From April 2015 to March 2016, I am the Wikimedian In Residence at the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford. The project page is at Wikipedia:GLAM/Bodleian. This means I use this account for paid editing as well as for volunteer editing.
My main interest is in promoting critical and scientific thinking. I am a logician by background, but since my doctorate I have been expanding my expertise to include cognitive and social psychology.
I'm an Integrationist: one of the reasons WP has millions of articles is that there are sometimes five different articles on the same topic.
Interview with TheNextWeb.com, published as "Wikimedia UK to Hire Full-Time Staff, Aims to Increase Content Quality on Wikipedia", 19 April 2011
Interview with The Times, published as part of a feature article about the public’s use of Wikipedia and other online sources to learn about cancer, 4 April 2011
A guest post on the Intute blog from when I was just starting to "get" Wikipedia: Voluntary work for an obscure educational charity, December 2009. Intute (RIP) was a publicly-funded web portal for academic research, teaching and learning.
Areas of activity
I only rarely create new articles, usually in an attempt to counter systemic bias:
Confirmation bias: This article was actually misleading in August 2009, when I began a total rewrite. I took it to Featured Article status (and the Wikipedia front page) in July 2010.
Heuristics in judgment and decision making: A high-importance new article, on a topic that's central to behavioral economics and to a lot of psychology, that I'm going to take as far up the quality scale as I can.
Illusion of control: I've done some rewording here but there is a lot more that could be done.
I run a site/ media archive about Scientology, from a critical perspective, which I won't link here because it contains potential WP:COPYVIO material. My opinions about the topic, I keep to my own site. Here on WP, I'm interested in raising the quality of certain articles:
Xenu: I was very active in making improvements to this article when it was put up for Featured Article Review, which it passed on 5 December 2008.
Disconnection: A large proportion of the content of this page is due to me. At the moment it's a large unstructured stream of instances, which could benefit from better structure.
Non-fiction book: Bare-faced Messiah: I was a major contributor to this article which, after further major improvements by User:Prioryman, passed Good Article review.
For your amazing work on the Xenu article. Thank you for helping to keep it at the highest quality rating on the English Wikipedia - Featured Article quality status. Cirt (talk) 03:00, 6 December 2008 (UTC)
The Copyeditor's Barnstar
For your help in copyediting the Nobel Prize. Esuzu (talk • contribs) 20:09, 18 May 2010 (UTC)
I, -- Cirt (talk), award The Editor's Barnstar to MartinPoulter, for excellent efforts contributing to bringing the article L. Ron Hubbard to Featured Article quality status. Well done! Wikipedia is enhanced and the community benefits from your successful efforts to improve the quality of articles on this project. Cheers, -- Cirt (talk) 16:35, 6 March 2011 (UTC)
The Psychology Barnstar
I, Smallman12q, hereby award MartinPoulter the Psychology Barnstar for his excellent article on confirmation bias. Thank you!Smallman12q (talk) 01:13, 23 July 2010 (UTC)
For the man who contributes so much in this field.Fainitesbarleyscribs 18:52, 12 April 2011 (UTC)
The Real-Life Barnstar
For contributions to and organisation of various Wikimedia events in the UK — Rodtalk 21:14, 3 November 2013 (UTC)
The Real Life Barnstar
Thank you, Martin, for doing the great presentation at Worldcon in London. I was nice to meet you there. Sydney Poore/FloNight♥♥♥♥ 06:19, 20 September 2014 (UTC)