The GSoW Vaccination Project - Feb - July 2015

From time to time GSoW likes to unite the entire team to focus on one subject. For 6 months we focused on all things concerning vaccinations. It took us a couple months to find our feet and actually get the ball rolling, once done the team was passionate about getting things done. (Not all work mentioned below was completed during the Vax focus months)

We take great pride in showcasing our work, these pages generate hundreds of thousands of page views each year, and will continue to do so year after year. All work is exponential as we can build off the pages created, as well as translate them into other languages.

Officially we finished the Vaccine project, but team members will continue to work in this area as there is much work left to be done. We will be moving on to a new focus Jan - June 2016 on a topic still undecided. If you have suggestions please comment here on our blog or write to us at GSoWteam@gmail.com

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


ENGLISH 

Charlie Sheen's Wikipedia page (thanks to Gene) and is getting about 4K views a day.


Northern Rivers Vaccination Supporters (Brand New Page) - This page was written by one of the new English editors, James Williams, about a group of concerned citizens in the part of Australia with the lowest vaccination rate. The article was reviewed by Susan Gerbic, Janyce Boynton and Leon Korteweg.

Fun Fact - The NRVS people were unaware of the creation of their Wikipedia page, it was decided that as the Brisbane Skeptics were having a SkeptiCamp on Saturday July 4th and at least one member of the NRVS team would be in attendance, GSoW would delay announcement of the page.  Susan Gerbic and James Williams gave the skepticamp organizers a video where James surprised the audience with the page. Video here

Brian Deer - Updated by Jim Preston - Before & After - This is the Science reporter that exposed anti-vax Doctor Andrew Wakefield. 

Every Child by Two - Page rewritten by Janyce Boynton - Before & After Founded in 1991 by Rosalynn Carter and Betty Bumpers to "raise awareness of the critical need for timely immunizations and to foster a systematic way to immunize all of America's children by age two."

Sherri Tenpenny (before) & (after) - Susan Gerbic - with the assistance of Jo Alabaster & Phil Kent (non-GSoW)

Leon Jaroff - (Brand New Page) - Written by Janyce Boynton, this biography is about the founding editor of popular science magazine Discover, and co-founder of CSICOP, the first successful skeptical organisation in the United States. (reviewed by Leon Korteweg)

Stephanie Messenger (Brand New Page) - Susan Gerbic - This is the anti-vax author of Melanie's Marvelous Measles which encourages children to seek out and embrace measles in order to make themselves stronger. The Melanie's Marvelous Measles Wikipedia page was written by Susan Gerbic in May 2015.

Steven Novella - Page updated and rewritten by various GSoW editors

The Mark Crislip/QuackCast page was an embarrassment. It is what I call a "non-scroller" which means you don't have to scroll to see the whole page.  Our community really should be ashamed that we allow pages like this to exist on Wikipedia.   Sean Whitcomb got to work and turned out this amazing transformation.  We contacted Mark for audio and I think he wins for funniest Intro Audio.  After

Rachael Dunlop now has a brand new page (with audio) written by new editor Sean Whitcomb. Rachael has been sitting on our list since we started collecting people to put on our list. She kept getting passed over, not because we were worried that there wouldn't be enough information, but because creating a page from scratch is a lot of work. I think Sean and team did a terrific job. Rachael was also featured on the front page of English Wikipedia as a Did You Know... Here are the stat views during that day.

Michelle Bachman - page updated by Janyce Boynton with HPV statements.

Bill Maher - Quotes from scientific skepticism community added concerning Maher's anti-vax comments. "Tara Parker-Pope and former Senator Bill Frist have called his criticism of the H1N1 flu vaccinations unscientific. Infectious diseases expert Paul Offit has written that misinformation about vaccines from celebrities like Maher has put children at unnecessary risk. Offit says that celebrities like Maher are seen as "less credible" and would still be considered just "great entertainment" if they weren't joined by the former Director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Bernadine Healy and influential pediatrician, Dr. Robert Sears.  Oncologist, David Gorski has also criticized Maher's beliefs about vaccines several times in ScienceBlogs, and when Maher received the Richard Dawkins Award in 2009, Gorski wrote it was inappropriate. Skeptics, including mathematician and science writer Martin Gardner, neurologist Steven Novella, and magician Jamy Ian Swiss have also strongly rebuked Maher, characterizing him as anti-science, uninformed and potentially endangering the health of fans who take his "non-medical" advice.  Maher responded to the criticism, saying, "What I've read about what they think I'm saying is not what I've said. I'm not a germ theory denier. I believe vaccinations can work. Polio is a good example. Do I think in certain situations that inoculating Third World children against malaria or diphtheria, or whatever, is right? Of course. In a situation like that, the benefits outweigh costs. But to me living in Los Angeles? To get a flu shot? No.'"
Maher's Wikipedia page receives ~50K views a month

David Gorski - Brand New Page created - Oncologist and editor of Science Based Medicine Website - critic of alt-med and anti-vax. 

Scott Lilienfeld - Brand New Page created - Janyce Boynton

Dorit Reiss - (Brand New Page) - Monica Quijano - Immunization advocate focuses on legal issues concerning vaccination.

Measles - András G. Pintér - Before & After (Pseudoscientific claims added - Stefan Lanka and the €100 000 to be payed)

Wendy Sue Swanson - editor Janyce Boynton - Brand New Page created Wendy Sue Swanson (born 1974) is a pediatrician, educator and author best known for her Seattle Mama Doc blog. As a doctor and a mother, Swanson advocates the use of online tools, such as blogs, Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites, to strengthen communication between healthcare providers and patients. Swanson asserts that online technologies can assist patients and families in becoming stewards of their own health. Swanson has dedicated her career to helping physicians learn to use online tools more effectively in helping patients make informed decisions based in science. "While we don't have the capability just yet," Swanson states, "my goal is to prove that an empowered and informed patient reduces health care costs and improves outcomes.

This Did You Know? Appeared on the front page of Wikipedia May 2, 2015

HUNGARIAN

Kanyaró (huwiki) - András G. Pintér - Before & After (Hungarian Measles page. Antivax movement section and pseudoscience section added)

HLakos András - András G. Pintér - Brand new page (well known infectologist, MD, specializing in Lyme and other diseases spread by ticks, often debates anti-vax activists)

PORTUGUESE

Steven Novella - Nix Dorf - New Page Created

DUTCH

Steven Novella - Rian van Lierop - New Page Created

-----------------------------------------------------------
A lot remains to be done. We barely got a part of the way through all the ideas on our work list. Editors will continue to pluck away at the list, but we will be moving forward. Jan-June 2016 we will focus on a yet undecided area. If you have an opinion on the matter please contact us on our Facebook Page.

As usual if you would like to know more about the GSoW project, please check out our YouTube channel. There you will learn all about the project, what to expect when training and afterwards. This project is not for everyone, so please inform yourself before writing to us at GSoWteam@gmail.com

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

Igwe - Prothero - Maher - MAAF - McCollum

So what do all these have in common?  They have a new face on Wikipedia. 

Vashti McCollum 

Not sure how this slipped off my radar but somehow this page re-write by Lei Pinter from last year never got the attention it deserves.  This was a lot of work, records on Vashti McCollum (the person) from notable sources were difficult to come by.   She tried to get a photo released by the family but couldn't make that happen. Possibly one of the GSoW readers might be able to help us out? 

Anyway, Lei tells a terrific story of a woman who faces off with the government over religious instruction in her son's school in the mid-1940's in Illinois.  We skeptics should be ashamed at the condition Lei found the page in before she started working on it.  Is this how we treat our representatives?  If we don't show them respect, why should we expect people outside our community to show them respect?  Thanks to Lei and the GSoW team, we now have McCollum's Wiki Back.

 

Leo Igwe

This page was in very sorry shape when Vera de Kok first took it on as you can see here. Brian Engler uploaded an image he took at TAM 2012.  Then Nathan Miller finished it up with a total re-write.  Much improved, great teamwork all.  Current Page

The Igwe release hit the front page of Wikipedia as a Did You Know in Feburary.  For regular followers of this blog you know that getting the front page for 8 hours is a big deal.  An extra effort is required to make it happen, and only brand new pages (no more than 5 days) or newly expanded pages within 5 days of its re-release are given that honor.  When I say expanded, I mean really expanded.  When you look at the before and after of Igwe's page you will see what I mean.  Only well-written and scrutinized articles are allowed.

The Igwe page received 3,607 views on that day.   That is about 3,550% above what is normal for page views.

That number is only a part of the story.  Igwe's article discusses other human rights groups doing similar work.  During the DYK for Igwe's article, the pages for Stepping Stones Nigeria received a 1,652%  daily increase.  That's a measurable effect to show how well we are raising awareness. The article on Witch Children in Africa, which receives virtually no traffic, received 4,339 visitors during that day.

Skeptical organizations receive extra attention from these Did You Know?  features as well. The Center For Inquiry article's daily traffic spiked by 33%, and daily visits to the James Randi Educational Foundation article grew by 20%.

Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers

Frederick Green along with some help from the team took on the rewrite of the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers page.  Here is the before  and now the after.

Because we expanded the article enough we were able to ask for a DYK, which appeared on the front page of Wikipedia on March 10, 2013.  Stats show a spike of 2,565 views.

The hook we used was this one... DYK ... that the Military Association of Atheists & Freethinkers provides "atheists in foxholes" with advocacy, community and education?

The atheists in foxhole page received 1709 views when normally it receives about 250 each day.

Donald Prothero

Everyone seemed surprised that Don Prothero did not already have a Wikipedia page, and once I started reading through Lei Pinter's drafts I can see why.  This man was long ago deserving a page.

We secured a Did You Know for Prothero also.  In the wee hours of the morning for America this appeared on the front page of Wikipedia.  DYK... that Stephen Jay Gould once called Donald Prothero "the best punctuated equilibrium researcher on the West Coast"?"

Prothero's page received only 1,120 views (probably because of the timing of the DYK).  Gould's page received a 50% increase in views, and the punctuated equilibrium page spiked with a 300% increase.

Bill Maher 

No, I didn't rewrite Bill Maher's Wikipedia page.  This is a example of working backwards, and guerrilla skepticism on Wikipedia.  I finally got around to watching Jamy Ian Swiss's lecture from TAM 2012.  In this video he talks about what scientific skepticism is.  I thought it was a good definition and would improve readers understanding of the term.  So I went to the scientific skepticism Wikipedia page and left a quote and citation to the video.  That one edit will expose the Swiss video (and the Swiss WP page) to 100K readers each year.  (note: the Swiss video on the JREF channel currently has 7,687 views.  If someone wanted to check back periodically, they could tell if there is a noticeable increase in views from today)

But this does not explain why I'm talking about Bill Maher.   In his video, Swiss goes on a awesome rant and calls Maher (an)  "anti-science, anti-vaxer, dangerous ignoramus, promoting toxic anti-scientific nonsense that kills people!"  That quote is just too good to waste.  So I ventured over to Maher's WP page and saw that the majority of the page is positive.  A man this popular and controversial needs a criticism section.  But this isn't a simple edit that just any editor of WP is going to be able to place without some problems.  So I made my intentions known on the Maher talk page, then went to my GSoW team and asked for more critical (and scholarly) citations from notable people. 

I got several suggestions and started to compile a list.  One of these citations wouldn't be enough alone, but several all together shows that there is a concurrence within the scientific skepticism community that Maher's anti-vax propaganda is dangerous.  So I added a criticism section to the Maher page.  Here is the page as I left it that night.

It took a few hours before other editors (not on the GSoW team) toned down my edit.  Swiss is quite aggressively verbal, as are others like Gardner who said, he (Gardner) was happy that Maher did not have children of his own that he could kill.  The rules dealing with living persons on Wikipedia are written so someone can't quote mine and attack.  The editors were quite right that the page is improved as it exists today.  They also changed my edit from anti-vax to anti-vaccination (which one of the GSoW editors also suggested) to make it clearer to readers.  

Also in the lede, before I got a hold of the page, the part in the second paragraph said... "He is also a critic of religion and is an advisory board member of Project Reason, a foundation to promote scientific knowledge and secular values within society."  I thought that was too wordy, and that the editor who wrote this was trying to infer that Maher was very sciency.  So I took off everything after the words "Project Reason."

The reason why I say this was working backwards, is because I was starting with a good citation from a notable person/place and then I took a look around WP and found a place to leave it.  Just the opposite of what most editors do.  Trust me this is much simpler to do this way.

This is guerrilla skepticism,  it is getting our skeptical message into areas that it wasn't before.  In ways that are non-traditional and mole-like.   

So to review, Maher's page now has citations for the SGU podcast, the JREF Swiss video and David Gorski's blog on ScienceBlog.  There are hyperlinks to many of our resources that were not there before, Steven Novella, Jamy Ian Swiss, Paul Offit, David Gorski, ScienceBlogs and Martin Gardner.   In the footnotes, beside each citation I have hyperlinked to the SGU, CSICOP and JREF.  

Time will tell if these edits I left will have any influence on changing minds.  It is too early to tell if people will click on the hyperlinks and discover our spokespeople and organizations.  I'm sure most people don't read through an entire Wikipedia page, they look for what they need and move on.  

But we have to try.  If I had just shared the Swiss video on my Facebook or Twitter timeline, it would have only reached about 2K people, and maybe only 20 people would click on the link and watch the video.  Then my "update" would move on and no one would notice it again. 

Leaving these edits, will expose people who are not necessarily in the skeptic community to the video/podcast/blog.  And not just for some arbitrary moment on a Facebook feed.  But every day, every month, every year (as long as they aren't removed).  And how many potential views are we talking about?  I'll leave you to play with this graph, but at the time of this writing the Maher page is receiving about 100K views each month.  Over a million views each year.  Quite a sizable difference from the 20 +/- views it would have received on my Facebook feed.

I wonder if Maher had been following the changes to his Wikipedia page?  He came out with this while I was writing this blog.  Religion, it's like Wikipedia. 

==================================

Now, I hope I've whet your appetite.  This is powerful stuff.  We need your help, there are thousands of edits just waiting to be added into Wikipedia, maybe even hundreds of thousands of edits.  And hundreds of pages that need to be created or rewritten.  We need people who are good at proof-reading, and people who can improve the basic edits we leave.  Researchers, current editors, people willing to caption videos and so much more.  And it needs to happen in English and other languages.  We aren't looking for a handout, we don't want your money.  We want your time, we want your attention.  We train, we mentor,  please join this most powerful and important project.  

Write to me at susangerbic@yahoo.com if you have questions.  Or friend me on Facebook or twitter.  We are all busy people, my work-load would make your head spin, but this is important, what are you waiting for? Join us.