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. 

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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.  

Plait, Gardner, Tyson, Kurtz, Andrus and so much more

For those of you just joining us, Welcome.  This is an update of all the new releases from the Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia project.  To learn more about what this project is please read this, its a little dated but should catch you up.

We translate well-written Wikipedia pages into other languages, currently we have 18 language teams working on the project (but we badly need more editors working with us, we train and mentor, see bottom of this blog for contact info). 

Not only do we translate but we need to write (or re-write) the pages that will be translated.  We have (and need far more) photographers, video interviewers, copy-editors, researchers, people to caption videos and just motivated people who like doing stuff. 

We have many more pages being worked on right now, but they didn't make the deadline for this update... so stay tuned.

So onto our most current updates... 



Martin Gardner &  Paul Kurtz 
Nix Dorf from the Portuguese team rewrote the Paul Kurtz page.  Here is the before... and now the after.   And then got on to the Martin Gardner page (before) & (after)  

Phil Plait
Filipe Russo created a brand new page for our very own Bad Astronomer, Phil Plait.  






Neil deGrasse Tyson
Luis Pratas rewrote Neil deGrasse Tyson  (before) & (after).  

I want to add that Nathan Miller did the research in English for the Penny4NASA section (under "views") on Tyson's page.  He is trying to build a complete page for the project but it might be too soon as they have not become noteworthy enough yet. 

Ken Feder
The English Ken Feder page got a Did You Know (front page of Wikipedia for 8 hours) unfortunately it was up from 11pm to 8am so we didn't get the hits we would have normally expected.  Only 1,190 for that night.  Other links on Feder's page also experienced a surge on that night. Keep in mind that these are mostly people outside our skeptical choir.  So total win for skepticism. 

Jerry Andrus - Now with it's 8th language... English, Dutch, Portuguese, French, Farsi, Spanish, Russian and now Swedish!  Way to go Philip Skogsberg and Wim Vandenberghe!  Very proud of you both!

Karl Shuker
Received a call-out from Blake Smith from MonsterTalk podcast asking if we might help out a cryptozoologist.  His page had fallen into disrepair, even threats to have the page deleted.  Editor Nathan Miller stepped in and cleaned it up.  Before and After.  Nathan stated "This has been a gratifying effort."

Point of Inquiry
Point of Inquiry is often used in our work as editors as a source for interviews.  This page (Before) had been on our to-do list for quite some time until new editor Ric Watts decided he wanted to take it on.  And he sure did.... here is the after Point of Inquiry.


Our Lady of Warraq
Before new editor Wim Vandenberghe joined the team he had been working on and off on this page for a apparition of the Virgin Mary in Egypt.  (before) He kept having problems getting his edits to stick, problems with other editors (believers) were mostly the problem.  He heard about our project and with a little training and some teamwork this page is in far better condition.  (after) 

As you can see from the before and after, no mention in the lede about what the "apparition" probably was existed until after we did the re-write. 


Danielle Egnew
You might remember from our last update that someone had added the name of Danielle Egnew to the Psychic page.  Listing her as a famous psychic.  I've never heard of her, but she has had an amazing career.  Check out some of these claims... 

Danielle Egnew is recognized in the United States, Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand for her work in the spiritual and metaphysical fields as a Clairvoyant Channel, Paranormal Investigator, and Healer. She is alleged to have successfully assisted law enforcement on cold case profiles, as documented on TV pilot Missing Peace.

Though she is alleged to utilize many spiritual aptitudes, she is widely known by film and radio audiences for her claims that her primary form of direct communication with spirit life is through angelic entities

Danielle Egnew currently owns and operates her own private metaphysical practice in the Los Angeles area.

She has more credentials in music, theater and LGBT activism.  I'm not concerned with those claims, just the psychic ones.  So my editors Nathan Miller and (3-day old Chris Pederson) went to town sorting through the mess.  First Nathan rewrote all of the citations so we could see where all the claims were coming from.  He discovered that nearly every footnote that supported a psychic claim was coming from her own website. 

Chris did some research to make sure that there wasn't a good secondary source for these claims elsewhere on the Internet.  Don't mean to spoil the surprise, but there were none.  So they spent about a day going back and forth researching and talking and finally Nathan said, everything comes back to Danielle's own website, "I'm pretty sure I could become a successful professional juggler, in the same sense that I could buy a domain name, and remain a 'successful, popular' professional juggle-master provided I'm not fired from my day job."

DING DING DING 

Exactly right.  Wikipedia is not a place where you get to advertise, it is not a personal brag page.  Wikipedia is where secondary sources (not your personal website) backs up claims.  Wild claims like how you have solved missing person cases using only your psychic powers needs backing up.  

  Here is the before page... and now the after.   
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 And now the plea for help.  We can not make these updates happen if we don't have help.  We need people to join with us to improve the 5th most popular Internet site in the world.  Yes, this is a crazy idea, but it is totally doable.  Once these pages are created it is pretty easy to maintain them, and we are only looking at a small section of Wikipedia, not the entire site. 

But we do need your help.   As I mentioned before, not just as editors but in all kinds of ways.  We also need help getting our message beyond the people who are currently reading this.  Do you have a blog/podcast that you can feature an interview of us or highlight our updates?  Can you tweet or post these on your own social network?  Can you write to skeptical and/or science media sources (and conferences) and encourage them to give us some time?  Especially need people willing to work in other languages besides English, we train, we mentor and are really nice people also.  
If you have ideas of helping us outreach, please write to me at susangerbic@yahoo.com so I can best advise how you can make the biggest splash.

If you want to become involved in the project.  First read everything on this blog as far back as you can stand (working from the bottom up is probably the best way to do so).  Then friend me on Facebook and let me know what your interests are, what language(s) you want to work in and what kind of training do you need.  And then the next thing you know you will amongst a group of people that are happy to see you and will get you helping.  

Thank you 

Editing Skeptical Content ~ Making it Stick!

Just encountered an blog that is sending "traffic" to this site.  Apparently "The Daily Grail" posted a blog a couple weeks ago about his frustration over editing Wikipedia on "TDG-related topics".  (which I hope someone will enlighten me about.)

I've reread his blog and the comments that follow.  I think that I'm understanding his frustration.

His point seems to be that Wikipedia needs to keep the "riff-raff" out but it is going too far, with "bias articles towards mainstream opinion without fair representation of alternative views." He seems to think that Wikipedia should be balanced.  He also states that "it was quite obvious that there was a fairly large, and loud, contingent of pseudo-skeptics in place there who would soon revert any open-minded content, no matter how well referenced and written the piece was."   He discovered the Guerrilla Skepticism blog and is pointing his finger at us for being the problem.  He even claims that we are astroturfing.

Well okay then.  I'm open to new ideas.

The example he gives concerns a trance medium called Leonora Piper, the blogger wrote an article about Piper and tried to quote it on Wikipedia as a reference. 

He seems a bit confused about the Wikipedia policy to favor a secondary source over the primary one, believing that when a reputable source reports on the original primary source it becomes more noteworthy and creditable.  Reading the blog again I'm understanding that he thinks his blog on Piper should be considered equal to a book review about Martin Gardner's assessment of Leonora Piper. 



The blogger feels that Martin Gardner should not be used as a reference on Leonora Piper because he (the blogger) found many factual errors in Gardner's research.

Now I'm not going to go into the background on all this, I'm simply bringing it up to you all intelligent people to kinda see the other sides point of view.

Here are a few samplings from the comment section.

"So, on Wikipedia, different people operate by different rules. It takes time and effort to understand those rules. Like learning how to deal with bureaucrats."

" find wikipedia attracts certain types that write their pages and edit their pages -- it seems geared toward the 'tiny detail' types, the OCD/asperger's types who are focused on details."

"When I was in high-school, my Psychology teacher used to call them 'anal retentives'"

"You have my sympathy: I once tried to correct a minor mistake about the history of the village I live in only for it to be re-edited within days. Some people get a fixation about certain things and nothing, but nothing, will shift their viewpoint."

"This explains why there are so many alternatives to Wikipedia, obviously you're not the first person to encounter a Wikitroll."

and lastly

"After a few years of following CISCOP, Penn and Teller, and other similar outfits I sometimes get the distinct feeling that the founding fathers of these groups are really all about supressing any and everything that might point to the wider powers of mind. It is not just that they are skeptical - they are outright hostile to the very idea of heightened mental and sensual faculties, and they assiduously stomp down even the slightest of glimmerings. It really feels to me like they have been "tasked" to stifle the human potential movement. There is a coordination among them if you happen to read them all at once. It was first obvious with 911 conspiracy theory which they endlessly and vociferously tried to quash, and they often had to abandon hard science to do so. Watching the Amazing Randi jettison his normally acute powers of observation to make allowances for the official government sanctioned 911 theory was the first real eye opener for me. These guys are not on the up and up at all.
Randi's adolescent rebuttal of quantum entanglement may be the most ludicrous assignment he ever gave himself or had given to him, but he has so boxed himself into a logical corner that he can't now really think very clearly. They really have the smell of hired whores to me, and the larger view might be that they have been tasked to keep as many people as possible dumb to a larger dimension. What really attracted Randi's attention about quantum entanglement was not the physics of it but that it implied an avenue from which things like ESP might find footing. The very idea of that immediately sets the works to grinding over there at CISCOP. They are like crazy fundamentalist preachers who must stick to their Good Book at all costs and no matter what."

I hope this gives all of us some pause.