GSoW on the Move - Sept-Oct 2014 updates

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

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

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

• "Investigates popular media pseudoskeptics."
• "Explores the pseudoskeptical mindset, motivation, and method."
• "Looks at ways in which scientific objectivity is compromised by vested interests, fraud, experimenter effects, and merchants of doubt who use skepticism as a weapon to further corporate interests."
• "Discusses current controversies."

Its a terrific looking website, someone spent some time on that. I love the webpage they gave me, great photo (James Randi is sitting next to me though you can't tell) and they even finally spelled my name right. I do love this part, "Gerbic bills herself as a “professional portrait photographer who specializes in people who don’t want their portraits taken”, an insight into several forms of psychological pathology, including a lack of empathy." I suppose they think I take photos under bathroom stalls and with a hidden camera on a bus or something. It's possible taking pictures of children who don't want their photos taken might mean I lack empathy? Anyway, guess I'm just going to have to stay tuned to see how this all plays out, can't wait to be "investigated" by this crowd.

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

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

And we are adding one more team leader to our group.  Team Curie will now have three Team Leaders
Ryan Harding, Richard and joining us is Christine Daley. Christine has been one of our Honeybadgers, 
running all over the place trying to get things done. She has been active on Todd Robbins, I Sold My 
Soul on Ebay, Angela Saini, Sanal Edamaruku, David Koepsell, Paul Zenon, Derek Colanduno and 
Friends of Science in Medicine. Welcome Christine.

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

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

each of these rewrites. 

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

Enjoy!

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

Dutch

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

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

Elektrosmog - Emile Dingemans - Before & After

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tim Trachet - Leon Korteweg - Before & After

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

Wim Hof - Emile Dingemans - Before & After

English

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

European Humanist Federation - Leon Korteweg - Before & After

Tim Trachet (new page created) - Leon Korteweg

Budd Hopkins - Janyce Boynton - Before & After

Robert Sapolsky small rewrite - Steff  - Before & After

Peter Gleick small rewrite - Monica Quijano - Before & After

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

Bruce Hood - Steff  - Before & After

Vincent Racaniello - Kyle Hamar - Before & After

Sarah Gray Thomason - Monica Quijano - Before & After 

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

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

Russian

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

Did You Know? 

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

Alton Lemon

View stats for Alton Lemon

Maynard & Bart Bok

View stats for Bart Bok and his wife Priscilla Bok

View stats for Maynard

Flim-Flam!

View stats for Flim-Flam! 

GWUP

View stats for GWUP

GSoW in the media

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

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

CFI Summit - Workshop - October 2013

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

Peter Gleick and Wikipedia

You know I keep finding evidence of how important the We Got Your Wiki Back! project is.  Opened the San Jose Mercury newspaper this morning and saw a familiar name and face looking at me.  Peter Gleick sounded so familiar, then I remembered that he was one of the main lecturers at SkeptiCal May 2011.  I presented that year also and took a lot of pictures which oddly enough made it up on the Wikipedia pages of Yau-Man Chan and Bob Carroll.  I noticed that Peter Gleick had a nice Wikipedia page but was missing a picture so click click goes my camera and there goes up another image for Wikipedia.

Regular readers of this blog know I'm a major believer in making sure all our spokes people's pages are in good shape, with content as well as attractive looking.  No red type, awesome photographs that help tell the story and citations that actually say what the citation links to. 

Also I'm all for making sure that skeptical organizations are getting recognition where ever we can fit in a plug.  All three of the aforementioned have SkeptiCal mentioned in the caption.  IF SkeptiCal was noteworthy (not yet but hopefully soon) they would have their own Wikipedia page that would contain a live link so readers could link to.  And that works backwards as well, when SkeptiCal gets its own page, the past speakers will be listed somewhere on SkeptiCal's page with live links so people can click over to their page.  Don't you just love Wikipedia?  I dare you to visit a page and NOT click on at least one hyperlink.  Its like eating potato chips right?

Anyway, I posted the picture for Peter Gleick back in June 2011.  Now it seems his name is all over the place and people are scrambling to find out who he is.  The skeptical community already knew who he was, but as I keep saying we aren't improving Wikipedia for the choir, but for the rest of the world that is trying to find out who is who.  I especially find it funny that people are going to see Gleick speaking at a skeptical conference that generally is skeptical of the global warming skeptics.  That is going to confuse most people. 

Having a well-tended Wikipedia page really helps with his credibility.  His page needs more content (and probably more pictures) but for the most part it looks better than most. 

The lede (also called leed) contains this bit. 

On February 16, 2012 Gleick resigned in disgrace from the American Geophysical Union Task Force on Scientific Ethics after he confessed he had obtained and distributed documents from the Heartland Institute by impersonating a board member, and apologized.

I've already left a comment on the talk page that I believe the word "disgrace" should be removed.  This is how things are done on Wikipedia.  I can go in and just edit it out (the BE BOLD policy) but for the moment I'm just going to ask and see if whoever edited it in the first place can back up that word.  It sounds like opinion to me?  Maybe Gleick actually used the word disgrace somewhere?  If so then the word should remain.  

Now back to my main point, backing up my claim that people are visiting Wikipedia for more information.  Yes I know that his personal website is probably getting a lot of hits, but that isn't a neutral site and people know that.  They want someplace that will sum up the person, and that place is Wikipedia.

So what do the numbers look like?  Normally Gleick gets about 80 hits a day to his Wikipedia page.  Yesterday (remember this tool is off 24-36 hours in reporting numbers) the page got 3,774 views.  When I came home from work ready to write this blog I noticed the next day's numbers are already in.  3,130.  I'm leaving the link for you to watch the numbers hit as the story unfolds.  Exciting huh!

So what about the supporting cast?  Does the Heartland Institute have a Wikipedia page?  Apparently they do and Gleick is already mentioned on their page.  Someone is on it!  What do their hits look like since the story broke? They have seen a spike in traffic as well. 

Eugenie Scott and the NCSE might even see a spike in their hits.  Don't see anything for Eugenie Scott, and only a slight increase for NCSE.  But it is difficult to know what might trigger a wave of Wikipedia views.  Tomorrow Dr. Scott might be interviewed on CNN discussing the issue, we just aren't able to plan for everything.  Its like a giant pond with a stone thrown into the water causing a ripple effect with other Wikipedia pages seeing an increase in hits.  This is why we need to have their backs.

We need to be ready. 

Please help with this project.
Write to me at susangerbic@yahoo.com

BTW join me this April 21st at SkeptiCal (they have a great speaker list and some might just need their pictures taken.  Race me!)