hideout, although we were still able to add new members.
A later release added the gang membership indicator to wanted posters, so we got to show off our membership for a little while, and eventually the gangs were formally released.
The Howdypedia crew is comprised of good players. Really good players. At times, five out of the ten slots on the overall top ten list have been filled by Howdypedians, and the gang itself occupied the #1 slot until The Guardian Gang knocked us down to #2. (What can I say? They had 120 members, we have 20.) Our top-ranking members include Charlie Maddox, Conrad Istar, Wyndakatu (Folie A Deux), Treecamel, Joe Horn, Greeble, and Emufarmers Sangly (hey, that's me!).
Well, no, not really. We at Howdypedia believe in ethical hacking, and do our best to find any exploits or security holes and bring them to OOO's attention. (To their great credit, we have been able to find virtually no real exploits that would benefit a player; BH's client-server relationship is very well thought-out.)
Of course, the original reason for digging into the game files is for the betterment of the wiki, and finding things like the badge requirements has enabled us to avoid enormous volumes of laborious testing.
And yeah, we do show off a bit: From early gang membership to colored writing to the iconic purple hat, we see no need not to let others know who we are.
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