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Sunday, November 2, 2014

GSoW on the Move - Sept-Oct 2014 updates

Many great things have happened in the last couple months, lots of work getting done as you will see below in a few minutes. Make sure you check the before and after's on each of these rewrites, you will be amazed.

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I have been honored by parapsychologist Rupert Sheldrake by placing me on his list of Who's Who in media skeptics.  I'm not sure what that means, but heck I'm with a great bunch of people.  From what I can tell this is a website devoted to several aims... 

  • "Investigates popular media pseudoskeptics."
  • "Explores the pseudoskeptical mindset, motivation, and method."
  • "Looks at ways in which scientific objectivity is compromised by vested interests, fraud, experimenter effects, and merchants of doubt who use skepticism as a weapon to further corporate interests."
  • "Discusses current controversies."
Its a terrific looking website, someone spent some time on that. I love the webpage they gave me, great photo (James Randi is sitting next to me though you can't tell) and they even finally spelled my name right. I do love this part, "Gerbic bills herself as a “professional portrait photographer who specializes in people who don’t want their portraits taken”, an insight into several forms of psychological pathology, including a lack of empathy." I suppose they think I take photos under bathroom stalls and with a hidden camera on a bus or something. It's possible taking pictures of children who don't want their photos taken might mean I lack empathy? Anyway, guess I'm just going to have to stay tuned to see how this all plays out, can't wait to be "investigated" by this crowd.

GSoW would also like to thank Peter Mogyoros for his many months as team leader of the Hungarian editing team. Due to work and school issues he will be stepping down, but remaining with the project. Peter was know for the amazing work rewriting the Péter Érdi pages in English and Hungarian. Our first ever non-English voice audio. Thank you Peter.

Replacing him will be András Gábor Pintér a current member of the team. We all look forward to watching you grow the Hungarian team and turning out those pages András. 

And we are adding one more team leader to our group.  Team Curie will now have three Team Leaders

Ryan Harding, Richard and joining us is Christine Daley. Christine has been one of our Honeybadgers, 
running all over the place trying to get things done. She has been active on Todd Robbins, I Sold My 
Soul on Ebay, Angela Saini, Sanal Edamaruku, David Koepsell, Paul Zenon, Derek Colanduno and 
Friends of Science in Medicine. Welcome Christine.

Here is a project that I have only become aware of in the last week. I've had a long phone conversation
with the leader of this project and think its so important that I'm willing to take a chance that this will
steal some of GSoW's "thunder".  I'm going to link to James Heilman's NYTimes interview here, but 
in a nutshell what he is trying to do (and is doing) is to get correct medical information onto Wikipedia
in all languages. Sounds familiar right?  He has a different organizational approach than GSoW has, but the 
goal is the same, focus is on educating the World.  He has selected 35-50 Wikipedia medical pages and 
made sure they are well-written, then he is working with Translators without Borders to get these 
articles into all languages. In some cases they are translating the entire page, in others they are working 
on making sure the lede of the article is available in all languages. As he said to me, it is more important 
to write 30 small articles with correct information, than to write 2 complete articles with all the detail.
 In this case he is correct, time is money. And if you would like to contribute money I'm sure they 
would not argue, in many cases he has to actually hire someone to translate these pages.  
James and I will keep in touch and collaborate if possible. Very exciting to see two projects spring up 
like this. I've already learned a great deal from his project.  

I think that is all the updates I have for you all at the moment. Please review the before and afters of
each of these rewrites. 

Remember we are only able to do this work with the support from you. Please share this blog and 
shout it on the rooftops whenever you can. We always need people to learn how to do what we do. It is 
a commitment, but a good life-changing one. We train and mentor at your pace. 
Write to us at GSoWteam@gmail.com

Enjoy!

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Dutch

Burzynski Clinic (new page created) - Rian van Lierop, Leon Korteweg

Voice intros recorded and pictures taken of Cees Renckens, Catherine de Jong and Jan Willem Nienhuys - Vera de Kok


Elektrosmog - Emile Dingemans - Before & After


Lijst van cognitieve biases (new page created) - Coen de Bruijn, Emile Dingemans, Leon Korteweg

Lijst van skeptische conferenties (new page created) - Leon Korteweg

Lijst van skeptische organisaties (new page created) - Leon Korteweg

Lijst van skeptische podcasts (new page created) - Leon Korteweg

Lijst van skeptische tijdschriften (new page created) - Leon Korteweg

Maaneffect (new page created) - Leon Korteweg, Coen de Bruijn, Emile Dingemans


Tim Trachet - Leon Korteweg - Before & After


Wi-Fi#Gezondheidsrisico - Emile Dingemans - Before & After


Wim Hof - Emile Dingemans - Before & After

English

Seth Andrews (new page created) - Jelena Levin, Leon Korteweg

European Humanist Federation - Leon Korteweg - Before & After

Tim Trachet (new page created) - Leon Korteweg

Budd Hopkins - Janyce Boynton - Before & After


Robert Sapolsky small rewrite - Steff  - Before & After

Peter Gleick small rewrite - Monica Quijano - Before & After

Derek Colanduno - Tim Farley & Christine Daley - Before & After 

Bruce Hood - Steff  - Before & After

Vincent Racaniello - Kyle Hamar - Before & After


Sarah Gray Thomason - Monica Quijano - Before & After 


Preston Nichols/Montauk Project hoax - Chris Allen (the Nichols page was nominated for deletion months ago for lack of notoriety and the Montauk Project page was a stub. Chris took what was needed from the Nichols page and then asked for deletion, then merged it into the Montauk Project page. We want to make sure when people are looking for info about conspiracy theories, they are finding good information. Look at the talk page for the Montauk Project page and you will see how much interest there has been on this page, its quite an eyeful.  Chris has done a terrific job with this merger. Before & After 


Italian Committee for the Investigation of Claims of the Pseudosciences (CICAP) - Raffaella Vitali, Bill & Tim Farley - Before & After 


Russian

Seth Andrews (new page created) - 
Jelena Levin & Ekaterina Lobur

Did You Know? 


Did you Know? is a feature of Wikipedia that select pages can appear for 12 hours on the front page of Wikipedia. This window allows us to show off our work to people outside our choir. We had several articles featured recently. 



Alton Lemon
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Maynard & Bart Bok
View stats for Bart Bok and his wife Priscilla Bok
View stats for Maynard

Flim-Flam!
View stats for Flim-Flam! 


GWUP
View stats for GWUP




GSoW in the media

Shoutout from Skeptics with a K (0:00–2:20)


Daniel Loxton's Insight Blog about TAM 2013 workshop on Preserving Skeptic History


CFI Summit - Workshop - October 2013


Science Based Medicine - Steven Novella - Why Wikipedia is so important concerning medical pages.