Hello. My activities on Wikipedia split into professional and recreational spheres. At work, I'm a Professor inhealth informatics (work website here), specialising inconsumer health informatics, which includes researchon Wikipedia.
Much of my editing is because I'm a fan ofYes and otherprog rock, or from an interest in politics, particularly in the UK.
Some of my research has beenon Wikipedia. This study, byUser:Hydra Rain and I, used a questionnaire and interviews with individuals who had edited a random sample of health-related articles on Wikipedia. It was published in 2014 asFarič, N; Potts, HWW (2014-12-03)."Motivations for Contributing to Health-Related Articles on Wikipedia: An Interview Study".Journal of Medical Internet Research.16 (12): e260.doi:10.2196/jmir.3569.ISSN 1438-8871.PMC 4275502.PMID 25498308.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: unflagged free DOI (link)A conference paper was presented in the previous year asFaric, Nusa, Potts, Henry."Motivations for Contributing to Health-Related Articles on Wikipedia: An Interview Study".PMID 25498308. Retrieved16 June 2014.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) Hydra Rain has written blog posts about the study for Wikimedia Foundationhere and Wikimedia UKhere.
I also worked with Hydra Rain andUser:Doc James on a new study atdoi:10.2196/47562{{doi}}: unflagged free DOI (link) on the gender balance of medical articles on Wikipedia, alsopresented at Wikimania 2024.
My research more generally is on digital health, although I also work on pandemics, like COVID-19.
While I am very interested as a researcher in health-related topics on Wikipedia, I only do sporadic editing in this area. Pages I've created includeAtypical Canine Infectious Respiratory Disease Complex and the relatedIOLA KY405,science policy of the second Donald Trump administration,Center of Excellence in Regulatory Science and Innovation,boundary object,threshold knowledge,Dr Foster,transmural care,secondary research,forest plot,juvenile osteoporosis,habit formation,Wendy Savage,Hadiza Bawa-Garba case,Hedgehog coronavirus 1,Beluga whale coronavirus SW1,timeline of the 2022 monkeypox outbreak,contagious reticulum cell sarcoma,randomised non-comparative trial,student selected component andtheograph. I've also been working one-health andcoproxamol.
I've also reviewed two books forWikipedia Signpost:see here andhere.
I am best known online for myYesnews website and I have created a number of pages tangentially related to the band includingMartyn Adelman,Deborah Anderson,Jade Anderson,Aviv Geffen,Badger (band),Andrew Booker,Angels Embrace,Gonzalo Carrera,Change We Must,Crimson Jazz Trio,Crossover,Brian Davison,Deseo,Jeffrey Fayman,Colin Gibson (musician),GPS (band) (originallyOne (rock band)),Jakko Jakszyk,Luis Jardim,Jimmy Haun,Trevor Horn discography,Dylan Howe,Virgil Howe,Andrew Jackman,Henry Pryce Jackman,Jeremy Jackman,Lee Jackson,Jackson Heights (band),Gerard Johnson,Ronnie Leahy,The Lemon Trees,Stephen Lipson,Lost Tapes of Opio,Milton McDonald,Lou Molino III,Jamie Muhoberac,Christian Nesmith,Phil Palmer,Mike Paxman,Pete Roth Trio,Ponder the Mystery,Qango,Return To The Dark Side Of The Moon,Jay Schellen,Michael Sherwood,Jeremy Stacey,Paul Stacey,Trevor Thornton,Toltec,Trouble in Paradise,Tim Weidner,World Trade andYoso. I've also made significant contributions toAsia (band),Peter Banks,The Buggles,Circa:,CIRCA: 2007,David Cross (musician),Geoff Downes,Michael Giles,Tony Kaye,Igor Khoroshev,Pete Kirtley, "The Land of Make Believe",List of progressive rock supergroups,The Original Bootleg Series from the Manticore Vaults: Volume One,John Payne (singer),Producers (for which I added my first ever picture),ProjeKct One,ProjeKct Two,ProjeKcts,Refugee (band),Ramshackled,Symphonic Music of Yes,Ash Soan,The Syn,Ultimate Zero - The Best Of The U-Z Project Live,Ian Wallace,Alan Whiteetc. etc. My biggest projects here have been creatingConspiracy (band) and re-creating/rescuingDel Palmer.
In part spurred on byPip Pyle's death in August 2006, I did a lot of work on bands in theCanterbury scene, including creatingLaurie Allan,Mireille Bauer,Doug Boyle,Brainville,Clive Brooks,Jeff Clyne,Mark Ellidge,Miquette Giraudy,Alan Gowen,Mark Hewins,Brian Hopper,In Cahoots,Isotope (band),Ian Knight,Tony Levin (drummer),Mashu,Mirage (band),Benoît Moerlen,Francis Moze,Neville Whitehead (bassist),François Ovide,Geoff Richardson,Soft Heap (band) (andSoft Head),Trevor Tomkins andAlan Wakeman. I have made significant contributions toCaravan of Dreams (band),Canterbury Scene andCategory:Canterbury scene,Delivery,Hatfield and the North,Pip Pyle,Dave Stewart (musician) andThe Wrong Object. My biggest project here has been creatingGilgamesh (band).
I've also done some other prog rock/jazz-related pages, creatingMarc Bonilla,Bob Drake (musician),Kit Downes,Hail (band),Paul K. Joyce,Led Bib,Golden,Susanne Lewis,New Prog,Joe Porcaro,Rarities Volumes 1 & 2,Akira Sakata,Hideo Shiraki,Asaf Sirkis,Azalia Snail,Stick Men,Andy Tillison andFee Waybill; and considerably expandingPure Reason Revolution andChloe Alper. Most notable here is creatingBiota (band).
I also created "2 Phút Hơn",Pikki Pikki dance and "W.I.T.C.H.", having a strange interest in music popular on Tiktok.
I've created pages for fourDoctor Who authors:Mark Clapham,Rebecca Levene,Eddie Robson andSimon Winstone. Particular books I have worked on includeAnachrophobia,Combat Rock (Doctor Who),Deadfall (Bernice Summerfield),Just War (Doctor Who),The Mary-Sue Extrusion,Oh No It Isn't!,Peculiar Lives,Walking to Babylon andGenius Loci. Related articles to which I have made significant contributions includeAndrew Cartmel,Jason Kane (Doctor Who),Joseph Lidster,Judge Dredd,List of Bernice Summerfield characters,Paul Magrs,Martha Jones,Bernice Summerfield,Human Nature (Doctor Who episode) and theTenth Doctor Adventures. Also in the world ofDoctor Who, I've createdNida Manzoor,Cath Tregenna andJamie Mathieson and significantly contributed toDoctor Who,Out of Time (Torchwood),Smith and Jones (Doctor Who) andJudoon.
Pages I have made significant contributions to include...
... and many others, but I've done most onUnited Kingdom Alternative Vote referendum, 2011,United Kingdom general election, 2015 and2019 European Parliament election in the United Kingdom.
I've also created2023 Rutherglen and Hamilton West recall petition,2024 Social Democratic and Labour Party leadership election,2025 Runcorn and Helsby recall petition,2028 London mayoral election,apparentment,Bright Future (Iceland),Commons Privileges Committee investigation into Boris Johnson,Miranda Grell,United Democratic Party (Republic of Korea),Left List/Left Alternative,Brendan Donnelly,Jonathan Bell,Mats Löfström,Operation Branchform,Caroline Pidgeon,panachage,Poland is the Most Important,Garden House riot,UK Parliamentary by-elections,Dominic Carman,Wythenshawe and Sale East by-election, 2014,An Independence from Europe,Opinion polling in individual constituencies for the next United Kingdom general election,Independent Assessment of Paramilitary Organisations,Next Stretford and Urmston by-election,Mark Pack andCaroline Woodley.
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The most successful page I created was365 Dni, which racked up over a million views in a week. Other pages I've created include1356 Lisbon earthquake,Almost Naked Party,Ancoracysta twista,Bashplemi lake tablet,Buddy Bradley (choreographer),Benjamin Cavet,Caroline Deys,Emily Georgiana Kemp,Nelson's Small-eared Shrew,Betty Neels,Gillian Linscott,Peter Diggory,Malcolm Potts,Stephen Peet,Otis Ferry,mBlox,Centre of Excellence,Horace Sewell,Elo Sambo,Trigoides,Michael Rooney,Coxoplectoptera,No Offence,Object Z,Snake River Plains ground squirrel,Stepan Charnetsky,Sunda clouded leopard (a.k.a.Bornean clouded leopard),WCMX (sport),Nida Manzoor,Lóxoro,Japantown, Salt Lake City andJeff (comics character). I've also significantly contributed toOlinguito,Meredith Ostrom,Controversies at the 2012 Summer Olympics andMichelle Leonard.
I createdLondon Britannia Airport in 2013 and that...
 | On19 November 2013,Did you know? was updated with a fact from the articleLondon Britannia Airport, which you created or substantially expanded. The fact was... that the proposedLondon Britannia Airport has been dubbed "Boris island" by the media? The nomination discussion and review may be seen atTemplate:Did you know nominations/London Britannia Airport. You are welcome to check how many hits the article got while on the front page(here's how,quick check) and it will be added toDYKSTATS if it got over 5,000. If you know of another interesting fact from a recently created article, then please suggest it on theDid you know? talk page. |
I createdJewish Indian theory in 2022 and that also made DYK on 16 September 2022.
... but haven't edited (much):Advogato,WP:SUP,Molly Pitcher.
I'm also interested in the idea of theWikipedia:Intensive Care Unit. An important AfD ruling is atWikipedia:Articles for deletion/University of Florida Taser incident.WP:COI#How to handle conflicts of interest is another important piece of policy around deletion debates: it explicity discourages use of the term "vanity". Useful policy:WP:TPO
I have some interest in the question of whether members of the band of a 'solo act' count as notable, as I thinkWP:BAND provides insufficient guidance on this point. I suggest that a regular member of a solo act's band should count the same as a regular member of any other band. Three past AfDs that are relevant here are:Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Barney James,Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Del Palmer (second nomination),Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Evan Taubenfeld.
Other things I may want to reference:Wikipedia:Templates_for_discussion/Log/2012_October_8#Template:DWspinoff;Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2018 March 11;Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of people with coronavirus disease 2019
Sue Gardner's blog on expertise and transgendered issues:[1]
National electoral calendar 2014
ThePotts family inEmmerdale are named after me.
Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Elections_and_Referendums#RfC_on_leader_since_election_infobox_parameter
Ida B. Wells and her use of statistics inThe Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States
The following notes were inspired by a discussion onOpinion polling for the next United Kingdom general election, but I am including them here for potential more general usage.
Margin of error is a familiar term in opinion polling, but often a misunderstood one. Statisticians usually talk about a related concept, theconfidence interval. A poll is based on a sample from a population: we use the proportion in the poll supporting party X (or whatever) to estimate the proportion doing so in the population. But that estimate won't be spot on because ofsampling error. Assuming we have sampled well (meaning randomly), the sample proportion is an estimate of the population proportion, with the confidence interval/margin of error describing the precision of that estimate. A 95% confidence interval is defined such that the confidence interval for the sample estimate will include the true (population) value 95% of the time. (We can also calculate 99% confidence intervals, or 80% confidence intervals, or whatever, but we usually just use 95%.) The margin of error is then half the confidence interval, so a value may be reported as 40% ± 3% (margin of error), meaning the confidence interval is 37%-43%. This means the true valuecould be outside that range, but usually (95% of the time), the interval will capture the true value. The only problem is we can't tell from a single poll whether it's one where we were unlucky and the confidence interval doesn't capture the true result.
The precise calculation of confidence intervals is a large topic. However, if we presume a proper sampling technique, for large samples, of large populations, the margin of error for a proportion can be easily calculated: seemargin of error for details.
The margin of error and confidence interval vary with the sample size. The details depend on what you are doing, but generally the margin of error is inversely proportional to the square root of the sample size. (Thus, to get half the margin of error, you need four times the sample size.) Most political opinion polls are done on a similar number of people (so as to achieve a suitably small margin of error), but some are bigger or smaller, so you need to see what margin of error is reported for each poll, or do the maths yourself.
The margin of error for a proportion, like vote share, also depends on the vote share. We get better estimates of proportions near 0% and 100% than in the middle. The margin of error is smaller for a party with a vote share of 10% (or 90%) than one on 50%. The margin of error quoted is, thus, usually the maximum margin of error at 50%.
So, consider the following examples. AtOpinion polling for the next United Kingdom general election, there is a poll by Survation done on 5 Jan 2013 with a sample of 790[2], and another by YouGov done on 5-6 Oct 2011 of 2723 (link broken). We can calculate the maximum margin of error for each of these: for the Survation poll, it is 3.49%, but just 1.88% for the YouGov poll. Remember: not all polls have the same margin of error.
Now let's consider the 21-2 Dec 2011 YouGov poll of 1721 people[3]. This puts the Conservatives on 40% and the Liberal Democrats on 9%. I note the YouGov pdf doesn't even give the margin of error, but we can work it out. Thus, the maximum margin of error is 2.36%, but the margin of error for the Conservative vote is 2.31% and for the Liberal Democrat vote, a mere 1.42%.
With me so far? Good. Because it gets more complicated. Often, we're interested in the difference between two parties,e.g. the lead Labour may have over the Conservatives. We could look at the margin of error for each party, but the margin of error for the difference requires a separate calculation: seeMargin of error#Comparing percentages. So, let's take the 18-9 Dec 2011 YouGov poll, again on 1721 people, so we know the maximum margin of error is 2.36%. The Conservatives are on 38% and Labour are on 42%, so the difference between them is 4%, larger than the maximum margin of error. But the margin of error of the difference between the two parties is 4.22%, bigger than the difference between them.
Often, we have more than one poll, at which point we can consider combining multiple polls. When we do that, we're effectively making the sample size bigger, so the margin of error falls. If we have, say, 5 polls within a few days and they all show two parties within the margin of error, the combination of all 5, by reducing the margin of error, may show the two parties as being significantly different. See[4] and[5] for details.
This all, of course, presumes the polling was done well. The margin of error only considers the sampling error under certain assumptions. In practice, polls are usually less accurate because of methodological challenges in doing them right: see[6] for discussion. Some polling strategies appear to be generally more reliable than others. Thus, in the UK, phone polls appear to perform better than online polls.
Useful cite:[7]
There are many long-standing and deep-rooted issues with Wikipedia coverage of articles pertaining toDoctor Who. I have been guilty of these as well. There is much interesting and entertaining material that would appear better suited to something like the TARDIS wikia, but which does not meet Wikipedia's policy and standards. Here are some developing notes on what I see as the core matters.
Notes:Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of Doctor Who historical characters
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