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.   
 ----------------------------------------
 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 

We got your Wiki Back! - Tom Flynn

I wasn't all that familiar with Tom Flynn, but his name kept coming up in podcasts and articles I was interested in.  I also started noticing pictures of him standing at the podium at various conferences as I browsed through photo albums.  Nearly every time I came across his name I looked at his Wikipedia page and cringed.  Finally I copied the page to a private user page and started to work. 

I hadn't remembered until I started working on his page, but Flynn is the author of one of the first skeptical books I've ever read.  I picked it up I believe at the Skeptical Congress in Burbank, CA many years ago. 

Anyway, Tom Flynn's Wikipedia page was overdue for a re-write.  I really enjoyed listening to the old interviews on Point of Inquiry and reading issues from Free Inquiry.  Lots of great skeptical stuff there.  I was able to use another picture from friend of this project Brian Engler and also an image from Andy Ngo whom I wrote to months ago and asked if he would upload some of the images he took from the Humanist Film Festival in Portland, OR. 

Here is the page as I found it back in November 2011

Here is the new page. 

Guerrilla Skeptism on Wikipedia ~ Podcast Outreach Project

Hello New Readers.  Welcome to Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia.  

This blog is designed for those of you who haven't been following this project since June 2011 when I went public.  I have stolen from several of my blog posts in order to make this intro to the project as simple as possible.  

Here's the pitch...

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

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

We Got Your Wiki Back Project!  We need to think about what the "big picture" goal here is. When our skeptical "heroes" speak out for us in the "real world" they need the credibility of having a well maintained and cited page backing them up. Face it most people don't know who is who in the skeptical movement, Carl Sagan may be the exception but stop 10 people on the street today and ask them who James "The Amazing" Randi is and they will sadly shrug their shoulders. That's almost unfathomable to us skeptics. My point is, we don't live in the real world.  When someone turns on CNN and there is Randi talking about Sylvia Browne how many people are going to say "who is that?" a quick search on their favorite search engine and there they are on Wikipedia.  Shame on us if we don't have Randi's back. 

Working Backwards!  Often the majority of the time you spend working on an article is trying to find the references to edit into a page.  I advise to start with the article (must be reputable) read it several times, sum it up and go to a Wikipedia page that is associated with the topic and see if you will be improving the page with your edit.  Cite the article correctly and Your Done!


Podcast Outreach Project.  This is specifically aimed at you who are coming to this page today from a podcast announcement.  Some podcasts have a Wikipedia presence; SGU, Skeptoid, Skeptically, Monster Talk, Point of Inquiry and The Skeptic Zone (and others).  These podcasts need to systematically be "gleaned" through and all relevant material that can be cited from them, put on Wikipedia pages.  Other podcasts can also be used, but as they do not have a presence on WP the extra "punch" is missing. 


For example Skeptoid covers many paranormal topics that can be easily cited.  See these examples on Wikipedia;  Racetrack Playa, Joseph McMoneagle,  Remote Viewing, Dyatlov Pass incident and Betty and Barney Hill abduction.  Not only will this give the Skeptoid podcast a giant hit to the www.skeptoid.com website and give a boost to the shows reputation.  This is serious outreach to a community of people interested in the paranormal, whom may never have heard of Skeptoid.


Other podcasts like The Skeptic Zone, SGU and Skeptically do a lot of interviews in the science/skeptic community.  If the person they are interviewing also has a Wikipedia page then it is possible to glean a quote or two from the interview and insert it on that person's WP page, and give the citation to the podcast.  For one example see Mark Edward ("find on page" Mark holds an impromptu séance for Michael Jackson).  The SGU has done hundreds of interviews and lists several of the more prominent people on their WP page.  But  these interviews are not all on that person's page giving reverse hits back to the SGU page.  Yet another example, Seth Shostak from SETI gets 1,000 hits a month to his WP page, those viewers may not know he is also associated with the skeptic community.  The SGU interview could be mentioned on his WP page, sending potentially 1,000 extra viewers to their WP page.  

Specific podcasts cannot directly appeal to you (listener and fan) to edit Wikipedia in their behalf.  They can appeal to you to edit Wikipedia for skeptical content, and also to get in touch with me personally at susangerbic@yahoo.com where I can help you learn how to edit and do so in an organized systematic way.   This project is very important to gaining more positive exposure to skepticism as a movement and community.  I only want you to edit topics that you are interested in and probably would be reading/listening to anyway.  I will direct you on how to do this the most efficient way possible.  I am offering to train you how to edit if you need that kind of help, even virtually hold your hand while you learn.   


If working on podcasts does not interest you, but editing Wikipedia for skeptical content does, this blog has hundreds of ideas for beginning to advanced editors to get started.  My offer of help is for anyone needing advice or training. 



Thank you for reading this far.  I hope you this will be a perfect fit for you as a way of becoming involved in the skeptical movement.  We so badly need your help.  You can work from home in your pajamas with a cat in your lap. You can edit like a crazy person for days, then drop off the Internet for months when you are busy IRL and then pick up editing again when you have time again.  This project is made for you. Welcome.




Thank you, 
Susan Gerbic