An innocent-enough question on the demographics of WMUK's membership has led me a merry dance so far. I'm sharing it with this list since it seems interesting in its own right, and (judging by chat at Sunday's meetup) someone may well know more than I do about it.
The idea is to start with postcodes, rounded off like CB2, for each member, and then do a graphical plot. Since the so-called postcode centroids are well known data, that part isn't hard. But the big urban areas will not be clearly represented. The key word here seems to be "cartogram": see WP article. What I really would like is a "population cartogram", of area type, so a smoothing out of population density to be more even in a distorted map. There are examples as Figure 9 and Figure 10 in http://www.statistics.gov.uk/downloads/theme_population/SMPS58.pdf Those, though, are not based on postcode areas, but on census data done by wards. Anyone (I'm sure we have some experts) on the list who understands the point here? Locating the postcode centroids within their census ward, once an for all, (i.e. just some matching that may have been done already) looks to be enough for the basic purpose of displaying membership data to find clusters. Alternatively some sort of population cartogram based on postcode areas could do it. Doesn't look like rocket science. Locating the postcode centroid by district so that the Figure 10 map of the PDF could be used as a basis could be done with the list on the next page (p. 24 of document). Comments, please. Charles _______________________________________________ Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediau...@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org
