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My name is Paul Wilkinson (not to be confused with the late political scientist or the former footballer) and I live in Blackheath, London in the Westcombe Park district of the Royal Borough of Greenwich. I have previously lived in other parts of London (including Kingsbury - where I was born - St John's Wood, Kilburn, Islington, Mile End, Kennington (in the Brandon Estate) and the Maze Hill district of Greenwich). Before adult life in London, I grew up in other parts of England - notably Nantwich in south Cheshire, and Leicester.
I started editing on 3 October 2003 (the first article I created was Greenwich Park), and have drifted away from time to time, only to find myself drawn back for sometimes quite intense periods of editing. My edits total passed the 10,000 mark in May 2009, 20,000 in February 2016, 30,000 in April 2018, 40,000 in May 2020, 50,000 in August 2021, then 60,000 just twelve months later[1] – I was clearly accelerating. I passed 70,000 edits in December 2023.
My interests mainly relate to:
- the geography and local history of places in south-east London, and the people associated with them (particularly civil engineers and architects, but also artists, writers, politicians and others)
- cycling (I am a former member of Crewe Clarion Wheelers, Zenith Road Club and Woolwich Cycling Club)
- football - I am a supporter of Crewe Alexandra, getting the club's article to Good Article status in July 2021. In late 2016, as the subject expanded beyond Crewe, I started the United Kingdom football sexual abuse scandal article. I have also extensively edited (200+ edits each) the Southend United, Bury, Macclesfield Town and Wigan Athletic articles, among others.
- social policy - I studied public administration at Leicester Polytechnic. I later volunteered and was a temporary publications worker at the Child Poverty Action Group.
- criminology - I have written about London prisons and about magistrates (I did a PhD - awarded 1993 - at London School of Economics on sentencing practice in English magistrates' courts, and once worked for the Magistrates' Association).
- construction - working in the construction industry (since 1987) often gets me delving into architecture and civil engineering, particularly tunnels, dams and bridges, both recent and historic, in the UK and overseas. More recently, I have tried to expand Wikipedia's coverage of industry membership and trade associations, and construction companies (contributing extensively to pages on Carillion and Interserve, among others) and have contributed on construction computing topics, such as building information modelling. Outside of Wikipedia, I have written a book and journal articles and I write a blog about certain niche areas of construction ICT; I was on the information systems panel of the Institution of Civil Engineers (2010-2020), a member of the Government & Industry Interoperability Group (2021-2023), and am currently a volunteer in the UK BIM Alliance - which rebranded as 'nima' in October 2022 (I became a vice-chair of nima in August 2023).
I worked for the Halcrow Group (1987- 1994), Tarmac Professional Services (1994-1998; TPS later formed part of Carillion) and BIW Technologies (2000-2009) as a marketing and PR professional (I am a Fellow and past council member of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations, and was a board director in 2016 and 2017). From 1998 to 2000 and since 2009, I have worked as an independent consultant. I have been a visiting lecturer at the University of Westminster (two short-term contracts in 2015-16 and 2016-17).
For disclosure purposes, I maintain a list of current and recent clients on my website (see External links below - look at my 'About' page). I have edited pages about my former employers (after I left their employment), and about organisations of which I am a member. There have been past occasions when I had conflicts of interest in editing articles, but as have I learned more about Wikipedia and as COI policies have developed, I have - I hope - learned where not to tread (or, at most, where to amend minor factual inaccuracies, revoke vandalism, and/or provide verifiable, independent references).
I am an occasional photographer and have contributed photographs to Wikimedia Commons (sometimes using the now-discontinued Flickr Upload Bot - now do so via Commons:Upload). I have also added Voice Intros to three biographies of living people.
