Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Homeopathy and CBC News are WP readers accessing our edits?

Approached at Whole Foods on Sunday by a very personable woman handing out homeopathic samples for leg pain, my friend Deborah Warcken asked the woman if she knew how homeopathy worked?  When the woman answered in the negative, Deborah handed the woman this card.  I received these from Jay Diamond at SkeptiCal and had just given one to Deborah 30 minutes earlier, at a skeptics meetup.



The link takes you to a page with videos a plenty.  One I hadn't seen before was from CBC News out of Canada.  What a great job reporter Erica Johnson did in this investigation.  She seemed really concerned that the mother wasn't vaccinating her child, or should I say not vaccinating with real medicine.  Also Johnson seemed almost as sickened as I was to listen to a homeopath tell her that she could cure Stage I breast cancer in 15 days just by boosting the immune system.  In the case of Johnson "high five" for great reporting!

Anyway these are two great videos (part one and two) mentioned is CFI Vancouver which also has a mass overdose in front of an emergency room, there are some great lines like "even snake oil has real ingredients in it".

So I had already made a few edits to the homeopathy page. I can't remember but I think I've added a lot of the activism citations, in the last paragraph (hopefully it is still there when your reading this) is my newest addition using the CBC videos.  

 This blog tackles many elements of editing Wikipedia for skeptical content.  Not just where to edit, and how to edit, but I think its real important to try and see if we are seeing results from the work we are doing.  We can see if hits increase, but can't tell if minds are changed.  So as this is the very last days of June, I'm going to not release this blog for a month  and see if there is a significant increase in the hit count for Erica Johnson and CBC News's Wikipedia pages.  I'm also going to look at the hit counts for the two videos I linked to on YouTube.

Sorry I can't release this blog as it is written (June 26, 2012), because I know you all will travel over there and look at those pages and throw off the numbers.  The edits I made on the homeopathy page are waaaaaay down at the bottom of the page, no idea if people are getting that far in their reading.  I suppose I will know in a month. 

NOTE: This is an unscientific study, there are few controls. 
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 June 26, 2012 

  CBC Marketplace - Homeopathy: Cure or Con? Part 2 of 2 is at 14,479 views

 CBC Marketplace - Homeopathy: Cure or Con? Part 1 of 2 at 25,989 views


Erica Johnson Wikipedia stats trends about 17 hits a day

CBC News Wikipedia stats  trends about 121 hits a day
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The edits still remain on the near bottom of Homeopathy's page.


August 1, 2012

 CBC Marketplace - Homeopathy: Cure or Con? Part 1 of 2 at 26,403

  CBC Marketplace - Homeopathy: Cure or Con? Part 2 of 2 at 14,637

 Erica Johnson Wikipedia stats for July 2012 - about 14 hits a day

 CBC News Wikipedia stats for July 2012 - about 109 hits a day.

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

 So it looks like there was no major hit increase in the two target hyperlinked pages, in fact their numbers dropped.  And the YouTube videos did increase somewhat, but no idea if that was because of the Wikipedia citation or for other reasons.  Another thing I might mention, the two videos are just part one and two of the longer CBC News program.  I was completely engaged by the reporting, and wondering why such a drop-off in hits from Part 1 to Part 2?  It seems that only 50% of people watching the first video also watched the second video.  Many questions and possibilities.

 Seems discouraging.  A page like homeopathy is receiving over 100K hits each month.  You would think that maybe a percentage is following up on these links and reading all the citations.  

 I think what I learned is that hits to a page do not necessarily translate into reading a page thoroughly.   Getting your point across in the lede and first couple paragraphs is paramount.  Of course having skeptical references on pages is important, but fighting over citations on a well-trafficked page like this when the reference is so far to the bottom is probably not well spent time.  

 On the other hand, CBC News, and Erick Johnson now have homeopathy listed on their "what links here" tab.  This only makes their pages stronger in the eyes of other Wikipedia editors.  A page is considered an orphan if nothing links to it.  




The "What links here" area is on the far left side of all Wikipedia pages.  Check it out on your favorite pages. 

Want to note that I recognize some of the CFI group.  A shout out to Fred Bremmer (sans Dave the Skeptical Raisin) from Vancouver and Josh Rosenau from the San Francisco area. 

Additional note - Erika Johnson's WP page is a stub.

I'm always looking for people willing to help out with this project.  Please contact me at susangerbic@yahoo.com if you would like to help out. 
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Monday, July 30, 2012

We got your Wiki Back! - Mary Roach

I noticed a post in the Bay Area Skeptic's Facebook group months ago by someone named Chris Parker.  She was looking for someone to give her "must read" material for a college research assignment on psychics she had to present in class.  I contacted her and gave her some ideas, and linked her with Mark Edward who is an expert on the psychic business (see Psychic Blues on Amazon).

Chris did her essay and wrote to tell me all about the professor and the other students reactions.  I thought she was a terrific writer and felt that a blog would be in order.  She worked it up and Mark decided that he wanted to post the story on his blog, and did so in July.

In the mean time Chris shared that she was not taking college classes this summer and liked to keep busy, wondered about this Wikipedia project she kept seeing me yammer on about all over Facebook.   We exchanged emails for awhile and I asked her if she could pick a Wikipedia project what would it be?  So she spent a day and wrote me back with the suggestion that Mary Roach's current Wikipedia page was a stub and how sad that was.  She had been to one of Mary's lectures being that they both live in the Bay Area, and thought that if I showed her how, she would work on that page.

So, Chris and I went back and forth for a couple weeks, and then a few other editors from the project helped with ideas and how to cite some sources when I was at TAM.  Chris asked really great questions which helped me learn a lot about the gaps in my blog instructions and the reality of what I actually mean.  When you live and breathe this Wikipedia project daily, you tend to forget that others aren't as "connected" to the project and not reading and memorizing every word I write.

Want to point out that until this re-write I don't think Chris had ever edited Wikipedia.  I also don't suggest brand new people start with re-writes, but in Chris's case she was so excited and motivated that I thought "why not?".  She communicated with me clearly, asked lots of questions and we sent emails many times a day.  We started with the very basics, and once I pointed her in the right direction, she just took off.  I'm totally self taught, and Chris seemed to be learning the same way with only a bit of guidance.  One reason why I felt that Mary's page would be okay for a beginner was because her current page had a lot of external links to interviews and videos that only needed to be watched and quoted to expand into the article.  I knew Chris wasn't going to be searching for months trying to turn up secondary sources. 

We made a brand new user page for Chris's rewrite and made it "un-searchable", and on that page we had constant conversations about what should go where, and what to expand on and so forth.

Only after Chris was almost done did I approach Mary to get further citations we were missing, and had her upload some personal pictures (which warm my photographer's heart) they really make the page extra special,  I'm reminded of Lei Pinters's re-write of Kendrick Frazier's WP page a couple months ago. 

There was so much info on Mary Roach out there and Chris watched every video and read every link she could find.  (and yes, she even had a Google alert on her for incoming items) Now if Chris ever gets on Jeopardy and the category is Mary Roach, Chris will clean up.  One comment I remember from Chris, was she was surprised that interviewers always asked Mary the same questions over and over again. I suppose, now that if they start by reading Mary's new Wikipedia page they will be able to have a much well rounded interview. 

Okay, I know you have waited long enough.  Time to show you the before and after.  Hold your breath.

Mary Roach before

Mary Roach after

So wondering, Chris what's next?

As usual, if you would like to help with this project, I will keep you more than busy.  You don't even need to do as much work as Chris did, I have many tasks that await you, I will train.  Just please contact me at susangerbic@yahoo.com and lets get to work. 

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Friday, July 20, 2012

Spanish & Portuguese Wikipedia - a starting point

As regular readers of this blog knows, we are on week one of the Wikipedia World project.  We have groups formed for English, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, Turkish, French and German.  Hopefully in the next couple weeks we will have doubled that number.

I asked several of the groups if they would give me their opinion of skepticism and science topics on Wikipedia this moment in their language.

Nix Dorf sprang to the challenge and supplied us with a lot of information about what the Portuguese and Spanish pages look like.  I'm really shocked about some of these pages, homeopathy in particular.  The last 10:23 campaign was  global, the videos created can easily be cited on the homeopathy page, we just need volunteers to help out.

The following is guest editorial by Nix, he asked me to correct his grammar, but I'm not touching a word.

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Portuguese presence in Wikipedia as whole.
Nowadays Portuguese speakers are around 240 million native speakers in the World. Roughly 180 Million are Brazilians and the rest are mainly Portuguese, Angolan, Mozambicans and some other nations. But the bulk internet traffic comes from Brazil and Portugal, which are the most industrialized countries in this language. Brazil has about 81 million active Internet users, which make them the 5th nation in the world by user access. Portugal has 5.5 million more users.[3]

Portuguese isn't wide spread as English and Spanish. Portuguese is 6th most spoken language. But Portuguese Wikipedia has more than 742,000 [4] articles which is larger than WP in Chinese, Hindi-Urundu and Arabic which have a larger speakers base.
Considering that Spanish WP has approximately 900,000 articles while having roughly 400 million native speakers (it is the 2nd or 3rd most widespread language in the world [5]). That makes Portuguese to have a higher speakers/articles ratio, if that is really a valid way of measure anything. I’m just guessing based on the WP data available. But it looks like that the more industrialized the countries that speak a given language the more WP articles they seem to have. So my conclusion is that’s why German, Japanese and French have much more articles per speakers than Hindi or Chinese. But this doesn’t explain why Polish speakers have 900,000 articles with 40 million native speakers.

No language even compare to the amount of articles available in English. Even so English is not the most spoken language in the world as the number of native speakers; there are lots of people that have English as its second language and most English speaking countries are very industrialized too. On top of that USA is a well-known leader on all that happens online.
Skeptical presence on Portuguese Wikipedia.
In general the articles for uncontroversial subjects are often fine. The ones that are Brazil specific can be very rich, while depending on the subject attention, some other articles may vary a lot on how well written Portuguese articles are compared to the English ones. Usually you see some few claims that are ungrounded or biased like it is on other languages, but the fact is that Portuguese Wikipedia probably may not have as much editors as needed to keep it 100% clean (I guess no language really can claim to have it).

But when we get to evolution, homeopathy, religion, skeptics then it gets worse. Let’s go to a few examples.

The Randi article is very bad, compared to the English version. When I was changing it, I couldn’t resist and had to change Randi's picture itself. The former one wasn’t very nice and it had no bio info (birthdate, birth place, etc).

When you go to other skeptics, they don't even appear. I was unable to get individual bio pages on Penn and Teller for instance (there is a draft article for “Penn & Teller” together[1]). Even HBO used to air Penn & Teller Bullshit! on Brazil’s cable.
Michael Shermer[8] and Adam Savage[6] are just drafts. I would say that Mythbusters is a well-known show, at least in Brazil and I would guess in Portugal too, since the show itself has a decent page. Joe Nickell doesn’t even have a page.

Evolution pages have some discussions and back and forth reversals on ID and some had been blocked for edition sometimes. But the pages aren’t much biased. But they certainly should be improved.
Homeopathy page[9] cites for example a Word Health Organization "publication" called "Homeopathy: review and analysis of reports on controlled clinical trials" that was a draft from 2005 that was never published (I believe that this report was heavily criticized by an article on The Lancet and never made a respectful scientific Journal [2]). Even though it is still there as a favorable point towards Homeopathy, while it is not even cited on the Spanish and English WP versions. The article is listed as a medical especially, and not as an alternative medicine. So the article doesn’t seems to be very pro Homeopathy but is too soft into criticize it in my opinion. And it barely mentions Randi, what a shame!

To be honest, the article on skepticism itself is very poorly written and in my opinion it is has some bias towards the skepticism. If we plan to keep ourselves unbiased we may have to pay attention and fix this kind of bias too. It requires lots of discipline to be actually “fair and balanced”.

My personal pet peeves are the Articles on Spiritualism. With more than 3 million followers it is a big religion in Brazil. One of the most important icons was very famous woo woo called Chico Xavier[10], that is called by Wikipedia as a medium (not a supposed medium) and is very mild on criticism, while almost states that he was the true thing. When you compare these spiritualist articles with Shermer’s, and Randi’s you realize how big are the challenges that we may face.

Spanish Wikipedia as whole.
Spanish is the second (or 3rd) most spoken language in the world. It is hard to state that something is the biggest, tallest, or whatever in the world because it depends on so many variables, like native speakers, or national interests, or on different census criteria, estimates, etc. But even though Spanish is very important and is growing as a second language to many, especially in US. It is hard to compare, but while Chinese Mandarin and Hindi-Urdu are spoken by lots of people, they are mainly spoken on their original countries while Spanish is the dominant language in the American continent. Due the Spanish dominium on the seas during the Spanish conquests during the XVI century it got very spread.
The main nations on Spanish by internet millions of users are Mexico (31), Spain (30), Colombia (16), Argentina (14), Peru (10), Venezuela (9) and Chile (7)[3]. With all the Spanish speaking nations it may add up to approximately 120 million. This is a low number if you compare it to more than 400 million native speakers[5]. To give you an idea, Japanese native speakers are about 123 million (almost all on Japan) while there are 102 million native users[5]. Once again I’m working with the data available on Wikipedia and those numbers can vary. But, Japan has an 80% of the population as Internet, while several Spanish speaking nations are on underdeveloped countries.
Spanish Wikipedia has more than 900,000[4] articles and on uncontroversial articles it seems pretty fine. It looks to have a richer content if you compare it with the Portuguese WP, but less detail than the English version.
Skeptical presence on Spanish Wikipedia
The Article about evolution seems to be very complete and balanced and discussions and reversals are frequent, but not as frequent as the ones that I have seen on the Portuguese version. It lacks of a Evidence of Common Decent as we have for the Portuguese version. This subject is treated inside of the evolution[11]. This section needs to become an article and be expanded.
I’ve got the impression that the majority of the Spanish speaking countries are Catholic, which doesn’t require a belief on a literal truth of the bible, so perhaps the fundamentalists on those countries aren’t so willing to attack evolution. But my native Spanish speaking fellows might better comment on that.
Even the Article on James Randi[12] is much better than the Portuguese version; it still needs lots of dedication and effort to be brought to the English standard. It lacks of references and citations. The article on Penn and Teller is very simple, almost a draft. Penn Jillette doesn’t have an article while Teller[13] has one draft for some reason.
Michael Shermer [14] is pretty decent, but needs to be expanded.
The Article on Creationism has been edited and vandalized frequently on the last year. [15]
The article on Skepticism is really good, broken down in religious, philosophical, ecological and scientific types of skepticism. [16]
You can find pages for Ann Druyan , Harry Houdini, Susan Blackmore, Robert Todd Caroll, while Joe Nickell is missing. Most of the articles need some expansion and they are often drafts.
The article on Homeopathy[17] is pretty good, providing lots of valuable information and it takes the scientific side. It lacks of some of Randi’s confrontations, I would expand on that.
It seems that some battle has been taken place on the Talk and history pages. The article is protected from anonymous edition.
In my opinion it looks like that the greater number of editors is making the Spanish version better than the Portuguese one. Since I’m not a frequent Spanish Wikipedia visitor, I may be wrong. But some of the problematic pages on the Portuguese version aren’t with the same problems on the Spanish ones. The main issue is lack good information about skeptics.

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