User:EdwardRussell

A wikipedia enthusiast for many years, I am now interested in volunteering my time for editing. Particular areas of interest and knowledge are motorsports (particularly Formula One), British politics and Pure Mathematics, where I am primarily interested in Combinatorics. I also know TeX (LaTeX) and intend to use this where necessary to improve the typesetting within some mathematical articles. I am also interested in making contributions to articles relating to my home town of Ilfracombe, and the wider area of North Devon, in the English Westcountry, as well as in topics relating to my Alma Mater, the University of St Andrews and the actuarial profession, of which I am a member in the United Kingdom.

I believe that, largely due to the low prevalence of internet access across much of the continent; high-importance articles relating to many countries of Africa are severely under-developed. There is certainly evidence to support this view: for example, The Economist reported in March 2014 that "only 2.6% of geo-tagged articles are about Africa, which accounts for 14% of the world’s population". The uneven geograpical distribution of Wikipedia articles is in fact more stark than this, as was highlighted in a University of Oxford study. It is for this reason that I will focus on making contributions to articles within the Africa WikiProject, based on my ongoing research into these topics.

Major Contributions
Contributed the majority of the articles HIV/AIDS in Botswana and Education in Lesotho. Made major revisions to Ilfracombe and North Devon, as well as motorsports related articles, notably Gil de Ferran.

Articles which I intend to work on soon are:
 * Brighton and Hove - I was shocked at the quality of the economy section, which desperately needs re-writing following some research. I consider this to be high priority.
 * Fuel efficiency - I hope to make the article less US-centric, and update a lot of the information which is largely based on severely out of date articles, and in some cases from questionable sources, such as the Christian Science Monitor.
 * List of countries by electricity consumption - The article is hard to update due to the way the table is constructed. I hope to improve this structural problem, hopefully allowing others to better maintain the article into the future.
 * Formula E - The content of this article needs to be converted into prose.