GSoW Rocks the Internet with Major Updates

Before I begin... we have breaking news.  Amanda Berry has been found! This is the same Amanda Berry that Sylvia Browne said was dead and "in water" back in 2004 when Berry's mother appeared on the Montel Williams Show.  We have updated the Browne, and Berry Wikipedia pages to reflect this info.  Things are happening fast and possible that the references to Browne may not stick.
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Get ready - there are a lot this month -  in no special order... here they are.

Skeptical Inquirer Magazine - now has a new page in Portuguese.  Nix Dorf, Filipe Russo & Luis Pratas have been working on getting the licencing for this image for over a month.  Portuguese Wikipedia has some very strict rules and getting the magazine cover correctly added took far longer than the page translation. 

10:23 Campaign - Newly created for Portuguese readers - (Luis Pratas editor)

Mark Boslough - Nova interviewed Boslough for its program on meteors at the end of March 2013.  We were waiting for those viewers.  Look at what happened to the page view hits his Wikipedia page received during this time.

Ruth Hurmence Green - This is a rewrite (before) that editor Fredrick Green (no relation whats so ever besides how we are all related to each other) created.

Skeptic's Guide to the Universe - brand new page in Portuguese - (editor Luis Pratas)

JREF One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge - It was suggested by editor Rick Duffy that the challenge would probably receive more traffic if it were its own Wikipedia page. While there is still a mention on the JREF page, having its own page allows us to add a lot more content.  Rick also discovered when he was re-writing it, that many of the links were broken or missing.

Long Island Medium - Now in Portuguese.  Editor -  Luis Pratas

Stan Romanek - Rick Duffy created the Wikipedia page for this person several months ago.  We not only create pages for our skeptical spokespeople, but feel it is important to have well-written pages for our opposites.  Remember we are not writing Wikipedia pages for the skeptical choir, but for the general public. When people like Romanek are in the media, it is important that the public has a place (beside that person's personal website) in order to get information.

In this case, you can see from this stat tool, that Romanek has been in the media's eye.  People are going to his page to find out more about him, we are waiting for those people.

Sharon Hill - A brand new creation by Nathan Miller and team - this page will be featured on the front page of Wikipedia, May 8th from 4:00am - noon EST.  Please support the GSoW team during that 8 hour window by visiting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page and look for the Did You Know section.  This is a lot of fun (please share on your social networks)..  DYK is terrific outreach for our community as the majority of people who will be viewing this page are not skeptics.  Nathan is leaving a great little tease (called a hook) about Bigfoot so that should draw some extra attention.

Desiree Schell - rewritten by editor Chris Pederson.  Make sure you check out the before page.

And Psychic Fans your going to love this next one.  Check out the BEFORE page first.  Brand new editor Daniel Skitt decided to take on psychic Desert Tavares's Wikipedia page.  Personally it looks like Tavares (or one of her fans) wrote it.  Whoever it was did not know what they were doing and listed all the media appearances she has had.  Problem is they did not list the appearances, just the name of the show.

We loved the lede where they write that she is a "broadcast celebrity" and is the "daughter of internationally recognized artist, Luis Magin Florez".  A "celebrity" really?  "Internationally recognized artist"?  With no Wikipedia page?  That just seems odd.  Anyway, Daniel went through each citation and non-citation and found that just about everything went back to her own personal website.  He learned how to mark each claim with "citation needed" to keep himself organized, and we liked how that looked so much that we decided to keep that on the page when we re-published it.  It was either that or just deleting everything.

Nathan Miller carefully reworded the part about her making the predictions.  I hope that people reading the page understand what we were trying to say, that Tavares predicted it after the fact.  We left the page in much better shape than we found it.  It is now tagged with a notability flag, and we will move on to other pages.  Editors now have the choices to

1. Leave it alone
2. Delete it
3. Find all the citations

Skeptic Magazine - in Portuguese.  Just like with the Skeptical Inquirer Magazine release, the team had a mess trying to get the licensing correct for an image.  But now because of Nix Dorf, Rita and Luis Pratas, Skeptic Magazine is now live.  

CHILD - This is the first page rewrite of brand new editor Bill Grieb.  I had never heard of this organization before he started working on the rewrite, now after spending time with this page, I'm so glad we have this in great shape.  Facebook and Twitter were alive a couple weeks ago when the news broke that for the second time, parents had allowed their child to die while they prayed over them instead of seeking medical care.  CHILD works to change laws that prevent parents from being allowed to use loop-holes and claim religious exemptions.  Here is the before page.

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This has been a busy month for our team.  We have added several new editors and as we do so, grow the amount of updates.  We are continually recruiting, and customize our training to whatever is needed to get you started.

Here are a few recent interviews and blogs about this project.  Please become involved and join us.

May 4, 2013 - JREF Swift - http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/2108-skepticism-a-the-new-encyclopedia-or-wiki-skepticism-you-can-do.html

 

May 2, 2013 - American Freethought Podcast - (28:50) http://americanfreethought.libsyn.com/podcast-176-guerrilla-skepticism-on-wikipedia

 

April 28, 2013 - The Skeptical Libertarian Blog - Eric Hall - (this is a re-post of his March 16th blog for Skeptoid) -Snopes, "Liberal Bias," and Trusting the Internet - http://blog.skepticallibertarian.com/2013/04/27/snopes-liberal-bias-and-trusting-the-internet/

 

 

April 23, 2013 - Skepticality - http://www.skepticality.com/superlaw/#axzz2RK8pDXJw

 

April 20, 2013 - Amateur Skeptics podcast - http://amateurskeptics.com/AmateurSkeptics-083

 

April 10, 2013 - Skepticality - http://www.skepticality.com/#axzz2Q4t3tPC5

 

April 7, 2013 - Life the Universe & Everything Else podcast - http://lueepodcast.wordpress.com/2013/04/07/episode-53-hivaids-denial/

 

April 5, 2013 - JREF Swift - http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/jref-news/2082-join-us-for-qguerrilla-skepticism-on-wikipediaq-a-live-jref-workshop.html

 

April 5, 2013 - Skeptics on the Net blog - http://skepticsonthe.net/an-introduction-to-guerrilla-skepticism-on-wikipedia/#more-6852

 

April 3, 2013 - The Virtual Skeptics (about 22 minutes in) - http://virtualskeptics.com/2013/04/03/virtual-skeptics-33-432013/

 

April 2, 2013 - Skeptic's Dictionary Newsletter - (Bob Carroll) - http://www.skepdic.com/news/newsletter1204.html

 

April 2, 2013 - 360 Degree Skeptic Blog - (Andrew Bernardin) - http://360skeptic.com/2013/04/skepticism-and-wikipedia-a-call-for-volunteers/

 

April 2, 2013 - Florida Skeptics Blog - (Andrew Bernardin) http://floridaskeptics.com/2013/04/skepticism-and-wikipedia-a-call-for-volunteers/

 

March 27, 2013 - The Daily Grail - http://www.dailygrail.com/Skepticism/2013/3/Guerilla-Skepticism-Wikipedia

 

March 26, 2013 - The Morning Heresy - CFI - http://www.centerforinquiry.net/blogs/entry/3_26_13/

 

March 26, 2013 - Skepticality podcast - http://www.skepticality.com/spot-the-bull/#axzz2Oi3HNgma

 

March 26, 2013 - SWIFT blog - DJ Grothe - http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/2066-susan-gerbic-and-wikiskepticism.html

 

All Summed Up - Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia

Every so often I have to sit down and sum up all the Wikipedia projects we have going right now.  So this is that blog, if you have been reading the blog from the beginning, you can skip this one.  If you are new to the project this will really help you catch up. 

Next week will be the 2 month anniversary of the Wikipedia World project and I will give you real numbers and show updates next week. 

The following will explain all the different projects, with lots of links to blogs and articles explaining what this Wikipedia thing is all about. 

Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia (general)

This is the project I began with in 2011.  I first began editing WP by myself and quickly began picking up others who were like minded.  BTW there is nothing keeping non-English editors from doing this same kind of editing.  Ben Radford just sent me a link to Pensar magazine (Spanish language magazine owned by S.I.)

I advocate editing backwards.  This means first find an article that is from a noteworthy source, and then cite it on the appropriate page(s).

The most recent example I can think of that I personally edited began with an  email I received from the JREF.  It was a general email to the JREF mailing list.  I followed the link on that email to the Huffington Post article by JREF president D. J. Grothe.  (Both the Huff Post and D.J. Grothe can be cited as they both have WP pages, this makes them notable).

I was able to leave this on the Priceline.com Wikipedia page. 

JREF President DJ Grothe released a press release calling out Priceline.com for endorsing Caputo, stating, "It is difficult to watch the show and not feel heartbroken for those who are desperate to hear from the departed... and even more so if they are being manipulated by a charlatan." Grothe urges Priceline.com to "invite... your new representative" to take the James Randi Million Dollar challenge and prove her credentials.

As you can see I was able to hyperlink to JREF, DJ Grothe and to the James Randi Million Dollar challenge with this simple edit.  This is an example of getting skepticism, out past the skeptical choir and into the reading hands of people who may never have heard of the JREF or skepticism.  How many Priceline readers were reached with this one edit?  16,361 potential readers for August 2012 alone.  For September that page is trending 500+ readers each day.  Everytime Priceline.com is in the media, more traffic will be drawn to their WP page.

How many people would have read about the JREF challenge if I had simply reposted the JREF announcement if I had put it on my Facebook/Twitter/Google+ page?  About 1,900 people, all of whom are in the skeptical choir and they would be limited to viewing it just as long as it is in the "feed".    I don't know what the potential readers of the Huff post are, I'm sure it is sizable, as well as the amount of people who are on the JREF mailing list.  My point is, I do not have the ability to be DJ Grothe and write for Huff Post, we need that content written first.  But once written, those of us who are a part of the skeptical movement (a subset of the skeptical community) have many avenues to spread the message further and outside the choir.  We need to think outside the box.

I added this edit August 15, 2012 and no one has touched it, nor are there any grounds for its removal.  Now for the icing on the cake.  Why stop with Priceline.com?  I went over to the Long Island Medium's WP page and placed nearly the same edit on that page.  Some other editor(s) had been there before me and left some great guerrilla skepticism edits.  (I left footnote 11 only)

In June 2012, Mrs. Caputo appeared in a commercial for Priceline.com, in which she portrayed herself "connecting" with the late Priceline Negotiator character previously played by William Shatner.⁽⁹⁾However, this commercial has sparked controversy, since the commercial appears to make light of the Native American belief of smudging.(10)JREF President DJ Grothe released a press release calling out Priceline.com, stating, "It is difficult to watch the show and not feel heartbroken for those who are desperate to hear from the departed... and even more so if they are being manipulated by a charlatan." Grothe urges Priceline.com to "invite... your new representative" to take the James Randi Million Dollar challenge and prove her credentials.(11)

and

On April 1, 2012, the James Randi Educational Foundation awarded Caputo a Pigasus Award for being the "psychic" performer who fooled the greatest number of people with the least effort in the preceding year. JREF founder James Randi stated "[the show] is utter nonsense and dangerous". A Pigasus award was also given to TLC for continuing to air the show.

These are all great examples of Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia.  I worked backwards by finding the notable citation first, I can assume the other editors did the same.  How many potential readers are reached with the Long Island edits?  21K in August 2012.  In September we can see one day alone that page had over 10K views.  Every mention of Long Island Medium in the media brings in more views to the WP page.  So over 37K WP readers can read about JREF calling out the Long Island Medium, remember this is EACH MONTH. 

My team of editors (along with the other editors on WP) have placed tons of these citations.  Yet, it remains that the potential is for thousands more.  Imagine how many backwards edits could be left with one single Skeptical Inquirer magazine?  Skeptic Magazine? Scientific American?  When you start with a source that is noteworthy  (in other words it has its own WP page) and if you quote someone who also is noteworthy (not always needed, but it is better) then the potential to affect hundreds of WP articles is amazing.

One more mention, this to Dustin Phillips whose first edits on this project were backwards edits to the Oscillococcinum and Bioron pages. 

Podcast Project

This is also an example of working backwards and guerrilla skepticism.  We are small fish in the big world.  Getting the message out that we have podcasts, blogs, magazines and such centered around a skeptical theme is difficult.  There are many ways of breaking out of the choir, my project is only one way.  Again, you have to start with a noteworthy podcast, and find quotes that are relevant to the WP articles.  My favorite is Skeptoid for many reasons.   How many podcasts have you heard discussing the Philadelphia Experiment or Ball lightening?  BTW I just picked these two pages off the top of my head, you might be interested in the amount of views these pages get.  PE got 89K for August 2012 and Ball got 156.  You just don't know sometimes what interests people which is why we have to be diverse. 

At this moment, one editor, Jim Preston has made the Skeptoid project his baby.  It is time consuming but he is making progress.  In time we will review the hit counts  to see if he has increased the hits to Skeptoid.  I love it when we get to see measurable results. 

Skeptoid isn't the only notable skeptical podcast out there.  Several others also exist, but most don't discuss a topic like Dunning does using citations and such.  It is more difficult to quote a hosts opinion of something in the news, not impossible, but leaving this citation might be problematic in the eyes of other WP editors.




Recorded Interviews

When a noteworthy person is interviewed on a podcast they can be quoted and cited on WP.  This means all interviews on podcasts (noteworthy or not) can be gleaned for great quotes, cited and left on WP articles.  If the podcast is noteworthy (i.e. they have their own WP page) then that just makes the citation stronger.

The same thing goes for recorded interviews on YouTube.  If the WP can follow the link and listen to the interview and find the quote then it is fair game.  This means that all the interviews I have of James Randi, Mark Edward, Ray Hyman and so on are potentially usable for cites on WP.  So please pull out your video camera and start recording.  If you have something sitting around on your computer, get it up on YouTube.  If you think it might be valuable to quote from, but you don't want to make the edit, please leave the URL on the talk page of the person, or bring it to my attention.

Captioning Videos

This is another new project that is so important to the movement, and does not require a WP account, or any editing.

All videos we use as citations should be captioned in English.  Not only for the benefit of  hearing impaired viewers, but because once translated into English, it makes it easier for the video to be translated into other languages, then cited into WP articles that are not English. 

The problem we have run into on the Wikipedia World project is that the captions have to be added by the owner of the video.  This really restricts us to a very small number of videos.  I have written to several video owners  and not heard a peep back.   Thankfully, because of social networking I am "friends" with several people that own some of these videos, they have been gracious enough to upload the captions when asked. 

This video owned by Rex Young has now been captioned into English, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish and French (all within the last 5 weeks) More languages will follow.  (note: click on the little cc area to see all the translations)

Photographers Needed

Another area that we need a lot of help with are people willing to take and upload images that we can add to WP pages.  Most people do not understand that we can not add a picture to WP unless it has been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons.  The easiest way is to have the photographer do this.  The image does not have to be perfect, amazing or anything of the sort.  Sometimes we add the picture then find something better and change them out, it isn't difficult if we have access to the image.

Here are two guest articles from Vera de Kok explaining in better detail this subject.   Flickr and OTRS.

Also Portuguese editor Filipe Russo is looking for some good Penn & Teller images that can be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons.  Here is all we have to work with.  Remember we can't take anything off the Internet without the photographer's permission.   So we would prefer something shot at a skeptic or magic event, uploaded by the photographer.

We Got Your Wiki Back! project

One of the more popular of all the projects.  This one is a blast because the editors are usually creating pages for people they don't know, but by the time they are done they find they have become an expert.  I receive the most comments and thank you's for these, they are a lot more work than simple edits working backwards.

I've written about this project so many times that I'm just going to let Wendy Hughes explain it to you quickly.  (BTW this video has only been captioned in English so far, hint hint)

Now I'll just list a few of the people and groups we have added or re-written in the last few months.  I think you will get the idea.

Barry Beyerstein, James Alcock, Ray Hyman, Loren Pankratz, Skeptic's Toolbox and Jerry Andrus

Kiki Sanford

Mary Roach

Bryan & Baxter,  Jennifer Ouellette, Tim Farley and Alan Melikdjarlian

Kendrick Frazier

Robert Ingersoll

Tom Flynn

Alison Gopnik

Sikivu Hutchinson


Wikipedia World project

The world project has evolved over time.  I started by asking for people to translate two paragraphs into many non-English languages and find places to put up the paragraphs.  I was hoping to get people interested in editing in other languages.  My idea was to just introduce the idea then step back and hope they stuck with it.  I got no help from this shout-out.  

Next I tried to appeal to the 6th World Skeptic Congress for help, and then I made the case that we really need to branch out into other languages and used the page for Evolution as my reasoning.  Again no offers of help.  What I discovered was that people were reluctant to edit pages on Evolution because they felt they lacked the scientific background to do so.

So I regrouped and thought a lot about this, I wasn't giving up so easily.

I then decided that optical illusionist Jerry Andres would be the perfect page to write in all languages.  I wrote a blog introducing the idea, but still no one offered help.

Finally, I decided to have a long talk with the English editors that attended TAM 2012 (Brian Engler, Brian Hart, Tim Farley and Lei Pinter) I bounced off several ideas and they gave me great feedback.  We quickly put a plan into action, made some announcements and the next thing I know I was surrounded by people offering to help. 


We had great success using Facebook as a way to train and communicate when it came to the English group.  So why not try the same thing with a World group?  I wanted non-English editors to be able to participate, so we had to have a way for each language to have their own space for that specific language only. 

So what I did was to form a Wikipedia World FB group that only English is spoken in, here we can bond, share ideas, encourage, share links and just learn from each other.  Then each language group has its own FB group where I am the only English speaker.  In that group, editors can discuss specific issues to editing in that language.  They can also train each other on how to edit (most people come to this project never having edited WP before).  Inside these groups we can have people doing all the above projects that I mentioned earlier; captioning videos, photography, adding videos, We Got Your Wiki Back, guerrilla skepticism and so on. 

I will share a few blogs about this project here, but won't reveal what we have accomplished the first two months just yet (next week).

Overview of the World project

Overview of the Spanish and Portuguese WP pages by Nix Dorf

The first 3 weeks

Jerry Andrus in Portuguese


 And finally, thank you for bearing with me through this very long post.  Here is my first year in Review.

Wikipedia World - 3 weeks later

There has been a lot of interest in the Wikipedia World Project.  Most are obviously not involved in the group but still rooting for it to be a big success.

We are now about 3 weeks out from TAM 2012 when I announced this project.  And I think an update would be welcome about now.

We now have 13 language groups formed; English, German, Norsk, French, Turkish, Dutch, Korean, Russian, Portuguese, Espanol, Danish, Farsi and Swedish.

The IIG Randi Beard photo has gone worldwide with it included on these pages...

English
German
Turkish
French
Spanish
Russian
Dutch
Portuguese
Norsk

Our next project is to produce a Jerry Andrus page in each language.  After that page is done we will be able to branch off onto more pages.

The English page re-write is almost done and just waiting for me to spend a week in Eugene, OR gathering more interviews and photos.

The Portuguese and Dutch pages for Andrus are about a forth of the way complete. 

We have identified 7 videos that show Jerry performing or just show his illusions.  These 7 videos have very few words and no need for captioning, they are ready to go.

We have 5 videos that discuss Andrus and need to be captioned first in English and then in all the other languages.  We have 3 of these done in English, and 1 in Portuguese and 1 in Dutch.

I'm really enjoying doing the English captioning, at first it was confusing to me and took a long time.  Now I've got the hang of it and its like a video game of sorts, but with an actual purpose.  I've done several others in my video library but only the 3 for this project,  I will focus on improving that number this weekend.

We have have several Andrus videos that are already in a language other than English.  Those are ready to go onto pages as is.

Several of the language groups have done a cursory look at what lies ahead for us.  From what we can discover we have our hands full.  Nix Dorf provided us with a good overview of the Portuguese and Spanish Wikipedia pages on this blog.

We are making to-do lists in many of the language groups, and of course the individual editors are free to work on whatever projects/pages they want.  Several have already expressed the desire to work on homeopathy in their native language.  Niels is very interested in creating this page in his language, MusiCure.  Apparently it is big news in Denmark.

My goal is to also really focus on creating pages (or improving pages) for people and groups that are specific to that language.  We get so focused on English speakers being the big-wigs in the skeptical movement that we forget there are skeptical spokepeople all over.  Each language group will need to identify who/what these are and make a plan.

We have had many glitches, most of Wikipedia World team are brand new editors, we are stumbling through this together as so far the editing screen is exactly the same in English and all languages.   Kind of like using an ATM with a different language on the screen, you just hopefully push the right buttons.

On Portuguese Wikipedia apparently you can't use YouTube videos as a citation unless you get the URL on the "whitelist" first.  That was interesting, but we managed to work through that.

I usually make a user page for myself on the different WP language pages.  On one I instantly received a "welcome to Wikipedia" kind of notice, and then seconds later a notice for speedy deletion of my user page.  It is still there but that was a bit unnerving.  Rian also got the same notice when she created a page on the Dutch WP.  We never figured that out.  Its been interesting, but we are starting to get the hang of this. 

As usual we really do need your help.  We need 20 times the amount of editors we have now.  Its an exciting time to be doing this, and an exciting project.  Even if you don't have a second language, we can help you find your way to helping out with this project.

Please write to me at susangerbic@yahoo.com

James Randi and Madonna

There are two names I doubt you will see in the same blog title.  Been having a great day/night.  Fresh from TAM 2012 I've got all my pictures uploaded as well as videos.  And I'm all organized with the Wikipedia World project.  People are starting to arrive, I'm placing them in the World group where only English is spoken, and we have groups set up for each language.  At the moment we have; English, Spanish, German, Russian, Turkish, Portuguese and French.  People are still arriving home from their vacation in Las Vegas, so we will probably see a lot more activity in a week or so.

So, the first edit we were going to work on was to get the IIG tribute to James Randi photo over onto all the Randi pages we could.  I asked people at TAM to translate one sentence.  "The Independent Investigations Group [[IIG]] tribute to James Randi TAM9, July 2011".  I didn't plan this very well as I asked people to translate onto a piece of paper.  Once they gave them back to me, I realized that I do not know how to write all that out, plus I had a very hard time reading handwriting.

Some people emailed me the translation and that allowed me to copy and paste.

So how did I do this when I can barely speak English, and what does it have to do with Madonna?

First I opened up the Edit page of the English James Randi page.  And copied the edit for the picture that I left months ago.  It looks like this in English.

[[Image:JREF TAM9 Beard Photo.jpg|thumb|300px|The Independent Investigations Group [[IIG]] tribute to James Randi TAM9]]

Once the picture is loaded to WikiCommons any language can use the image.  So this part is what the photographer (me) named it.

 JREF TAM9 Beard Photo.jpg

Okay then I went to the Spanish James Randi page.   Clicked on the "editar" tab which is in the exact same place as "edit" in English.

I found the place I wanted it to be located and then pasted in the English (above) edit.  Then changed the caption to what someone sent me on email.  I think it was Patrick Mahoney, but not sure at the moment as several people sent me this caption.

It looks like this

[[Image:JREF TAM9 Beard Photo.jpg|thumb|350px|Un tributo a James Randi, dado por el grupo independiente de investigación durante TAM9 (La Junta Asombrosa, edición 9) en julio del 2011]]

I hit preview which is located in the same place as it is in English.  Here it is called mostrar previsualizacion.

Then I wrote "photo" in the reason for edit area and hit save (grabar la pagana).

I was feeling pretty proud of myself but only slightly because I already speak Spanish, so wanted to try something more difficult.

Noticed I have a translation from Ken Archbold in Russian, sitting on my email.

I went to the Russian James Randi page (took me a while to figure out what the word Russian looks like when written in Russian, but I have a son and they always want to appear smart so he pointed it out to me "Русский".  I clicked on the edit page tab which is labeled in a way that I would only know was correct because it was in the same place in English.  And because when I clicked on it, the edit page opened up.

Now I was really in trouble.  I have no idea how to write "image" in Russian.  Possibly it would have worked if I just did it in English, but I decided to find a page that would have pictures on it in the body of the page.  So I went to the Russian page for Madonna, opened up her "edit" page and found an edit for a picture.  Looks like this

[[Файл:Madonna 1990 cropped.jpg|thumb|180px|Мадонна во время [[Blond Ambition World Tour]] в [[1990 год]]у]]

So as you can see the format is the same as in English.  I simply removed the Madonna picture (Madonna 1990 cropped.jpg) and pasted in the Randi Beard jpg.  Then I removed the writing about Madonna that would be the caption area.  Мадонна во время [[Blond Ambition World Tour]] в [[1990 год]]у

Then pasted in Ken's text, and was left with this.

[[Файл:JREF TAM9 Beard Photo.jpg|thumb|180px|Должное Джеймсу Рэнди от независимой группы исследования в TAM, июля 2011]]

I "previewed" the edit and didn't like how small it looked so I raised the px to 300.  I don't do things in a small way.

I didn't know what to put in the "reason for edit" area, so just left a ?  I suppose I could have written in English "photo added" and most editors would understand.

Anyway, Nix caught the bug and went ahead and took care of the Portuguese James Randi page.

Everyone involved in the World project is going to become VERY familiar with this tool.  http://stats.grok.se/

So lets just see for fun, how many people are going to be viewing the photo we just uploaded?

You must copy the name of the page you are trying to look at exactly, and you must pick the language.  Here is what July 2012 looks like in Russian  for James Randi.

I think you get the idea. 

Here is a link from Lei Pinter (who is at the English only WP page) she thought this would be helpful to everyone, Inline interlanguage links.  

There is nothing keeping others from adding pictures to other pages.  If you get in trouble just don't "save" the page.  Or if you mess it up really bad, someone who has that page on a watchlist will clean up your mess with only two clicks of the mouse.  


One more thought, wonder if I'm going to see an surge in hits to this blog because I mentioned Madonna?  If so I better add a few more


Lindsay Lohan, Kevin Bacon, George W. Bush, President Obama, Mitt Romeny

Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia - World

The English guerrilla skepticism project has been amazingly successful in the last year.  With only a handful of active editors, we have created many new pages, re-written many more, and acted as police just about everywhere.  TAM 2012 has become a turning point for this project.  As I've been saying since March, we need to be global.  Wikipedia is the most important tool for skepticism that exists today, we can not keep ignoring that the vast majority of the world does not speak English.  Let's get over that, with current Internet tools we can easily communicate, organize and get this done.

The World project begins today.  We have already created a Portuguese, Spanish and French group that will work on WP in those languages.  All discussions (accept from English only editors like me) will happen in that group's language.  I want to encourage people who do not speak English to feel comfortable editing in their language to participate.

In the World discussion group we will discuss all the who/what/how of editing.  I have a bunch of volunteers (and still need more) with all levels of editing experience.  We will learn from each other, looking over edits and correcting grammar and so on.  I'm sure your reading/writing skills will really improve.

The World project will mainly follow the structure of the English project.  Improve pages of our skeptical spokespeople, add photographs, promote science and skepticism, remove vandalism, promote science/skeptic groups and tons more.

What this is not, a group promoting vandalism, or ganging up on other editors.  You have to still follow the rules of Wikipedia, we are going to turn around the reputation WP has amongst our community.   We aren't writing this for our own group, this is for the world.

How this is going to happen.  As I said if you talked to me at TAM, we are going to begin with some simple edits as a group.  First we are going to insert one JREF picture into James Randi's WP in all languages that the page exists in.  I have no idea what all those languages are.  So that is one of the first steps, 27 are listed. This is the area on the far left of the page.  This is the picture. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:JREF_TAM9_Beard_Photo.jpg and I already have the caption translated in many languages and hopefully will get this done tonight.

Months ago I tried to get people interested in editing the word Evolution in all languages, but it is an intimidating subject, very technical and too advanced to start with. 

So we are going to start with Jerry Andrus.  I have almost finished his page in English and we are not going to translate it, but write a new one in every language possible.  We are going to do this mainly by translating existing videos.  There are many Andrus videos already existing in other languages, we just need to know what they are.  We will all be using the same captioning software recommended by Tim Farley.  We need a ton of volunteers to subtitle in English as well.

Keep in mind that you do not have to only work on Jerry's page, you have free reign to edit everything, I highly encourage you to do so.  That kind of thing will happen naturally, once you learn how to add a picture to one page, you will go and add to others.  I'm using the Andrus page as a training tool, also it will make sure we all are together with a rich history of modern skepticism under our belts.  Once Andrus  is done we can link to Randi's, JREF, CFI, optical illusions, Uri, cold-reading, Ray Hyman and on and on.  So we do need to know what exists and what we need to create.

Please contact me if you would like to become involved in this project.  susangerbic@yahoo.com  You will also need to friend me on Facebook. (I apologize in advance if you refuse to use Facebook, you can use an alias and call it Bookface, but all communication about the projects are going to happen there in closed groups)

Thank you in advance, looking forward to getting to know you all and making real changes to critical thinking happen world-wide.

Susan

Video of Ray Hyman discussing Jerry Andrus and Wikipedia with me at TAM 2012

Video of Wendy Hughes explaining the We Got Your Wiki Back! project

Instructions on how to get started editing.

Blog on the speakers at the 6th World Skeptic Congress.

Anderson Cooper and John Edward ~ a new friendship

I'm just sick over this, well not sick but pretty close to it.  I've respected Anderson Cooper for years.  My avatar on the JREF forums is a picture of Cooper and Browne on CNN with the screen shot that says "Dead Wrong".  Cooper has always asked the hard questions and did his research, he never let anyone get away with vagueness, he slammed them to the floor.  Psychics were always handled firmly.

Now this.

Anderson allowed John Edward onto his show to give readings to his mother and himself.  Nothing skeptical mentioned from what I've heard.  This JREF SWIFT blog sums up how I feel.

Tim Farley on October 20th SWIFT blog talks about skeptical tools to measure how successful we are.  I concur we really need to be able to measure our impact.  We can't keep throwing darts into the forest if we never go and look to see if we hit anything.  When involved in any kind of event, there should be some discussion about how it went, what could we have done better and where did we go wrong.  We need to learn, and improve.

Tim asks the question.  Who of these psychics is more popular (Browne, Van Praagh or Edward)?  Interesting question.  Where do you concentrate your efforts if you have very limited time and resources?  I'm sure there are many ways of doing this, book sales on Amazon maybe?  Google search results?  Tim would probably have 34 different ideas if we asked him.

Here is a simple way.  Use the Wikipedia Article Statistics Tool.  It only takes 1.364 seconds and you will be amazed.   Keep in mind this tool has a bit of a delay.  So if we want to look to see if John Edward's Wikipedia page got any hits after his Oct 14th, 2011 debut on Anderson, we can just look it up.

Generally Edward has about 600 hits a day to his Wikipedia page.  On Oct 16th his page got 3.7K hits.  Then the next day 3.1K, then 2.7 and finally 1.6K  (maybe people were finally watching Anderson from their recording on Tivo?)

Wikipedia is a great way of judging popularity because it is accessed by the general public (believer, skeptic and fence sitter)  We can assume that Wikipedia users tend to be people who have access to the Internet, and I'm only looking at WP in English.

What kinds of things are people reading on his page?  There is quite a lot of skeptical content that I and other editors have left.  His page is patrolled quite carefully, I am one of them and have reverted edits from skeptics many times.  I've erased "he's the biggest douche in the Universe" at least 5 times this year alone, others have probably caught those edits before I got to it.  (BTW this isn't guerrilla skepticism)

I'm waiting for some other source (secondary) to pick up the JREF blog post so I can (or someone else can) put the article up on Edward's page.  We rather not put up primary sources if we can help it.

Lets just answer that question.  Which of these psychics is more popular?  Quick come up with your own guess before I reveal my answer.  Using Wikipedia as a resource we can come up with a few numbers.  I'm picking Sept 2011

Sylvia Browne - 14,003
John Edward - 16,244
James Van Praagh - 4,156

This just added Dec 25, 2011  


22K John Edward "fans" will read this quote from Michael Shermer this month "Pretending that the dead are gathering in a television studio in New York to talk twaddle with a former ballroom-dance instructor is an insult to the intelligence and humanity of the living".

JREF President issues challenge to psychics

If I might paraphrase Wikipedia editor Dustin Phillips who says he got into editing Wikipedia because he kept putting up great links on his Facebook page to share with his skeptic friends, after awhile it seemed to make more sense to put those same links up on Wikipedia so everyone could see them.  Exactly.

Posting links for your friends is a good idea.  A better idea is to get the links in a place that the world can enjoy.  A place that holds an encyclopedic hold on our hearts and knowledge.  Maybe a place like Wikipedia?

Found this link left on Mark Edward's Facebook page today and I knew exactly who needed to be reading it.  Yep you know where. 

So I read through all the links on the page (thank you DJ for including so many).  I went through every single link and made a nice paragraph that could be inserted on the pages of Van Praagh, Sylvia Browne, Carla Baron, John Edward and Alison DuBois.  I just changed a few words here and there to make it fit nicely into their pages.

On Van Praagh's page I went a bit farther.  Because of the links that DJ left in the Huffington Post I was able to add two awesome YouTube videos to his page.  I didn't label them as "failures" like the videos state, but just mentioned one as "Van Praagh often appears in the media to promote his group readings, seminars and workshops. One such appearance on the TV show "The Circle" shows Van Praagh giving a 5 minute reading to several audience members". The 5 minute reading is pretty horrible to watch BTW.  I didn't put these two sentences under criticism/skepticism but under the category of "Career as a Medium", mainly because I don't want to give my opinion that it is a failure of a reading, I'm just letting the viewer decide.  I'm sure true believers will think he did rather well (he did seem to get a few hits) and they might say that they know he is for real because sometimes he has a bad day. 

In another link I wrote a completely separate paragraph about a medical statement he made about Barbara Walters.  He told her that she had elevated white blood cells, she went to the doctor and found out that her blood was normal.  She states on the video that what he told her is harmful.  So I left that video for his fans as well.

I'm sure that the JREF's exposure on TIME.com, ABC, Nightline, AOL, Huffington Post and on and on will get more readers than my few paragraphs on the psychics pages on Wikipedia.  But they work together, people go specifically to Wikipedia to learn about these people, and will look at the references left.

What kind of numbers are we talking about anyway?  Lets look at only Sept 2011 and see what kinds of hits we can expect Oct 2011 will get.

James Van Praagh - 4,156
Carla Baron - 718
John Edward - 16,244
Sylvia Browne - 14,003
Alison DuBois - 263

So about 35K people are looking at these pages each month.  That's quite a lot when you think it just took me about an hour to update these pages.  Almost a half a million will view these citations in a years time.  Also leaving these citations exposes readers to our skeptical spokespeople, publications and organizations, that is a win for Guerrilla Skepticism!  

So keep this in mind the next time you paste a link to your Facebook page or Twitter feed.  That's nice and keeping your friends informed is a good thing.  But if you aren't willing to take an hour once in awhile to edit that link into Wikipedia, then maybe you should bring it to the attention of someone who will.

Seriously think about this next statement of mine.  Are you a skeptic, part of the skeptical community?  Fine, hang out, share links, socialize and bitch about stuff.   Or are you a part of the skeptical movement?  If so, what are you doing? If you are in the movement then you need to start doing so. 

SGU24 ~ What were their Wikipedia Stats?

I'm sure after they get a extra long night of sleep the crew of The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe‎ podcast will be evaluating their first ever 24-hour podcast extravaganza.  Steven Novella stated that their goal was to raise critical thinking levels with a dose of skepticism and science (I'm paraphrasing here).  They had a meter that they checked every so often that went from red to green.  I have no idea how they were measuring this gauge or if it was just a prop for the show, but what Novella is advocating is exactly what I have been blogging about for the last few months.

Increasing awareness of skepticism/critical thinking/science is good for society.  A win-win for everyone!

There are many ways to achieve this goal, the SGU felt it could help out our cause by staying awake for 24 hours and letting the world watch them do it.  Maybe it helped?  There were thousands of views, and tons of tweets everywhere. It certainly made people talk and engage with each other, thats all a good thing strengthening our community.  I managed to make it through about 4 hours on Friday night and about 3 hours before and after work on Saturday.

During the hours I watched I managed to get some quick Wikipedia editing done (as I noted in the comments of this blog) Dustin scored a couple great updates to Boiron‎ and  Oscillococcinum‎'s pages.  Lei finished up Vashti McCollum‎'s page, and I'm hoping others were editing away while listening also. I tweeted the Wikipedia edits as they were being finished on the SGU24 tweet, the JREF and Tim Farley re-tweeted a few times.  All good.  I didn't get any comments from the watchers or the SGU (as far as I know) who were following the tweets.  I'll try not to be cynical, but the chat room and the tweets seemed more concerned with the social aspect of the whole event (like how much bacon they could eat) and as I said, bringing us together is a good thing.  Personally I would have liked to see them suggest things for the community to do...write letters, tutor a child, sponsor a classroom... edit Wikipedia for skeptical content... you know things that really improve critical thinking. 

I believe that when someone is in the media's eye and the listener is not sure who they are, or wants to refresh their memory of the person, they are going to turn to the Internet to fill them in.  When typing in that name, usually within the first few hits they will see a link to a Wikipedia page (if that person is noteworthy enough to have a page).  For many reasons (people are familiar with Wikipedia, no popups, no virus, easy to use, neutral and usually sums up the person in a few paragraphs) most people will click on the Wikipedia link before they go to a "personal" website.  Maybe after reading the Wikipedia page they will follow the links to other websites.  I don't have access to their websites sats, but if they are curious about their hits from Wiki most webservices will tell them where they are receiving "referrals" from. 

I thought it might be interesting to see what kind of hits came in to the "skeptical spokespeople"'s Wikipedia pages for 9/23.  The site I'm using is something you can use also.  http://stats.grok.se/  There is a delay in recording the numbers and I might be premature blogging too early. The delay might be as much as a day, depending on time zones and maybe other things.  We can look at these same Wiki pages in a day or so and see that we can see.

I'm not going to give the real numbers (don't want to turn this into a popularity contest, if you want to know how many hits a site gets, you can plug them into the Wikipedia article traffic statistics tool.  Everything is in percentage based on what is considered normal for Sept 2011.

SGU - +300%
Rebecca Watson - +216%
Steven Novella - +300%
Jamy Ian Swiss - +430%
Richard Saunders - +180%
George Hrab - +34%
Adam Savage - +152%
Tim Minchin - no increase (may be too early to look at his results)

Is this totally scientific? No.  Lots of things might be affecting these numbers.  But it is interesting.

I mention all this not just because I want more people to get involved in doing something to help out the skeptical cause by editing Wikipedia for skeptical content.  But because we need to make sure we have the backs of our skeptical spokespeople.  They represent us!  When people go to their pages, they will be exposed to other skeptical/science/critical thinking hyperlinks that they may follow and read.  They may also click on the links at the bottom of the Wikipedia page (the external links and further reading links).

This is a part of guerrilla skepticism and just plain common sense.  We need to make sure these pages are in order, well written, current, engaging and so on.  You can help, please help, there is so much that needs to be done.  Open a Wikipedia account, ask for help, read this blog for ideas, whatever it takes.  Just join the cause and help.

Note!
Our very own Karen Stollznow will be appearing on Anderson Cooper's talk show on October 10th.  She says that she was only one of several people all talking about the harm that psychics cause.  She didn't get to say a lot, but she is going to be our spokesperson for those few comments.  And when people google her (and you know they will) they will find that we have her skeptic back!

FYI this blog discusses the stats after the NBC Nightline "Beyond Belief" show that the JREF recently did. 

JREF in the news

Just a quick mention that here is a wonderful opportunity for someone wanting to edit Wikipedia in support of the JREF.

Just got this email from them that lists all the citations with them in the news lately!  Designed just for us.  Well not really, but it is perfect for working backwards (having the article, writing the citation then putting it in Wiki)

Also want to mention this...  that's US! 

Top Posts on the Randi.org Blog

• Off to Canada Celebrating the Exposure of "Psychic Sally" | James Randi
• Skeptics at the Metaphysical Fair | Karen Stollznow
• Diversity at The Amaz!ng Meeting 9 | Brian Thompson
• “Psychic” Nikki Not “Psychologically Ready” To Prove She Can Actually Do Anything (Besides Talk, That Is) | Jamy Ian Swiss
• Placebos And Deception | Dr. Steven Novella
• Galactic Overlord Xenu Strikes Scientology? | James Randi
• Guerilla Skepticism and Wikipedia | Susan Gerbic
• Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd Loses Fight Against Humanist Activist | James Randi

We Got Your Wiki Back! The Numbers from Nightline's Beyond Belief

You have all heard me go on and on about the need to improve the Wikipedia pages of our skeptical spokespeople.  This I call the "We Got Your Wiki Back!" project.  I've mentioned not only the reasons for doing so but whose pages desperately need help, and how you can help edit.

Today I want to talk about the numbers.  We can use our handy Wikipedia Statistics tool brought to us by Tim Farley.  http://stats.grok.se.  I want to point out that this website is not exact to the day, because of time zones ect I believe that the stats are off by a day.  (again not sure)

I'm going to work just with the ABC Primetime Nightline "Beyond Belief" show that aired August 17, 2011.

The first segment featured a reporter investigating James Van Praagh, and being unimpressed with him, pretty much saying that he thinks he is cheating when he says he talks to dead people. Van Praagh did a reading on the reporter, giving some amazing hits.  But after the fact the reporter was able to pull up an interview he gave two years ago listing all the details that Van Praagh supposedly got.  This SWIFT blog pretty much sums everything up.

James Randi was also featured on the show, lets look at his Wikipedia hit statistics.



There is a clear jump with about 550 hits over what he had been trending that week.  Because Randi is all over the media it is unclear if the July 18th jump was because of Nightline or not. 

I think that the next featured skeptical spokesperson will give us better clearer results.  Banachek was very prominent in the show, using the stats tool we can see what his hit rate looked like for months even years before the Nightline show aired.  This next graph is from July 2011.

We see that he averages about 56 hits a day.  Because of TAM9 July 15-17 this might be the reason why the jump in numbers on July 17-18th. 

Banachek July 2011

Here is August 2011.  We clearly see a major jump in numbers hitting about an 800% increase over normal. 

Banachek August 1 - 18,  2011

 

Something Van Praagh did in the media caused an upsurge of hits.  Looks like he normally gets about 200 hits a day, then suddenly in the 900's?  As I said I don't really follow his schedule (and don't watch TV) so these could be from the Nightline show.  I'm sure someone will clear this up for me.


What about other people featured on the show?  ABC reporter Josh Elliot is the one who interviewed Van Praagh.  By the way I think he did a terrific job and maybe the skeptical movement should approach him for future media coverage.


 Major jump.  Averaging 423 hits a day during August 2011, he has a 600% increase when the show aired.


Lets try one more.  The JREF was mentioned a few times on the show, did it see an increase in hits?




An increase, but not a significant amount like with Banachek.

Another person mentioned on the show (and his name appeared on the screen) was Dr. Gary Schwartz.  Lets look at his stats for August.



A small increase in hits, but nothing significant. 

Here is Allison DuBois's page stats for August.  The other psychic interviewed was Rebecca Rosen who does not have a Wikipedia page, but according to Nightline has a 2 year waiting list for readings.  Odd that if she has changed that many lives that she is not noteworthy enough to have her own page.  Remember Georgia O'Conner?  She has testimonies from thousands of people she has helped, you got it, no Wikipedia page. 



What does this all mean?

These are just the raw numbers, there are a lot of factors that could effect who gets hits and who does not.  Was the name written on the screen?  Van Praagh and Schwartz names were.

I think overall that I have made my point.  When our skeptical spokespeople are in the media, they are going to get an upswing in hits to their Wikipedia page.  People want to know who these people are.   What are we presenting to the world? 

Not only our spokespeople's pages need updating but so do the pages of people like Gary Schwartz.  Nightline went to a lot of trouble to mention that he was a Harvard Professor now working at the University of Arizona.  Major creds right?  Allison DuBois's page also needs some serious cleanup.

I'm sure the page for Psychic Kids could use some updating.  I think Banachek's powerful words would really help to spruce it up.  In fact I think Banachek's comments could be used all over these psychic's pages.  Hint Hint

What about this Nightline Show?  We need to get it up on the pages of all these people and onto the JREF page.  That's keeping things updated.

Get Editing!