July Updates - Scott - Gorski - Tyson - Radford and MORE

WoW July is only halfway done and we have so much to talk about.  Lots going on with the GSoW team.  So in no special order lets get started.

The beauty of having a world team like GSoW  is that we can't all be in the same place at the same time.  While many of my team were at the Amaz!ng Meeting - TAM 2013, others were busily at work editing.  Nix Dorf released the Eugenie Scott page in Portuguese.

Neil deGrasse Tyson just received two rewrites, one in Portuguese by Luis Pratas, here is the Portuguese before,  the other, by new editor Michael Steinkeller in German.  By the way Michael joined after watching the JREF workshop video.  If you haven't seen it yet, it is located here.  One more thing, Michael almost didn't join because he has two small children, but somehow he is managing to find a few minutes to work on this project, remember folks you set your own pace at GSoW.

Here was a major event.  You would think that David Gorski already would have a Wikipedia page wouldn't you?  Well someone attempted to create one, but left it in such embarrassing condition we had to jump in and do it right.  This is what we found.  Okay hold your breath and now look at what we created. Introducing the new and improved David Gorski Wikipedia page! Not sure why I always say "Strong enough to stand an elephant on it" but that phrase keeps coming to mind when I think of this page rewrite. Thankfully we released the page rewrite in time for TAM, Gorski's page views tripled during that weekend.

Sometimes it is the little things that give me that kapow feeling.  We managed to get Gorski mentioned on the Steve Jobs page.  Its kinda lost in the mass that is Jobs page, but still with the hit count it receives, it can't hurt. Searching for "Gorski" on the page, I learned that according to Gorski, the 9 month delay with the cancer treatment may not have killed Jobs, interesting.  Another thing I just learned is that even now in June 2013, Jobs is ranked number 70 in top Wikipedia views.

Ben Radford's book Tracking the Chupacabra was front page of Wikipedia as a DYK.  Follows of the GSoW project know what that means, a ton of views for the 8 hour window it is up. Well the results are in, here are the view stats.  The ripple effect caused the page for Chupacabra to also receive a spike. And the movie Species as well.

Bill Grieb rewrote the WP page for Ronald Bailey (before) (after)

Another rewrite for Bill Grieb was this one for the Merseyside Skeptics, what a difference (before) (after)

Fresh new photos I took at TAM have been added to these pages... Daniel Loxton, Harriet Hall, Derek Colanduno, Mark Edward, Donald Prothero and Massimo Polidoro.  This isn't difficult to do, if you have a photo that you think would improve a WP page, please contact me and I'll walk you thought the process.

A GSoW team member reminded me that we are responsible for a lot of quick edits on Wikipedia that are pretty cool.  We do a lot more than just page rewrites.

Braco the gazer got a lot of attention from editors trying to get the first sentence of the article just right.  You would be surprised at how much time we can spend on a single word when dealing with believers and other WP editors.

Here's a fun one,  my son mentioned that Jenny McCarthy was going to be on The View, which led me to getting all ranty on Facebook skeptics needing to do something.  People quickly began posting links to noteworthy articles about this announcement.  I in turn threw the links over to my GSoW team and Nathan Miller quickly responded by successfully adding a couple of the links.  Since then other WP editors (not on my team) have added a whole section under the criticism section.  You will notice that not only is Bill Nye mentioned, but so is Derek Bartholomaus's Body Count website.  And just in time, Jenny isn't as popular as Steve Jobs, but she is sure rolling in the views this last week.

TAM 2013 was awesome.  I'm still not completely recovered.  Here are a few videos I created while there.  This first one is a 3-parter on Crowd-Sourced Activism.  I spoke with Shane Greenup (Rbutr) and Tim Farley (What's the Harm?) and had a major blast.

Susan in the Superwoman pose at the Crowd-Sourcing Workshop

Later in the afternoon I participated in the Preserving Skeptic History workshop with some of my favorite people, Daniel Loxton, Ray Hyman, Tim Farley and Robert Sheaffer. Special guest appearance by Susan Blackmore.

Here is a series of shots I took of people whose pages we created or rewrote along with the WP page. Just for fun.

Tim Farley

Robert Sheaffer

Leo Igwe

Sean Faircloth

Richard Saunders

Sara Mayhew

Recording a Skepticality episode

Recording a Virtual Skeptics episode

 The surprise of all surprises was the wonderful comments from James Randi and DJ Grothe when they presented me with the JREF award for Skepticism in the Public Interest,  It reads "With gratitude for your steadfast advocacy for skepticism on the World Wide Web and at the grass roots."

Backstage with DJ and Randi

Just of few of the GSoW team

Its all about having fun and changing the world

As you can image, we have far more work to do than editors to do it. Please contact me at susangerbic.com if you have questions or would like to join the project.  For the last two years we have been working out of secret Facebook groups.  I'm happy to say we have outgrown Facebook.  In the next few weeks we will be moving to a custom built forum that will allow better communication between the language teams, as well as better training of new editors.  Just like the Facebook groups, the forum will be hidden away unless you have joined our team.

Thank you for your support, and I hope to hear from you soon.

Susan

Many Languages ~ One Goal: Improve Critical Thinking on Wikipedia

New project for Guerrilla Skepticism

I've been thinking about this for some time and want to share my thought process with you.  In the town I live in, Salinas, nearly half of the population speaks Spanish.  I speak Spanish in the context of my work as a photographer, understanding or speaking outside work is not so great.  But the idea that there are other languages people communicate in is a constant reality. 

As some of you may know, I'm very active with the Independent Investigations Group (IIG).  I like to know if things we are doing work,  and love feedback and stats.  At the beginning on my involvement with the IIG and Wikipedia editing,  I kept analyzing the amount of hits generated directly from Wikipedia to the IIG website, and what pages/topics were sending us the hits.  Overwhelmingly every month it was (and still is) anything to do with UFOs and Billy Meyer.  I noted that a lot of  these hits are coming from Wikipedia Japan.

I must admit that I'm not the quickest thinker, it takes me awhile to get-it.  I asked Robert Sheaffer who writes the Psychic Vibrations column for SI (here is his new book) "why are the Japanese so fascinated by UFO's?"  His answer "I really don't know why the Japanese are hitting your links big-time. Yes,
they are UFO-crazy, but then so are the French, Belgians, Chinese, Brazilians, Mexicans, Americans, Brits, and practically any other country you care to mention."  That answer really got me thinking, why then were we getting so many hits to www.iigwest.org from Wikipedia in Japanese?  (I'm sure you are all already there with the correct answer, remember I'm slow about this)

Could it possibly be that the IIG does not have a reference on other language's UFO Wikipedia pages?  Do other languages have UFO Wikipedia pages?  If they do have a page, is critical thinking represented well?  What about all the other pseudoscience topics?  If the English version is in such dire need of help, I can only imagine what the non-English ones might be like.  I believe that the English speaking countries have more skeptical organizations hosting skeptical events.  This outlet allows us to socialize and network with like-minded thinkers thus creating tons of podcasts, blogs and media to other English speakers.  What must it be like to live in Uganda or Equator as a skeptic?  No TAM like events happening down there that I know of.  Maybe because they don't have the social distractions we have they are more likely to DO SOMETHING for the skeptical cause?  Maybe they have already picked up on editing Wikipedia for skeptical content and have been doing so aggressively prior to Tim Farley's call to edit ?    I just don't know.

So here is what I'm proposing.  We are a very talented bunch, I know we have access to lots of skeptics that can read/write in many languages.  Why not take a short "call to action" and translate it into as many languages we can, and then post it back on this blog for people to copy/paste and send to any non-English speaking skeptical blogs/podcasts/individuals/groups we can find?  It won't be something that can be managed by me, I won't be writing any blogs in Tagalog in the near future, and don't really care for the Babel Fish translations of pages.  But maybe someone in the Philippines or elsewhere will see the call-out and pick up from there?

People of the world deserve to have access to well written and correctly cited, skeptical articles just as much as the English speaking world.  Please help if you can.  The following is what should be translated (not verbatim but its context).  The two paragraphs below that probably do not need to be translated (but it could be summed up as instructions to pass on)

For fun I've included a few Wikipedia pages in different languages along with September 2011's stats for that page. 


A call out for skeptics/critical thinkers to edit Wikipedia for factual content. 

Guerrilla Skepticism is the act of inserting well written, carefully cited skeptical/scientific references into Wikipedia pages that need critical thinking, while still following the guidelines and rules to make it into everyone’s online encyclopedia. This grassroots method allows skeptics working at home the ability to contribute to the skeptical movement without personally confronting people.

Wikipedia users will find references to skeptical articles that they can follow or not. Changing a mind can be a slow process, facts stacked onto more facts. When they begin to question they will start to search the Internet for answers. Wikipedia will be there waiting for them with no eye-witness anecdotal opinions, and no one in your face telling you how stupid your beliefs are. We will go a lot farther changing minds when the person is doing their own research which will allow them to set aside their cognitive dissonance and celebrate critical thinking with a clearer mind.

For more information visit http://guerrillaskepticismonwikipedia.blogspot.com/ 

contact me at susangerbic@yahoo.com

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As a English speaker I have been focusing just on the English version of Wikipedia. Now it is time to broaden our scope, Wikipedia readers in every language deserve to have only facts on the pages they are visiting. This means we need volunteers to translate the above two paragraphs into whatever languages we can and send to critical thinking groups for publication. This could be newsletters, blogs, podcasts whatever media that will get the attention of critical thinking editors willing to help edit Wikipedia for skeptical/scientific/critical thinking content.

If you can read/write in another language, and can translate the above two paragraphs into explaining the goal (not just a direct translation) please do so and email back to me at susangerbic@yahoo.com. If you know of any non-English speaking places that the translated "call to action" can be sent, please also email names/links to me.

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Chupacabra in English September 2011 results - 81,755

Chupacabra in Tagalog September 2011 results - 20

Chupacabras in Spanish September 2011 results - 19,243

Chupacabras in French September 2011 results - 6

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Unidentified flying object in English September 2011 results - 50,650

objeto volador no identificado in Spanish September 2011 results - 26,293

In Korean September 2011 results -  369

In Japanese September 2011 results - 32,156