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. 

We Got Your Wiki Back - Sikivu Hutchinson!

Regular readers of this blog might remember a few months ago I wrote a blog for She Thought explaining the We Got Your Wiki Back! project.  Along with the reasons why it is important, I followed up with my normal plea for editors.

Well guess what, not a single person signed on.

No one.

I wrote to several people that will be speaking at the Women in Secularism conference this May.  Debbie Goddard responded, but her Wikipedia page had already been targeted for deletion and I was unable to save it.  Jennifer McCreight's page has just had an over hall which happened because she asked for help. One of the other speakers was very rude with comments about Wikipedia editors.  All the others that I had contact info for, ignored me. Only Sikivu Hutchinson responded.  Sikivu supplied me with links and pictures and over the last 3 weeks the page has really developed.  Tonight I'm proud to be able to launch a total re-write of the page.  See the bottom of this page for Before/After lnks.

Thanks to everyone on the team for your feedback on the page.  Brian Engler quickly responded to my call for pictures, he even managed to edit her face out of a group shot for the main photo on her page.  Adam Isaak donated an image from the last Humanist conference (but alas, we didn't end up using it).  Wendy Hughes sent me links and told me that she has a famous father who is also on Wikipedia, thus I was able to add her name to his page also. 

I wanted to point out that some of these women speakers pages are being improved behind the scenes.  Lei Pinter is working on cleaning up Greta Christina and Ophelia Benson's pages with new images supplied by Brian, and some general housekeeping. 


We are making a difference, it is slow, but it is getting done.  

Sikivu Hutchinson was such an interesting topic, I had not known of her before the re-write.  She has done (and continues to do) some amazing things.  I listened to all of her lectures and read a lot about her.  Fascinating woman.  The billboard idea was a very clever idea, linking modern Black non-believers to Back non-believers from the past.

Speaking of the billboard project.  I would like to see more street-view images like the one on this page.  Its a formal way to link the two Wikipedia pages together.  I put the same billboard image up on Zora Neale Hurston's page with a link back to Sikivu's page.  Zora Hurston gets over 35K hits each month which means the Sikivu Hutchinson page has been exposed to an additional 35K readers.  There is nothing stopping other pages to be linked by their common billboard.  We just need others to become involved. 

Write to me at susangerbic@yahoo.com

Sikivu Hutchinson Before

Sikivu Hutchinson After

Smithsonian Article on Women Wikipedia Editors

Just a quick note to catch you up on how busy we have been.  Several really exciting pages are going up or just went up.  Rick Duffy launched the brand new page for SkeptiCamp.  Looks wonderful and seems to be stalled while awaiting consideration for Did You Know? recognition. 

Lei Pinter has been working on Reason Rally as well as several other projects including Greta Christina. 

Dustin Phillips is about done with a complete re-write for Alison Gopnik.  It is going to be an amazing makeover just wait and see. 

Photographer Brian Engler has been uploading pictures like a mad man. And we are adding them to pages as fast as he uploads them.  I have a couple more photographers who are in the process of uploading images from Reason Rally, TAM and the Florida Humanist Convention. 

I've got multiple pages going at once, creating a page for Actress and skeptic Rachel Bloom and total re-writes for Secular Humanist Tom Flynn, Magician Paul Zenon and  Professor Sikivu Hutchinson.

I have more waiting in the wings to start, so if you want to help or have something to add I'm all ears. susangerbic@yahoo.com

The main reason for this blog post was to introduce you to this terrific article my friend Jarret from  The Odds Must Be Crazy website sent me.  Great title, "How Many Women Does it Take to Change Wikipedia".  Regular readers know I don't focus on one area, my blogs are all over the place with topic choices.  This author is correct there is a small percentage of female Wikipedia editors.  I don't know this for sure but would suppose this to be true, that female scientists pages are in bad need of attention.  Science = Skepticism so we need to keep an eye on this area as well.  You all know I don't want to assign people to specific pages, I want people to edit pages they enjoy.  Editing is fun, and I want it to stay that way.  But check out Sarah Stierch's article and comment.  We bloggers thrive on getting comments.

 

Uploading images to Wikimedia Commons

Thank you to several photographers that are currently uploading images to Wikimedia Commons.  It really adds a lot to the page.  Just want to mention that my very first edit to Wikipedia as a skeptic was uploading a image of Brian Dunning I took on a JREF cruise.  Now look at me.

I find Wikimedia Commons really confusing to use when you try to do anything other than just upload an image you took yourself.  I have no idea how to edit or delete something, so I try to get it correct the first time, otherwise I just rename the file and reload it.  I'm sure I'm not the best teacher when it comes to uploading pictures.  But I'm going to try and do it anyway, at least just the basics.

Skeptic Brian Engler sprang to action when I asked if he could add some of his images from CSICON to Wikimedia, but he asked some really great questions along that journey, hopefully the answers will be of use to others. 

First question was...

"I'm always happy to share photos with our community and ask only that I be credited (Brian D. Engler) when my photos are used.  Question:  My Wikipedia edit name is not my actual name.  With it, however, I find that I can log onto WikiCommons.  If I upload photos there, though, how do I get my actual name attached for photo credit?"


My solution was for Brian to make a user page for himself on Wikimedia, that way anyone who clicks on the contributor's name will end up going to his user page.  You can add all the images and a bio to the page.  I don't have much of a user page on Wikimedia so I guess I should get on it.  But you can click on my uploads and you will get this page.

One thing Brian did to give himself photo credit was to rename himself on Wikimedia to his real name.  The only problem I can see with that is that he will have two separate accounts,  if he wants edit the image into Wikipedia then I believe he will have to sign back in under the new name.  I use the same name on Wikipedia and Wikimedia so I can move back and forth without signing in again.  I guess it might be easier to change his name on Wikipedia to his name, and then on his old user account write that he has changed his name, so Wikipedia does not think he has a sock-puppet.

Next question from Brian...

"I followed their upload steps, adding both categories and a description, but once the photo showed up I found that it was labeled "Uncategorized" and did not show the description I'd added ("Tom Flynn at CSICON in New Orleans, October 2011").  I then tried to edit and add categories, which seemed to work except they're listed now in red under "Template." I saw no obvious way to add the description."

This is a little more complicated.   Generally when something is in red then that means it is not "linked" correctly.

When you want to upload first go to the Wikimedia main page.  On the left hand side click on "upload file" it will ask you to click on "select media file to upload".  Make sure that whatever your going to upload has some kind of name and not just the numbers that your camera named it.  I'm going to select one of my favorite pictures of Mark Edward that I took in Solvang, CA last month.  Save it as a .jpg,  it does not have to be high resolution.  Find the image on your computer and select upload.  Once it has uploaded, select "complete".

Click the "this is my own work" button.  Then "next".  It should look like this. 

There is a blank box you can write in next to description. 

Here is where you can write all the information about the image you want.  Be descriptive and informative.

Now click on the blue "add categories..." link.



Start typing something in the box and it hopefully will auto-link.  It should "suggest" categories for you.  I know "American skeptics" is a category, so I'm going to type this in the box.  When you have a category you want, hit "save category".  The link should be a blue hyper-link.  If it appears in red ink, that means that the category does not exist.  Think of all the categories you can and select them all, in this case I added "mentalist" and "mentalists" and many other categories.  Generally you can look at the bottom of the WP page and see all kinds of categories.  These are case sensitive.  When you think you are done, select "next".  It will upload and you should be left with something like this.

This blog explains how to upload the image onto the Wikipedia page. 

Keep in mind that having pictures on the WP page does more than make the page look good.  It can also be a great advertisement for the event it was taken at.  Having the podium with the event's logo really helps.  Andy Ngo from the Portland Humanist Film Festival uploaded several images that I put on WP.  Here is one he did of Roger Nygard. 

Barry Karr gave me the names of several people at CSICON that did a lot of photography.  I've contacted Robert Sheaffer and Adam Isaak who are both opening up their portfolios for possible WP images.  Robert Sheaffer BTW uploaded an old image he had of Phillip Klass to Wikimedia and now his page has an image.  

Thank you again photographers.  I hope this inspires more people to look through their photo files and start uploading.  If you don't want to be the one inserting the image onto the WP page, then bring it to the attention of a WP editor like myself and maybe soon thousands of people will be viewing your image.  Don't let this become a gloating match, pictures go up and pictures go down on WP.  

EDITED November 27, 2011
Thanks to Brian Engler several WP pages have been updated with great photos.  A few of these pages were completely missing even one picture.  I referenced CSICON on the caption (as well as most of the pictures show the podium with CSICON on it).  Because there isn't a WP page for CSICON what I did was add this to each edit... What this does is make the words on the WP appear saying CSICON but when it is clicked on, the reader will be redirected to Committee for Skeptical Inquirer's WP page.  

[[CSICOP|CSICON]]

Now that CSICOP has announced that it will be having CSICON yearly, it is probably a good idea to add a reference to the event on their page.  Adding this hyperlink to these pages exposes WP readers to the CSICOP page.  What is the potential?  October 2011 showed 53,862 hits to the following pages. 

Seth Shostak
Chris Mooney
Massimo Polidoro
Bill Nye
Tom Flynn
 

Barry Karr's Wikipedia page is currently being written and not publicly launched yet.  I added one of Brian's pictures to the page for later use. 

Thank you Brian Engler.  I look forward to you looking through all your old photo albums and uploading more.  Especially helpful was the way Brian cited the images, in the description area he wrote completely the citation that was needed to insert under the image, I copied the text, changed CSICON to

[[CSICOP|CSICON]] and pasted it in. Very simple for an editor to quickly add the image and description.

Here is Brian's Wikimedia page.   

Another Edit 11/27/11

example of adding a picture to a page that already has an info box but no image.  

Here is what it looks like before I add the picture.  

 

I am only concerned with the areas for "image =" and "caption =" Now I'm going to take a .jpg from Brian's wikimedia page.  I'm copying and pasting exactly what he wrote.  

 

Now I'm going to change the CSICON in the caption to  [[CSICOP|CSICON]] so that when someone clicks on the hyperlink they will go to the CSICOP page.  



Then hit "preview" and write an reason for the edit.  Click the "add to watchlist" box so you can know if someone changes the page.  Then if you like the way it appears then click on save.  

 

In this case I'm not sure that this image is the best image for his page.  William B. Davis is not known for his work in the skeptical movement, but as an actor.  That should be the main image, but because there is no image on the page and Brian and I have William B. Davis's Wiki back this is the image that is going up.  

When we get something that better reflects his career then all the steps I just explained will be done again and this picture along with the caption will be inserted into the text somewhere on the page.  Exactly where?  You just try it out in different places, keep hitting "preview page" and seeing if you like it where it is appearing.  

When this picture is moved the edit will look just like this.  

[[Image:CSICON 2011-William B Davis.JPG |thumb|250px|William B. Davis participating in
"Skepticism and the Media" panel at [[CSICOP|CSICON]] 2011 in New Orleans ]]

If you think the image is too big or too small, try changing the number of px in the citation.  Try 100 or 150 to make the image a lot smaller.  The reader can always click on the image to make it bigger and get the specifics of who the photographer was.