WikiSim at BigMathsJam 2025
A transcript¹ of a BigMathsJam presentation in November 2025 about WikiSim.
Hi welcome to WikiSim My name is James or AJP WikiSim is a public space for data, calculations and simulations It's a Wikipedia for imagining futures that actually add up So as an example of this is a question that my friend added last weekend Which is how many neurologists do we need to meet UK government healthcare guidelines So if you click on that link you will go to this page And as it says here it is still a draft a work in progress because it only has one condition in it at the moment But for that one condition we would need 65 full time neurologists And this calculation is referencing various other bits of data So how many people are diagnosed with this condition in the UK every day and it's about 19 how many people in the UK have this condition it's about 150,000 And how often per year should they be reviewed so it's once per year There are a couple of other data points in here as well so new appointment length of 30 minutes so that's how long they should be seen initially and then the follow up appointment length of 15 minutes so once per year they should be seen for 15 minutes and you or a politician or a political assistant might come to this page and say "Well you know what? That 30 minute initial appointment... that's too short. It should be 60 minutes." And now the number you would need of full time neurologists goes up to 71. And maybe that's an ok policy. Maybe that works. What about this 15 minutes "Nah that's too short. It should be 30 minutes once per year." Now you'd need 130 neurologists. Now we only have 850 or so neurologists in the UK Maybe you could make that work maybe you could re-prioritise and make other conditions be seen less but at least you have a very quick way of sense checking whether a policy actually makes sense or not And so this brings us onto the first why of WikiSim? It is to help our leaders avoid writing cheques they can't cash So to make it easier for us and for them to figure out what's going on and what kind of plans will actually add up. When these calculations get too complex or they start feeding back into themselves maybe they're unintuitive or you want to visualise them this is when you could start wrapping them in a visualisation or a simulation And so this is an example of Energy Explorer This is still a prototype so some things aren't yet correct in it like the cost and it doesn't factor in the grid But if you click play it will load up and it will show you this screen here So we're just going to select the UK and whilst this is loading up the data I'll just explain the motivation for this So I had been having various conversations with people over the last maybe 5 years And some saying "Solar is amazing! It can do everything." And others saying "Solar is useless! I don't know why we're build it." And I'm like "Well, I don't know what the answer is." So let's just get the data together and get a rough ballpark figure for what that answer would be. Is it [solar] useful? Is it not useful. And the same for wind as well And so here you've got the real demand data for the whole of 2018 for the UK So the amount of electricity that was being used per hour As well as how much energy you would get by building a wind turbine in different places So here we've put down two 20 gigawatt arrays Which might seem like a lot but we've actually already got 30 installed in the UK And we've also put down quite a lot of pumped storage, pumped hydro storage But here you can see the day is now dawning And this is how much energy you would have got from solar throughout that day And the same for wind this is what would happen if you had built a wind turbine in different locations So this brings us onto the second why of wikisim Which is, just to help reduce the noise reduce the temperature and increase convergence between groups which are otherwise quite far apart In this case I gave it to people who were saying "Solar is useless and it can't do anything!" And other people who were saying "Solar is amazing. And it can do everything" And without me saying anything they played it for 5-10 minutes and then they came much more into the middle Solar, yeah, it's good at some stuff during the summer and during the winter yeah, it's a lot harder to use solar. But I didn't tell them what to think They just had 5 minutes of playing, it was fun it was fact driven let's do more of that. So please get involved It's at WikiSim.org You can add data and calculations that's easy or very easy. You can build a simulation that's quite a bit harder. Or you can help build WikiSim itself. Thank you very much.
Notes
¹ This is the transcript of a re-recording of the original talk.