Happy 2nd Birthday GSoW! (and updates)

How very exciting, we are turning TWO!  After the video read on for the latest updates.  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efU-2yw0U58&feature=youtube_gdata

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New French editor Christophe Michel adds the James Alcock page to French Wikipedia, Christophe will also be interviewed as our French representative for Observatoire Zététique.  The OZ has agreed to support us with updates as the French team rolls them out.  

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The Portuguese Team scored our very first non-English DYK on the front page of Portuguese Wikipedia.  Unlike the English page which stays up only 8 hours, the Portuguese DYK remains for days.  So for a week or more in May 2013 Portuguese readers were treated to a photograph and DYK of our very own Neil deGrasse Tyson which they had translated in March.

Looking over the stats from that period you can see that the Tyson page was averaging about 100 views each day.  There are spikes of over 1,000 each day during the time he was featured as a DYK.  But as you can see, the views every day since the DYK are averaging about 300 views.  I'm not sure what the reason is, we released this page in March and it could be from a combination of things.  All we know is that his page views are over 3x's what it was receiving before our involvement.  A win for science!  

Even more interesting.  Look at the stats for Carl Sagan's Portuguese page for the same time period.  Averaging under 100 views each day, now it is averaging 500 a day since our involvement.  The same effect is happening (though smaller) on the Cosmos page.  

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CFI was kind enough to send me to lecture to the Portland CFI group in May, there I found 3 new editors.  One of which has just finished a re-write of the Rationalism page.  View the before page. Now the after.  Great work Joshua Filmer!

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Leo Igwe was just given the high honor of receiving 3 new pages in one week.  German, Dutch and Russian.
                            

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English editor Bill Grieb re-wrote the page for Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy book.  Yes, even books can have their own Wikipedia page if they are noteworthy enough.  This is such a well written page, that others on our team will be using it as an example for other book pages they are currently working on.  So stay tuned.  

Before and After

As you know, we try to get our pages noticed outside the skeptical community.  So Bill managed to get the Bad Astronomy page on the front page of Wikipedia for 8 hours as a DYK.  Here are the stats during that period.  

When I knew that the DYK was going to appear, I wrote to Phil Plait to tell him.  To my surprise he wrote a blog about it for Slate Magazine.  That article gave us several new editors. Thanks Phil!  Here are the stats for the Plait WP page.

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English and Dutch editor Wim Vandernberghe has translated the English ADE 651 page into Dutch.    Maybe some governments will benefit from a good Google search before they invest in their next "bomb" detector.    

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Josh Hunt (from Cleveland, OHIO Skeptics) took issue with the Gore Orphanage Wikipedia page.  As you look at the before page you will see how it was depicted as if this orphanage was really haunted. Many Ohio ghost-hunting groups venture out to the ruins of this orphanage to report back on all the "activity" they find.  Funny that, as Josh discovered that there was no such place called Gore Orphanage, only a Gore Orphanage road.  And even more odd, there was no Orphanage.  At least not one that had been burned down killing children.  Seems that this is all a urban legend once you look into the story, wonder how the ghost hunting groups explain this?  

Because Josh wanted a complete story, he and his wife went out to the site where this was supposed to have happened and photographed the marker.  Awesome job Josh.  After page

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This page has been a long-awaited re-write.  As I've said before, I do not assign projects.  People choose something off the list or come up with something on their own.  Shane Vaughn for whatever reason selected Phillip Klass for a re-write, and I'm very pleased to show you the Before and now the After.   

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I've had a few interviews since the last update.  Skepticality Podcast continues to allow me a few minutes each episode, and editors roll in after each one airs.  All of them long-time listeners to Skepticality, I'm told they have been wanting to get involved in a project that  can be done from home that makes a real difference in the world.  They all tell me they have found it with GSoW.  Thank you Derek Colanduno for your support.  

CFI and the JREF have been very supportive of this project, with publicity, retweets, and opportunities to lecture.  Thank you for supporting us.  

There are many other people to thank, including my vast group of Facebook friends who step up when I need something Photoshoped or advice about some bit of research.  The comments, retweets and shares really help our team succeed. 

If you look at our last update you will see that I have had many interviews and shout-outs the last few months.  Everyone has been so nice and supportive even though I tend to ramble.  Skeptical Connections Podcast is just starting out and allowing me a segment to talk about on-line activism as often as I want.  

So that is it for this update.  There are many more projects that are in varying stages of completeness.  We don't just churn these pages out, it can take weeks of research to re-write (or create) a page.  Add in the formatting and code associated with writing for Wikipedia, and you will see this is a very difficult chore we are taking on.  I don't want to scare away potential editors, we do train.  Everything is discussed throughout the process, positive feedback is given and nothing is released onto Wikipedia unless it has been reviewed by several editors.  I promise we won't allow you to blow up Wikipedia.  

I should mention that not every person on the team is involved in research.  We have people who support pages by copy-editing and photography.  Some people caption videos.  Some are involved in small edits that only take a few minutes to finish.  There is a lot of work to be done.   We are in this together, so please consider joining our team.  Friend me on Facebook and I'll get you started.  Lets Go!

Happy Birthday GSoW!

Half-Dozen New Releases - Skeptic's Toolbox Faculty

The day has finally arrived!  I'm super excited to launch two brand new pages and four rewrites to Wikipedia today.  I'm really hoping that everyone reading this will read through each page and follow the links.

If you thought you knew these people, you're about to get to know them better.  If you have never heard of these people, then frankly you need to brush up on the history of the modern scientific skeptical movement.  Get back to basics. 

The Skeptic's Toolbox is the longest running skeptic conference in our history, bet you never heard of it! 

Beyerstein and Andrus are no longer physically with us, but their memories and work continues.  I'm very proud to have met them both.  

When you meed Alcock, Hyman and Pankratz at a conference, make sure you introduce yourself, thank them for making the skeptical movement possible and then ask them what they got up their sleeves next.  Cause they aren't even slowing down. 


Before I get to the launchings, I might add that faculty member Harriet Hall already has a beautiful Wikipedia page that Tim Farley launched over a  year ago.  I have just been keeping it updated for this release.

HERE YOU GO

Skeptic's Toolbox - brand new

Loren Pankratz - brand new

James Alcock - before

James Alcock - current

Ray Hyman - before

Ray Hyman - current

Jerry Andrus - before

Jerry Andrus - current

Barry Beyerstein - before

Barry Beyerstein - current

One more random thing I want to mention.  The Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia team has decided that moving forward when we link to the term skeptic we are going to start linking to the WP page for scientific skepticism. If you find pages where this has not happened, please make the change for us.  If you are not comfortable doing this,  and don't want to be trained, please just drop me a email.

Like what you see.  think you want to get involved?  Please contact me at susangerbic@yahoo.com and I will keep you busy. 

Video Interviews and Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia

I hear from people all the time they love this project, but they are looking for a non-editing way to help out. 

So, this blog is for you.

Editors of Wikipedia can not add in content that does not exist.  Most of us do not have the ability to create articles and publish them in noteworthy places, we badly need more content.  Editors can quote from podcast interviews (better if the podcast is noteworthy, but not necessary) but then again very few of us have the ability to create a podcast.

Blogs generally are a good way to stay informed and create community.  But Wikipedia editors are not supposed to cite blogs.

What most of us do have, is the ability to create video interviews of noteworthy people (not forgetting those who will soon become noteworthy).

I'm finding the use of video interviews increasingly valuable for the We Got Your Wiki Back! project.  You can't write a whole Wikipedia page based on YouTube video interviews, but it can work to supplement an article, shore up vagueness, and bring lots of personality back to a Wikipedia page that may otherwise seem dry.

The YouTube video just needs to be dated and location is also a good idea.  Any extra information you can add on the video is also helpful.

I am currently re-writing the Wikipedia pages for several of the founders of the skeptical movement.  As well as creating from scratch the Skeptic Toolbox page.  I've been having trouble finding citations about the formation of the Toolbox as well as the motivation for creating it.  So I sat down with the creator Ray Hyman on Father's day and on video asked him about the history and motivation.  Uploaded it to YouTube, quoted him and cited the video.  DONE!

While I was at it I managed to get 4 more videos about his history in science and skepticism.  His comments not only shore up citation holes on his page, but they work to confirm other citations on other people's pages.  When he mentions that the first workshop was with Jim Alcock and Steve Shaw (now Banachek) that strengthens citations on Alcock and Shaw's pages.  We have to constantly remember that back in the 70's and 80's people didn't carry around video cameras in their pockets, and no one realized how important those first meetings would be, the media surely wasn't paying attention.  We need to document our history moving forward, as well as recapture what we can of our past.

Some other examples of using videos for citations on Wikipedia.

I've met James Randi many times, and with my good friend Kitty Mervine we tag-team taping just about every story he tells.  You never know if it will be a magic trick or a personal story, or something about the history of skepticism, but it is always something worth capturing.

When I began editing in 2010 I went through my videos for some reason and came across this one.  Randi discusses Claiborne Pell.   (I was on a rocking cruise ship and missed the beginning of the story) and I had to ask Facebook friends who Randi was talking about because I had never heard the name before.  Here is the Pell page before I added a Paranormal belief section.  And now here is the page with the Randi interview. 

Another great example of using videos to support a page.  When the Reason Rally happened at the beginning of the year the WP page was heavily edited by religious editors trying to diminish the rally.  They quoted all the news sources they could find, which were noteworthy sources but they were all religious.

I didn't attend the rally, but a woman whom knew of this project but had never thought she would ever have a need for help, wrote to me.  The page was a mess, skeptics had not yet come out with any media supporting the rally.  As you can see from this link, the page had become very religious friendly.  According to all the newspaper articles, there were hundreds of Christians handing out flyers and free water to the bad Atheists.  The Atheists were holding really evil signs and saying bad things about religion.

One example was this one "Other atheist activists held more controversial signs such as “So many Christians, so few lions,” in reference to the Diocletianic Persecution, in which several Christians were tortured." That's right "one example", there were thousands of people there and one person holding a sign should be mentioned?  Funny that they said only "several Christians were tortured", I guess they didn't have the room to name each one individually?  Seriously, the bias of that editor was obvious.  

The page went under many changes with two people sitting on the page.  They were arguing and reverting edits like crazy.   See the talk page for more info on how crazy it was. 

It took me some time to finally take this page seriously and go in and change it to what it looks like now.  Finally skeptics started posting videos of the speakers, and people like Brian Engler uploaded images.  Once the videos were up, I searched for the ones with the best quality, and edited out the quotes that I thought represented the speaker best.  Then cited the video.  We never want to remove all criticism, but just get down to the facts.  


The video you get does not have to be fancy, don't wait until you have the perfect setting, turn on the camera and do the best with what you got.  When you upload it, tag it with everything you can think of, and again don't fuss on it too much, its more important that it is uploaded quickly than playing with it for months until you forget about it (or worse delete it)

As in the case of the Reason Rally, we do not always have time to wait for the "official" videos to come out.  Citations must be freely available to anyone who wants to follow the link and see whatever it is you saw when you wrote the citation. (note: this does not mean that you must have a URL, the reference has to be one that without a lot of effort they can also obtain)

So pull out your smart phone,  or video camera and get these interviews recorded.  I could also use some help finding these interviews that should be on these pages.  Please contact me with whatever you got stored on your YouTube feed that might be relevant. 

I was just asked yesterday to recommend a good book talking about the modern skeptical movement's history.  Other than a few mentions in journals, there isn't one that I know of.  We are still waiting on the biographies (or auto-biographies) for our founders.  In the meantime, some of us over on Wikipedia are doing our best to get the citations, pictures and videos all in one place.  Future historians will thank us!

As usual, if you would like to help out with this project contact me at susangerbic@yahoo.com

The Bem Experiments

Been wanting to get to this one for a couple weeks.  I have only an hour flight from San Jose to LA so I settled down with James Alcock's article about Daryl Bem's "Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect."   Several IIG people had been talking about this excellent review by Alcock and I knew I would need some uninterrupted time to sit and understand what I was reading.

The IIG were right, it is an excellent critique by Alcock, and I understood almost all of it once I started underlining and taking notes in the margin of the magazine.

So here is is several weeks later and I have a few minutes before I leave for work and want to pop it into the Daryl Bem Wikipedia article.  Guess what someone has beat me to it!  Awesome.  This person left it before it became published in SI but gave the SI citation (this will be published in the March/April 2011 issue)

So I cleaned that reference up (guess they forgot to go back and take it out) and then added what I wrote on the plane.

Who ever did the first blurb didn't quote Alcock, only just stated the facts. This is just a matter of editors style choice.  I think it makes for an interesting comparison between styles.  I'm a quoter.  I want to bring as much of the original article writer's "personality" into my blurb as possible.  Wikipedia is only about facts, but we don't want it so dry that someone reading the page will not want to follow up on reading the article that is on-line at SI (just click on the link cited).  What I added is in Red. 

"Feeling the Future" and the resulting controversy

In 2011, Bem published the article "Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect" in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that offered statistical evidence for psi.^[12] If "Feeling the Future" is correct, it would provide evidence for psi, significantly altering the assumption of the linear nature of time, challenging the very core of modern scientific thought on the matter. Both the presentation of this article by a highly respected researcher, and the decision of an upper tier journal to publish it has engendered much controversy. Not only has the paper's publication led to a criticism of the paper itself^[13], but it also prompted a wider debate on the validity of peer review process for allowing such a paper to be published.^[14] Bem has appeared on MSNBC ^[15] and the Colbert Report ^[16] discussing the experiment.

The methods that Bem uses in his experimentation itself has been viewed as controversial as well. According to understood statistical methodology, Bem incorrectly provides one-sided p values when he should have used a two-sided p values.^[17] This could possibly account for the marginally significant results that he produced in his experiment.

Professor of Psychology, member of CSI and Skeptical Inquirer Magazine, James Alcock after evaluating Bem's 9 experiments finds metaphorically "dirty test tubes" Serious methodological flaws exist throughout including changing the procedures partway through the experiments. Combining results of all tests that had a 50% chance of significance with tests that had a 33% chance. The amount of actual tests done is unknown and no explanation of how it was determined that participants had "settled down" after seeing erotic images. Alcock concludes that almost everything that could go wrong with this 9 trial experiment did go wrong. "Parapsychology is not honored by having this paper accepted by a mainstream psychology journal."

One of the nine experiments in Bem's study ('Retroactive Facilitation of Recall') has since been replicated by scientists Stuart Ritchie, Chris French, and Richard Wiseman who found no evidence of precognition. Wiseman has also set up a register to keep track of other replicating efforts. The meta-analysis on registered replication efforts will begin on Dec, 1st 2011.

So none of what is written is incorrect.  Again how you write your blurb is entirely up to you.  Styles differ between editors, and you will find your style as you do more editing and grow confident.  You will also note that the original editor did not hyperlink to James Alcock, SI Magazine or CSI, its all about using each other as resources.  I also added the hyperlink to psychology to give Alcock more creds (it is a psychology journal afterall). 

It is pretty lengthy even before I added my blurb.  But no one seems to be complaining (at least not yet) and if other editors want to change things that's fine with me.  I have it on my watch list.

Robert Jahn ~ I should have known better!

It was brought to my attention that this blog mentions Robert Jahn as a skeptic.  I had him on a list of people whose site needed a picture as well as a cleanup.  I gathered the names for that list from the Rational Skeptic Wiki Project that had a mix of skeptics and non-skeptics on it.  I went to Robert Jahn's Wikipedia page before he was brought to my attention and looked it over.  Not knowing who he is I thought he looked okay.  After I was told to look into his skeptical credentials further I looked at Google and really only found his academic webpage as well as the Wikipedia link.  Nothing enlightening.  Apparently there are several men named Robert Jahn so their pages were intermixed with the Jahn I am looking for.

So back to the Wikipedia page.  The person who asked me to look closer is someone who should know, Barry Karr, Executive Director of CSI.

Hopefully you are looking at Jahn's page right now, what you see here is badly referenced (see the flag at the top of the page asking for citations and cautioning viewers that the page has been written from a single source).  There is no picture, no personality, lots of red "dead links" this is what is called in Wiki language a "stub" page.  But skeptics also have badly maintained stub pages, and we have a whole list of people who need a picture.  So I'm learning nothing from just the quick glance.

Then I start reading his lead, the academics and prestigious schools just scream that this man is noteworthy.

Professor Robert G. Jahn is Dean Emeritus of the School of Engineering and Applied Science of Princeton University. He founded in 1961 the first American laboratory dedicated to the study of Electric propulsion for spacecraft and satellites, the Electric Propulsion and Plasma Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton University, and directed it for more than three decades. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and has been chairman of the AIAA Electric Propulsion Technical Committee, associate editor of the AIAA Journal, and a member of the NASA Space Science and Technology Advisory Committee. He is vice President of the Society for Scientific Exploration and Chairman of the Board of the International Consciousness Research Laboratories consortium. He has been a long-term member of the Board of Directors of Hercules, Inc. and chairman of its Technology Committee, and a member and chairman of the Board of Trustees of Associated Universities, Inc. He has received the Curtis W. McGraw Research Award of the American Society for Engineering Education and an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Andrha University.

So if Mr and Mrs America sitting on their couch read what I read (just quickly) how can you sum this man up?  Is he a scientist worthy of being someone we need to have his Wiki back?  Or what?  What I said to myself was "damn, this man sounds awesome".


So I ask Barry, "what are you talking about, nothing on Google is coming up on this guy other than solid academic links or the Wikipedia page where he looks like a good solid scientist".  Barry's reply is "do a search for him on www.csi.org and see what you get.

Well that was an eye opener!  There I find that this man was involved in the Bem paranormal experiments, and not on the skeptical side.  I had just read Jame's Alcock's critique of Bem and friends, I had made a lot of notes of how I intend to post the write-up from SI into several Wikipedia pages.  In fact the March/April issue is sitting next to my laptop where I can glance down next to the bowl of cherry pits and see the title "Proof of ESP?  Not Quite." looking up at me.

Then taking a third look at Jahn's Wikipedia page, there is a lot of information that should have raised a flag, like the mention in the above paragraph that he is the Chairman of the Board of the International Consciousness Research Laboratories". Which I have never heard of (nor has Wikipedia as the link is a dead one) but that word Consciousness is just one of those "hum" kind of words.

Then later in the Wikipedia page we find this,

"With Brenda Dunne, Robert Jahn established the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab in 1979 following an undergraduate project to study the low-level psychokinetic effects on electronic random event generators. Over the last 25 years and more, Jahn and Dunne claim to have created a wealth of small-physical-scale, statistically significant results that suggest direct causal relationships between subjects' intention and otherwise random results."

Brenda Dunn goes to a dead page as well.   An eyebrow raiser to say the least.  They claim to have  found evidence that a subject can change a randomizing machine.  Just the word "psychokinetic" should have set off an alarm, but I didn't notice it. 

Then the clincher that I didn't notice until the third time reading the page. 

"Experiments under Jahn's purview also came to deal with Remote Viewing (RV) and other parapsychological matters. More than 30 papers were published in peer-reviewed journals. Statistical flaws were proposed by others in the parapsychological community regarding some results in a few specific experiments."

Well oh well oh.  

No hyperlinks to the paranormal words that might set off a light bulb and explain the terms.  Only one slight criticism from this source that does not have a URL link associated with it, from a paranormal journal. 

Critique of the Pear Remote-Viewing Experiments by George P. Hansen, Jessica Utts, and Betty Markwich, Journal of Parapsychology, Vol 56, No. 2, June 1992, pp 97-113.

What!

Here are the links to CSI articles I found once I checked on their site.


Back to the Future: Parapsychology and the Bem Affair - Jan 2011

A Mind at Play: An Interview with Martin Gardner - April 1998

A Korean Skeptic’s Report: New Ager-Occupied Territory - March 2000

What’s Going On At Temple University? - Oct 1998

Anomalous Cognition? A Second Perspective - August 2008

Tachyons and Other Nonentities - September 1994

Scientific Remote Viewing - June 1996

An Alien Taxonomy - June 1997

PEAR Lab Closes, Ending Decades of Psychic Research - June 2007

Barry Karr is correct, this man isn't unknown to us.  There are many articles written by skeptics devoted to informing the public about this man and his psychic research.  Wonderful.  But what about the rest of the world, I'm not saying that a high percentage of the 411 million hits to Wikipedia in the last 10 years ended up on Robert Jahn's page, but there it is for whoever wants to read it.  

Shame on us.  Why did we allow this to happen? I know what to look for, and I still missed all the red-flags.  And yes, you can make fun of me all you want, but the end result is the same.  Robert Jahn's Wikipedia page is in desperate need of a make-over.  

I've given you just a few of the links.  I've cleaned up the dead hyperlinks on the page as I couldn't stand to look at them anymore.  The discussion page has nothing except this "This article falls under the scope of WikiProject Paranormal, which aims to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to the paranormal and related topics on Wikipedia.".  Please people, lets get this taken care of. 

 

Portraits on Wikipedia

Part of the "We got your Wiki Back" project.

A large part of what makes a Wiki page engaging is the use of pictures on the page.  By profession I am a portrait photographer (I specialize in people who don't want their pictures taken, usually the very young and the old and cranky).  Portraits on Wikipedia fits right into that skill set. 

Lets just go to the category American Skeptics for a quick look at how we are doing with photographing our spokes people.  Remember you can access this page by just going to a skeptic's page, scroll down to the bottom of the page and under Categories you should see this link.  If you don't see the link then it probably needs to be added and you can see my other blog on how to add that.  At the moment we only have 93 people listed on this page, something tells me we are a bit behind. See this blog about how to add a category.

Looking over this list I'm really surprised how many I've "tagged" with my pictures.  Some are the main image, others are somewhere else in the page like Hal Bidlack "relaxing" on the stage at TAM8 while some nameless "psychic" tries to discover who is missing a kidney.  (there is no accident that she is missing from this picture as well as her name in this blog) Same picture and reference is on Derek Colanduno's page. 

Brian Dunning, Harriett Hall and several others have pictures from the IIG 10th anniversary party up where they received awards for their contributions.  When I do this kind of post I'm able to link back to the IIG page for a bit more publicity.  They are also mentioned on the IIG page.  We are small fish in the ocean that is Wikipedia, we need to use our resources (each other) to become mainstream and linking to each other is a way to do that.

George Hrab has a great picture of him wearing a balloon hat.  Mark Edward took my camera away from me when we were at the Drinking Skeptically party at TAM7 and snapped it.  Tim Farley is the person who wrote this page and asked if I might have any images of Hrab, I searched my library and found this one.  In fact I think this was one of the first I've posted.  Again a plug for the JREF with this picture reference.

I've talked about Yau-Man Chan's picture in another blog, but want to mention it again.  This man is famous for his ping-pong skills and his two Survivor shows.  Only in our little world is he known as a skeptic. But now someone who might be looking him up for other reasons is going to come across this adorable picture with the JREF Pigasus.  Another hit for the JREF.  And someday when SkeptiCalCon gets enough notoriety this will link to their page with free publicity.

Here's an interesting image that I uploaded for Power Balance Bracelet, it was taken during the test done by Dominique Dawes and IIG.   I hyperlinked to the IIG under the picture and also in the article itself. I know people are clicking on the hyperlink because I am watching the IIG's "stats" page and can see where the hits come from.  You might notice on Dawes page that there is also a reference to the IIG and Power Balance that I left there some months ago.

Ray Hyman, Barry Beyerstein, James Alcock and Wallace Sampson all get linked together through this picture and it gets a quick mention of the Skeptic's Toolbox as well.  (The toolbox is in very bad need of a page, I just haven't managed to get to it yet). Most of these men are in bad need of a new picture for their site, so don't wait for me.  Barry's daughter is going to upload some images for me someday soon and I'll post them when she does. 

Several are missing pictures, Dr. Dean Edell and Elizabeth Loftus are just a couple.  Then again I'm sure Roger Ebert is wishing he didn't have a picture up, check this out?  Is there an award for worst Wiki portrait? 

The Robert Lancaster picture has a funny story behind it.  When I'm going out with my camera I usually have a picture goal I'm hoping to get.  At TAM6 I had heard that RSL was going to be attending, and I'm a big fan of his www.stopsylvia.com site.  My photo goal for TAM6 was to get a picture of me shaking his hand.  My friend Paulina Mejia took this image, you can't see me because when Tim Farley wrote Robert's page he asked me if I had a picture, I cropped out my mug and this is what we were left with.  The photo was taken pre-stroke.

Here's a great example of guerrilla skepticism on Harold Camping's page.  I managed to put up a picture of the IIG at the rapture party on May 21, 2011. (click on the image to read the signs) And a great quote from American Atheists while I was at it.  Use your resources.

Michael Stackpole's portrait is linked to the Dragon Con page more publicity for a skeptical event, good job.

Here is one that needs a new portrait, Greg Epstein 

And now a list of people who are missing their profile picture.
Claude Allegre, Farrell Till, George Abell, Isidor Sauers,  Robert Sheaffer, Stanislaw Burzynski, Andrew Weil, Stephen Barrett, Bart Bok, Chris French, Drauzio Varella. Eddie Tabash, James Oberg, Jerome Clark, Kendrick Frazier, Linda Howe, Michael Goudeau, Sanal Edamaruku, Sherwin Nuland, Phillp Klass, Dean Radin, Robert Priddy, Victor Stenger, Curtis Peebles, Donna Kossy,  Gerald Glaskin, Terence Hines.

James Moseley Not sure about this guy, I found him on the Rational Skepticism Project Page, I'm sure someone will let me know. 

Really sad pages here, I had to take a look at them again as I linked them to Wikipedia, and we really have our work cut out for us.  This list is long, but the list of people missing are even longer.  Please, if you know of people to add to this list let me know here and then others can see and help out.

How to post a picture on a site.  It isn't as easy as you might think, you don't just upload it from somewhere on the Internet.

First you have to open an account on WikiCommons.  Then you go to the "upload" page.  Follow the instructions and hopefully you will be left with a .jpg file that can be stored for someone writing a page, or for you to upload that very minute.

It will ask you for categories, I'm not sure how to find these categories, so I just start typing in the word skeptic and it usually gives me several choices.  I "add" all that pertain to the person.

How to actually edit a picture onto a Wikipedia site.  Place your courser on the WP page you want the picture to appear.

Select the 5th image from the left side of this image.  (The rectangle photo)

A box will appear.  In the "Insert File" you are going to place the file name of the image that was uploaded to Wikimedia Commons.

In the lower box is where you write your caption.

When done the edit may look like this below.  You can see that the | is in-between each area.  You do not have to have the picture size in your edit.

If you want your image to appear on the left or center side of the WP page, you can add the word, "left" or "center" to this edit.  Make sure you have a | before and after the word.

[[Image:Four Founding IIG.jpg|thumb|250px|Four founding members of the IIG, James Underdown, Brian Hart, Milton Timmons & Sherri Andrews, celebrate the 10th Anniversary of the IIG, August 21, 2010]]

The 250px is where you change the size of the picture.  Play around with different numbers in here and keep hitting "preview" on the page you are inserting the picture in.  Look at what the result is and see if you should raise or lower that number.   This writing is the name of your uploaded picture. Four Founding IIG.jpg Do not change anything, otherwise your image will not load. 

This writing Four founding members of the IIG, James Underdown, Brian Hart, Milton Timmons & Sherri Andrews, celebrate the 10th Anniversary of the IIG, August 21, 2010 is what you want to appear under the image.  You can [[ hyperlink ]] to other Wiki pages even in this area.  Which is what I have done on several pictures I referenced above.  See Ya-Man's picture with Pigasus.

I have quite a few pictures just sitting in the Common's area waiting for a page to be made.  This TAM9 I'm photographing everybody separately for their future Wiki picture, you never know who will need it next.  

Get Shooting!

p.s. Here is my Wiki Commons page with all the pictures I've uploaded.