User:Ddstretch

Specific Wikipedia Activities

On Wikipedia
Here is my first edit.


 * Significant work to articles:
 * Founding, active membership, and contributions to the Cheshire WikiProject
 * Created and contribute to the Cheshire Portal.
 * Created many templates in use by the Cheshire WikiProject
 * Creation of Hundreds of Cheshire, Ancient parishes of Cheshire
 * Substantial Additions to Haslington, Church Lawton, and others.
 * Expansion to Barthomley, Crewe Green, and others.
 * Created numerous stub articles for civil parishes in Cheshire (all districts).
 * Minor Edits to the Changsha and Zhangjiajie entries.
 * Added material to the Smallthorne entry.
 * Added material to the Stoke-on-Trent entry

I am an administrator, having become one on 6 June 2008 (see my RfA nomination and process here.) However, I have had a break from being an admin: I resigned that position on 10 March 2009, but applied for and got admin status back on 25 December 2012, once myself and my family had successfully re-located to China.I am now starting to increase my contributions to wikipedia again.

I edit now from two major locations in quite different parts of the world, depending on where I am at the time. I edit from machines on my local network in the UK, which is where I now primarily live, but I also edit from a PC within China. In the case of China, this means that I sometimes cannot access sites (including wikipedia) because of the blocks that constitute "The Great Firewall". In those situation, if my need is to access something quickly, I will fall back on using a paid-for VPN service. This means that the IPs I seem to access Wikipedia from need not always accurately give my location. I may make use of servers in a variety of countries that allow me the quickest access at the time. I usually continue to access the Internet with these links for the remainder of a session once it has connected, though there may be occasions when I switch the VPN service off, apparently then changing countries or continents very quickly if one uses the IP address solely to determine where I am editing from.

For the benefits of the curious. My family lives in China, because they are Chinese citizens, but visa restrictions imposed by UK governments mean they can no longer live with me in the UK (though they were able to do so before), and I live in the UK because I now have a chronic health condition that can only be adequately managed if I live in the UK (though I could easily live permanently in China, but for this).

Elsewhere

 * Writing &mdash; Academic Research Articles (particularly in measurement theory some may know as "axiomatic measurement theory" within psychology, and the formal bases of research design and the research process in psychology); Writing about various failures of reason apparent in areas of "alternative medicine" or "complementary medicine", normally involving a misunderstanding of the scientific processes, and the pervasive nature of psychological effects that are often insufficiently controlled, if at all, in research in this area; Science Fiction, and a semi-regular column (in Chinese) for a Chinese magazine;
 * Academic Research: since taking early retirement, I have continued to engage in academic research. The areas that I have continued to research in are ones I have chosen not to edit extensively here on wikipedia, though I have sometimes carried out minor editing. The areas include: Informal logic and Argumentation Theory, Mathematical psychology, Psychological and Psychiatric research methods and statistics (e.g., Research, Psychological research methods), and Philosophy of Science. This work has focussed on the issues of evidence, argument from evidence, and the nature of the evidence-based research processes in the psychological and psychiatric sciences using (a) a formal logical/mathematical structure informed by various areas with applied mathematics dealing with measurement, category theory, and mathematical logic, and (b) an appreciation of ideas from within philosophy of science, epistemology, and philosophical logic, argumentation theory and informal logic particularly with the issue of writing persuasive material.
 * Music Composition;
 * Gardening;
 * Walking; and
 * Watercolour Painting

Other Information
Born in 1953 in Cheshire, UK.

Degrees from Welsh (Bangor), Scottish (Stirling), and English (Birmingham) Universities.

'''My eyesight is not good, and is deteriorating, so I may sometimes miss elementary errors in edits I make. I apologize in advance for this.'''

WikiProject Membership
I am a member of the following WikiProjects:


 * Cheshire
 * UK Geography
 * UK Subdivisions
 * Rational Skepticism

Useful pages

 * Stub templates
 * Template messages
 * User talk messages (often about disruptive behaviour), multi
 * User talk messages(often about disruptive behaviour), single
 * The main category
 * WP:5P
 * WP:Reckless or WP:Be Bold
 * WP:BLUDGEON
 * Statistics about parishes, etc

Useful additional formatting, etc resources when writing articles

 * How to edit a page
 * Manual of Style
 * Compass Table

Other useful tools

 * Displays edits and summary tables, graphs of edits for a user
 * Tool to display how many times a page has been viewed
 * summary of my edits

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