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I've made a start on an introduction to population processes, and, if you look at the wiki text, there's a comment paragraph outlining my intentions for the rest of the article.

I currently intend to structure the article around a treatment of birth, death and catastrophe processes (since these are the simplest analytically tractable examples of population processes). This will, I hope, be built from a look first at the idea of birth-death processes, then adding catastrophic events.

On the whole, since population processes are best discussed (I think) by analogy to biological populations, I have been thinking that it will be best to proceed by giving first an informal treatment of the concepts, then a formal mathematical definition.

Finally, it may, one day, be necessary to divide this page up into its constituent parts and fill in those empty links above (might redirect them for now), but it might as well be in one place for now, until the body of articles on related topics grows.

Finally, I look forward to the contributions of other interested Wikipedians!

--Ben Cairns 12:21 3 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I'm probably done with this article for now. After a little longer as a Wikipedian, I am now of the opinion that this article will probably be sufficient for the time being. Anyone who is sufficiently interested in extending it should, of course, do so!

--Ben Cairns