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Homeopathy - An open letter to Jimmy Wales

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One of the Guerrilla Skepticism editors (Vera) turned me on to this awesome article about homeopathy.  The author is Jimmy Wales.  In case you don't know, Jimmy Wales is the founder of Wikipedia. 

Apparently Wales feels that homeopathy is a scam and taking it instead of real medicine is dangerous. He wants to know what can be done about homeopathy.

Then he writes that the homeopathy Wikipedia page editors have "eloquently explain[ed] what this means: "Mathematically, in order to have a reasonable chance to obtain one molecule of the original extract, the patient would have to consume an amount of the remedy roughly 10^321 times the number of atoms in the observable universe."

Right on Wikipedia editors!  We spend a lot of time trying to get the article as close to perfect as possible.  Just take a look at the "talk" tab (located on the right upper side of the page) and you can see the never-ending discussion about everything.  The discussion on whether or not to have the word "quackery" in the lede went on for months. There are several homeopaths that frequently engage in the discussion on talk, so the discussions get quite interesting.  

If you are one of the 140K people who visit the English homeopathy page this month, you will be greeted with this first paragraph...

HomeopathyListeni/ˌhmiˈɒpəθi/ (also spelled homoeopathy or homœopathy; from the Greek hómoios-ὅμοιος- "like-" + páthosπάθος"suffering") is a system of alternative medicine originated in 1796 by Samuel Hahnemann, based on his doctrine of similia similibus curentur ("like cures like"), according to which a substance that causes the symptoms of a disease in healthy people will cure similar symptoms in sick people.[1] Scientific research has found homeopathic remedies ineffective and their postulated mechanisms of action implausible.[2][3][4][5] The scientific community regards homeopathy as a sham;[6] the American Medical Association considers homeopathy to be quackery,[7][8] and homeopathic remedies have been criticized as unethical.[9]

If the reader feels the need to continue reading past the first paragraph, they will be treated to the entire history of homeopathy as well as quotes like the one Wales stated.   If someone insists on using homeopathy after reading this Wikipedia page, then I don't think anything will convince them.

And before you get all gloomy about all the people who still take homeopathic products, remember most people don't use them.  Most people understand that homeopathy is quackery.  Maybe they don't know what homeopathy is, but once it is explained, they usually say "that's nuts".   We skeptics are too close to the issue, we see and hear about these stories because we are interested in the topic.  It feels like we spend all our time rolling our eyes and raising our blood pressure over these discussions, but really we are winning this war on pseudoscience.  We are, trust me.  We still have a long way to go, but we have the tools to do so.  We just need help to get it done, and done in a way that it is settled. 

Wales states in his conclusion, "Who should I talk to about this in order to encourage the creation of a campaign to stop this?  This is not my primary area of interest and so I am not the right person to lead it myself.  But I would like to help."

My answer to him is this.  "Jimmy you have already done more than anyone could possibly dream that can be done.  You created the most amazing resource in the world.  I mean that, not only in English but in every language possible. The English homeopathy page alone gets over 140K views EACH MONTH.  That is a lot of people being educated about homeopathy.  Thank you.  Allowing us editors to 'do our job' and keep these articles honest and correctly cited is enough.  I can't imagine what else you can do, my brain is teeny tiny compared to your mighty brain, if you come up with something please oh please let us in on it, we want to help."  

We can't all do something as amazing as Wales and create the most useful and amazing resource on the Internet.  Most people commenting on his blog suggest things HE CAN DO.  I know he asked, but really its our turn now.  Don't point fingers at other people who are currently involved, like James Randi and the 10:23 campaign.  We can all do something.  Pick your topic, psychics, vaccines, cryptozoology  or whatever gets your heart rate going.  You can work with the Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia team (we train) or hundreds of other ways to take care of these issues.  Quit bitching in your beer, rolling your eyes and DO SOMETHING!

Write to me at susangerbic@yahoo.com if you are interested in helping out with the Wikipedia project (all skill levels are needed, and we also need languages other than English, did I mention we train and mentor too?)







July-August updates

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Hello everyone, what a busy summer it was for GSoW.  Many of our team members were away from the project but we still managed to get a lot done as you are about to see.  

For those of you not familiar with this blog you will find below all the pages that we have either created brand new or completed major rewrites of.  I encourage you to click on the "before" and "after" for each of these rewrites.  When I see the differences I always get a thrill chill, even after seeing hundreds of these over the last 3 years.  Most of these "befores" have been in this horrible condition for years and if not for GSoW would have probably remained this way forever. 

There is an interview at the bottom of this blog that has this exchange between myself and Emery Emery.  He was thanking us for creating his Wikipedia page.  I answered that I was glad he liked it, but we didn't create it for him, it was created because we felt that it was warranted.  The work we do here is for YOU the reader and for all the Wikipedia readers out there.  I hope you learn something new.  

Enjoy!

Susan Gerbic


A treat for all our readers... Listen to Wikipedia being edited


The Vaccination Chronicles
GSoW members and other skeptics are currently in the process of captioning Richard Saunders' documentary, that features interviews with people who have lived in the time before widespread immunization was introduced, and victims of vaccine-preventable diseases suffered tremendously, often leading to death. It is a pressing warning to everyone: please vaccinate your children.

Progress so far:
Danish subtitles - Claus Larsen (non-GSoW)
Dutch subtitles - Rik and Leon Korteweg (GSoW)
German subtitles - Steff Knappe (GSoW)
Italian subtitles - Raffaella Vitali (GSoW)
Portuguese subtitles - Nix Dorf (GSoW)
Russian subtitles - Svetlana Bavykina (GSoW)
Turkish subtitles - Isil Arican (non-GSoW)
Expected: Hungarian, Serbian, Slovak, possibly also Norwegian, Greek, Spanish and Finnish. If you don't see your language here, contact Richard Saunders to see if you can help! (GSoW membership not required)

Leon talks about the project here and here





Dutch

Rob Nanninga - Leon, Emile - Before& After

Stichting Skepsis - Leon, Emile - Before& After

The Four Horsemen (atheïsme) - an edit war and intense discussion about possible deletion resulted in improvement by Leon, Emile and others; the page was kept in a much better condition. Before & After


Victor Stenger - Wim Vandenberghe

English

Alton Lemon - Brand new page

Astronomical Society of Victoria - Greg Neilson  

Bart Bok - Greg Neilson - Before& After

Bill Bradfield - Greg Neilson - Before & After

Brian Brushwood - Todd Dietrich - Before& After

Center for Inquiry - Chris Allen - Before& After

Chris Mooney - Kevin Elsken & Dustin Phillips - Before& After

Comité Para - Leon Korteweg

David Koepsell - Dave Trumbore & Christine Daley - Before and After


Daniele Bolelli - Greg Neilson - Before& After

Dickson Despommier - Kyle HamarBefore& After

Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions - Before & After

Friends Of Science In Medicine - Christine Daley - Before& After

Gesellschaft zur wissenschaftlichen Untersuchung von Parawissenschaften (GWUP) - Michael Steinkellner, Leon Korteweg

Heather Dewey-Hagborg - Janyce Boynton - Before& After

Ian Patrick Harris - Erik Hess - Brand new page 

Joe Nickell - Sarah Gilbert - Before& After




L. Sprague de Camp - Before& After - Janyce Boynton


"List of skeptics and skeptical organizations" was renamed "List of notable skeptics",
List of skeptical organizations split off from it and expanded. - Leon Korteweg

List of skeptical conferences - Leon Korteweg

List of skeptical magazines - Leon Korteweg

List of skeptical podcasts - Leon (additions by András, Svetlana, Todd, Raffaella and Michelle)

Lists about skepticism ("One List To Rule Them All") - Leon Korteweg

Massimo Polidoro - Raffaella Vitali - Before& After 

Matt Dillahunty - Jay Young - Before& After

Vincent Racaniello - Before& After - Kyle Hamar 

Maynard - Greg Neilson - Before& After

Neil Gershenfeld - Jelena Levin - Before& After

Robert Ingersoll Birthplace Museum - new photos (thanks to Tom Flynn & Monica Harmsen)

Richard Wiseman - Walkiria Nubes Cordova & Dustin Phillips - Before& After

Rosemary Altea - Lee Christie - Before& After

Skepter - Leon Korteweg

Skeptics with a K podcast - Leon Korteweg - New page

Stichting Skepsis - Leon - Before& After

Template:Skeptical magazines - Leon Korteweg

Template:Skeptical podcasts - Leon Korteweg

Victor J. Stenger - Todd Dietrich - Before& After

Wonder en is gheen Wonder - Leon Korteweg

Hungarian

Christopher Hitchens - Peter Mogyoros, Attila Harta - Before& After (including June)


Hungarian Skeptic Society - Attila Harta, András Pintér - Before& After (including May and June)

Italian

Massimo Polidoro in Italian - Raffaella Vitali 

Portuguese

Steven Novella - Nix Dorf

Richard Wiseman - Valério Andrade Melo


Russian


Richard Wiseman - Svetlana Bavykina & Jelena Levin

Spanish

Leo Igwe - Erik Hess


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

Just in case you have missed it, GSoW has had some great new interviews, be sure to check them out.

Skeptically Yours recorded at TAM 2014 - Emery Emery & Heather Henderson Interviewed Susan, Nix and Lei

Data Skeptic - lots of numbers in this interview - skeptics like stats don't they?

A Public Thank you from a Fan

Skepticule talks about the GSoW secret forum (at about 8:00)

Here is a dowser's site that is frustrated with Wikipedia editors you might enjoy

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

As usual if you want to join GSoW or have questions please contact us at GSoWteam@gmail.com




Plait, Gardner, Tyson, Kurtz, Andrus and so much more

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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 andmetaphysical fields as a ClairvoyantChannel, 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 






A pair of facts beats a full house of myths - RIP Fred Green

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It is with a very heavy heart that I need to share with you all the loss of one of my GSoW editors. I do not know the circumstances of his death, and how he died is not important to this story.

Fred friended me on Facebook Dec 24, 2012 with this message "I am completely new to WP, I have no account and no experience. I would love to help out in any way I can though, I suspect it will be more rewarding than commenting on facebook posts, lol." He was spot on with that. He invested his time on a project that really makes a difference, his contributions, lasting.

Fred was generous with his time, had a great positive attitude, and quickly became someone that took on responsibilities. GSoW thrived on Facebook groups for over a year, but we kept growing and we wanted to mingle the languages, so we built a forum. Fred was chosen to be the team leader of one of the English teams, Sagan. He remained an important part of our growth until a few months ago when he asked to step down for personal reasons.

During his tenure with GSoW he worked on some really great pages, Hemant Mehta, Ruth Hurmence Green, the Skeptic Booklist and the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers (MAAF). For someone with no experience he took on the challenge and made a difference. Fred also worked behind the scenes, training and supporting other GSoW editors. On our forum, he introduced himself and added " My experience with editing WP articles is limited but Susan keeps me around for her own amusement." And I would have too, he was that kind of person, you just wanted him on your team. I'm glad that even though it was a short time, I can say he was on my team.

I'm trying not to get all soppy, which is difficult during this emotional time. I think this is a great reminder that there are all kinds of special people out there, people who you haven't met yet, and maybe if your lucky, like I was, you will get a Facebook friend request from one of them and find out you have just met a very special person. The line "A pair of facts beats a full house of myths." was Fred's signature on our forum.


Fred we miss you.

Fred Green's Wikipedia User Page

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

The person on the forum that knew him the best was Lei Pinter who wanted to share her thoughts with you also...

I lost a friend today. We only met once in person but we had a special friendship nonetheless. We worked together on editing a couple of Wikipedia pages and trained other folks how to make the edits as well. It sounds kinda dry, I realize, but for a couple of IT geeks it was an oddly cathartic hobby.

 The one time we met he went out of his way to join my sons and me at dinner while I was near his hometown on a business trip.  We had talked online a few times, had some similar life experiences, but this was our one and only face to face meeting. As we all sat down over a full spread of Mexican food we felt like old friends. Talking about his experiences in the Air Force, comparing notes on current IT fads, and falling into an instant kinship over our shared hobbies. It meant a lot to me that he took the time out of his busy evening  to meet with us. But from what I have read online that was his personality all of the time - kind, gentle, and very family oriented.

I don't know the details of his passing, and may never know. But I know that he made an impact on the world. Writers like Jennifer Michael Hecht often talk about how hard it is to pay attention to life as we are living it. But just in the act of having made it this far our friends have "made it to the first reel". And a little piece of them sticks with us and makes us better people by association.


GSoW on the Move - Sept-Oct 2014 updates

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

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

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

  • "Investigates popular media pseudoskeptics."
  • "Explores the pseudoskeptical mindset, motivation, and method."
  • "Looks at ways in which scientific objectivity is compromised by vested interests, fraud, experimenter effects, and merchants of doubt who use skepticism as a weapon to further corporate interests."
  • "Discusses current controversies."
Its a terrific looking website, someone spent some time on that. I love the webpage they gave me, great photo (James Randi is sitting next to me though you can't tell) and they even finally spelled my name right. I do love this part, "Gerbic bills herself as a “professional portrait photographer who specializes in people who don’t want their portraits taken”, an insight into several forms of psychological pathology, including a lack of empathy." I suppose they think I take photos under bathroom stalls and with a hidden camera on a bus or something. It's possible taking pictures of children who don't want their photos taken might mean I lack empathy? Anyway, guess I'm just going to have to stay tuned to see how this all plays out, can't wait to be "investigated" by this crowd.

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

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

And we are adding one more team leader to our group.  Team Curie will now have three Team Leaders

Ryan Harding, Richard and joining us is Christine Daley. Christine has been one of our Honeybadgers, 
running all over the place trying to get things done. She has been active on Todd Robbins, I Sold My 
Soul on Ebay, Angela Saini, Sanal Edamaruku, David Koepsell, Paul Zenon, Derek Colanduno and 
Friends of Science in Medicine. Welcome Christine.

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

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

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

Enjoy!

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

Dutch

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

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


Elektrosmog - Emile Dingemans - Before& After


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

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

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

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

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

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


Tim Trachet - Leon Korteweg - Before& After


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


Wim Hof - Emile Dingemans - Before& After

English

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

European Humanist Federation - Leon Korteweg - Before& After

Tim Trachet (new page created) - Leon Korteweg

Budd Hopkins - Janyce Boynton - Before& After


Robert Sapolsky small rewrite - Steff  - Before & After

Peter Gleick small rewrite - Monica Quijano - Before & After

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

Bruce Hood - Steff  - Before & After

Vincent Racaniello - Kyle Hamar - Before & After


Sarah Gray Thomason - Monica Quijano - Before & After 


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


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


Russian

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

Did You Know? 


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



Alton Lemon
View stats for Alton Lemon

Maynard & Bart Bok
View stats for Bart Bok and his wife Priscilla Bok
View stats for Maynard

Flim-Flam!
View stats for Flim-Flam! 


GWUP
View stats for GWUP




GSoW in the media

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


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


CFI Summit - Workshop - October 2013


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





Year End GSoW updates (Nov-Dec, 2014)

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What an amazing year! Really we have been busy. I look back on the last few blog updates and see some incredible work by our GSoW team. We are really making a difference and continuing to grow. The conference season is about to start and lets hope that you will see GSoW members at all the conferences (big and small) as you know we need the outreach in order to be able to recruit new members and gather more citations, audio and photographs of the people and projects from our community.  Yours Truly began the year with the first SkeptiCamp of 2015 in my local skeptic group (our first conference) it was a blast and am already planning the 2016 event. 

Check out this awesome cartoon Kyle Saunders drew for us and it tells the story better than I can. We have really frustrated a lot of paranormal people. I got a tweet last week from someone I don't know that said this...




Well I can only assume this is another person that is upset that we are asking for citations for claims made on Wikipedia. Sorry, but that is just how it works.  Fascinating mentality.  

We have had nine new members in the last two weeks. That is a very good sign, and three others are about to come out of training. I should be able to talk about their final projects next blog update.  

We have several pages that are only sentences away from being finished that are not included here on this update. We want to make sure everything is completed before we release them. So they will be waiting till the next update as well.  So in the meantime, enjoy what our team has created for you, and for the rest of the world. We are truly reaching beyond the choir!

Updates, Updates, Everywhere
GSoW has started to experiment with editing events loosely based around the Wikipedia This Weeks Article for Improvement effort. Many editors working on a single subject with many small improvements can make a huge difference.


Dutch

Leon Korteweg continued his efforts to document all skeptical organisations in Europe by translating Gesellschaft zur wissenschaftlichen Untersuchung von Parawissenschaften (GWUP) to Dutch. This organisation that unifies all German-speaking skeptics in Europe (essentially Germans, Austrians and Swiss), is among the most active and visual skeptical societies on the continent and works together closely with other groups in for example the Netherlands and Belgium. The article was reviewed by Rian van Lierop and Tijmen van Assen.
In the same category, Leon translated European Council of Skeptical Organisations and Association for Skeptical Enquiry that he first wrote in English (see below). Emile Dingemans reviewed the Dutch versions.

Although famous as "The Science Guy" in the United States, Bill Nye is not well-known in the Dutch-speaking world. Tijmen van Assen, assisted by Leon Korteweg, decided to make extensive biographical information about this science educator available in their language.


Coen de Bruijn, Emile Dingemans and Leon Korteweg greatly expanded Flemish philosopher Maarten Boudry's page (Before& After). A rising star within the skeptical movement, he repeated a Sokal-style hoax and succeeded in fooling two Christian philosophical conferences. His thesis on psychoanalysis (that was recently made into an audiobook by Jozef Van Giel), earned him the SKEPP prize for the best research into pseudoscience and the paranormal. He has since organised and spoke at many conferences about pseudoscience.


Catherine de Jong is arguably the most powerful woman in European skepticism. She led the 10:23 Campaign in the Netherlands, became chair of the Vereniging tegen de Kwakzalverij (Dutch Society Against Quackery, the oldest skeptical organisation in the world), and in 2013 was elected board member of the European Council of Skeptical Organisations. Vera de Kok took her picture and recorded her voice intro, Leon Korteweg wrote her biography, our new member Raymond van Es reviewed it.


Emile Dingemans successfully managed to keep the page about "The Iceman" Wim Hof factually accurate, when Hof's son tried to insert extraordinary claims without any evidence to back it up. Although Hof claims to be able to cope with extreme cold through a mixture of Buddhist, Hindu and other Asian meditation techniques, scientific investigations from two universities provide some evidence suggesting that a particular breathing technique, that has nothing to do with the psyche, but also a genetic advantage, help Hof endure low temperatures rather than any psychological manipulation of the auto-immune system. Before& After


Comité Para was updated by Leon Korteweg after it adopted a new logo and changed its longer official name. Before & After

When the Lijst van skeptische tijdschriften (List of skeptical magazines) was challenged for a lack of reliable sources, Leon Korteweg took the criticism seriously and contacted the Archive for the Unexplained in Sweden, that holds one of the world's most extensive collections of skeptical and ufological magazines. With its database as reference, the page was revised and expanded in both Dutch and English (see below), and saved from deletion in Dutch, having been reviewed by several non-GSoW Wikipedians. Before& After


English

The European Council of Skeptical Organisations (ECSO) coordinates the work of many (trans)national and regional groups in Europe, hosting, organising or sponsoring conferences and symposia, exchanging information and supporting the setup of hew groups. Leon Korteweg collaborated with many others to complete this umbrella organisation's article, including ECSO chairman Gábor Hraskó, ECSO board member Catherine de Jong, former ECSO board member Michael Heap, András Pínter, Susan Gerbic, Vera de Kok (technical support) and Ryan Harding (reviewing). After publication, the page was translated to Dutch (see above) and Hungarian (see below).


While drafting the ECSO, Susan suggested we should contact the Association for Skeptical Enquiry as well. The ASKE is, amongst other things, known for organising skeptical conferences in Manchester a decade before QED originated, distributing the Skeptical Intelligencer and conducting dozens of paranormal investigations, mainly by Tony Youens. ASKE chairman Michael Heap soon aided Leon Korteweg in completing both pages, Vera de Kok helped with picture restoration, the draft was reviewed by Ryan Harding. After publication, the page was translated to Dutch (see above).


After the Dutch version of the List of skeptical magazines was challenged (see above), Leon Korteweg made sure reliable sources were also added in English, significantly expanding the list as well. Before& After


The Last Dragon (2004 film) has been thoroughly cleaned up by Leon Korteweg, after warnings by other Wikipedians that no (reliable) sources were provided had been ignored for more than a year. The text consisted almost entirely of a plot summary without any reference, and seemed to encourage an uncritical view of dragons as more than mythical creatures, and to portray cryptozoology as legitimate science, blurring the lines between fact and fiction, history and imagination, with suggestive categories such as "hypothetical life forms" (which dragons aren't in biology). Critical but honest reviews of the film have been added from reliable sources. Overly important that this page gets the GSoW treatment and has correct information on it.  December 2014 it received over 3 thousand views.  Before & After

Comité Para was updated by Leon Korteweg after it adopted a new logo and changed its longer official name. Before & After

Skepticality - Christine Daley has taken on a much needed update of the Skepticality podcast Wikipedia page. Before& After

Article Montel Williams has been updated with a criticism section by Chris Allen - Williams page now says "Controversial self-declared psychic Sylvia Browne featured frequently on The Montel Williams Show from 1991 until its finalé in 2008. Williams described Browne as "the most appearing guest on a talk show in the history of television" and "the longest running guest in daytime television",[18][19] and her appearances included particularly controversial incidents relating to kidnap victims Shawn Hornbeck and Amanda Berry. Williams has been criticized for allowing his high-profile show to serve as a channel for Browne, notably by fellow retired military officer Hal Bidlack, with Bidlack publicly asking "Commander Williams, have you lost your honor?". 

The Montauk Project (Chris Allen) rewrite and merge from Preston Nichols's page that was deleted. Before & After  I had not heard of the Montauk project before Chris had taken on updating this page. So I was pretty surprised to learn that it gets a lot of page views, December 2014 it got over 10,000 views. Amazing!

Jan Harold Brunvand This was a really fun and much needed rewrite by Janyce Boynton. I knew nothing about this man, but of course knew all about the term "Urban Legend" which he is famous for. Fascinating man, so happy to see his Wikipedia page go from 3 citations to 73 citations. Truly an amazing page. Before& After

Italian


CICAP, the Italian skeptical organisation, was recently completely rewritten and expanded by Raffaella Vitali. Before & After

Hungarian


European Council of Skeptical Organisations - translated by András G. Pintér from the English article by Leon Korteweg


Origin of Species - András G. Pintér extended the contents of the article and divided it into sections, along with providing more reference - Before& After


Paleoastronautics - An article by Attila Hartai on the theories of claimed historical visits by extraterrestrial intelligence

Hungarian Skeptic Society - (work still in progress) András G. Pintér added an info box along with additional information to the article, backed up by references - Before& After

Tényeket Tisztelők Társasága - A former, no longer existing, unofficial group of Hungarian skeptics (no photo yet, work still in progress). András G. Pintér added more information, backed by references, Attila Hartai made some structural corrections - Before& After



Mentions

GWUP conference - May 2014 - lecture by Michael Steinkellner 

Carbon Dating blog

Leon Korteweg's interview with Dutch Kritisch Denken

Skepticality podcasts - Nov 20, Dec 3& Dec 24th 

Short tutorial on how to use Cat-A-Lot on Wikimedia Commons

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Wikimedia Commons is the media database of the Wikimedia projects. It is structures using categories, I've blogged about how categories work on 'Commons before. Yesterday Leon asked me if I knew a tool that would easily categorize a batch of images. Cat-A-Lot is a usefull tool for this. I made a short screencast explaining how to use it:


Jan - Feb 2015 Starting the Year off right!

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The year seems to be starting off right.  GSoW has launched a new group focus, this time it is all things concerning vaccines. We have decided to focus on this topic because of the recent alarming outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases in areas where immunisation rates have dropped. And because we have already done the pages for many of the skeptical spokespeople who are publicly supporting vaccines (David Gorski, Harriet Hall, Steven Novella and more) we are going to focus on the anti-vaxers.  

The only one that was finished in time for this blog update was for the anti-vax lecturer Sherri Tenpenny.  This Ohio woman was planning a Australian tour encouraging parents not to vaccinate their children.  The Australian skeptic community was able to organize and get her tour cancelled. You can read all about it on her Wikipedia page. These pages aren't going to be the beautiful pages you have grown used to reading about here on this blog, with photos and interesting facts about their lives.  These pages are designed to just get the facts and citations out there, just the bare bones.  We aren't going to be hunting these people down and asking them to upload a nice profile photo or audio.  
This is the before and after for Sherri Tenpenny.  The work on this page was completed by Susan Gerbic and two non-GSoW skeptics, Joe Alabaster and Phil Kent.  


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The next big news is that the Australian Skeptic's National Convention have asked me (Susan) to travel to Brisbane to speak in their conference. I'm so thrilled, I had no idea I was even being considered.  I hope to be going on a skeptic lecture tour (hopefully hitting all the places that Tenpenny had to vacate) 






English

Christine Daley and Leon Korteweg improved and expanded the List of prizes for evidence of the paranormal, this is essential for the international skeptical movement: prove us that there is something paranormal, magical, supernatural or whatever extraordinary under controlled conditions, and skeptics will be amazed and pay you well. Curiously, however, nobody has even passed any of the tests, and not for a lack of trying, nor because they were unfair – conditions are always mutually agreed upon between challengers and claimants. Before& After

Leon Korteweg has given the Atheist Manifesto by Dutch philosopher Herman Philipse an English Wikipedia page (reviewed by Michelle Franklin). Although Philipse said he was frustrated everyone in the Netherlands only knew him from 'that odd manifesto', branded 'superficial' by opponents, this booklet was enough for Ayaan Hirsi Ali to reject Islam definitively, after which she became the world's most vocal female critic of religion. She wrote the preface to the 2004 republication. 

On 18 February, Rob Nanninga was featured as on the Main Page as Did You Know, attracting an amazing 11,500 views that day, another 5,000 the next day and 7,500 more the third day! Leon Korteweg, who had previously written his Dutch article in September, and improved it before publishing the English translation (with the help of Susan Gerbic, Julie Tomlinson, Janyce Boynton, Michelle Franklin and Jan Willem Nienhuys who all reviewed it) on 30 January, was overwhelmed at the success.





Warrick Couch - by editor Greg Neilson was a brand new creation. Greg told me that he was shocked that this man didn't already have a Wikipedia page. Once I read Greg's draft I had to agree, this man has done just about everything but "Dancing with the Stars".  I think that might be a reality show that I would watch, can you imagine a bunch of astronomers dancing together?  I think that would be a great theme for a astronomy conference. 

Greg applied for the Did You Know and within a few days it was on the front page. It even bypassed the normal waiting period. We aren't complaining, DYK's get the page views outside the normal skeptic choir. 



Warrick Couch hit 1,999 views during its first 3 days Did You Know window

Perry DeAngelis, who most people will know as a former host of The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe podcast of the New England Skeptical Society (see below) before his death in 2007, was in fact the driving force behind the foundation of both. Susan Gerbic and Jim Preston created a page to acknowledge his importance.

The New England Skeptic Society (NESS) was given a major rewrite by Susan Gerbic, who delved into its history (among them Perry DeAngelis' part, see above), achievements and activities. It now has a worthy article - Before& After

Jelena Levin wrote a new page for Recovering from Religion, an international organisation that provides help to people who struggle with losing their faith. Recently a hotline was launched for anyone facing immediate troubles, while RR does not preach or proselytise, only provide aid where it can. Leon Korteweg reviewed and corrected the article.

The stub for Mark Forsyth was massively expanded by Janyce Boynton. Before & After

On 11 February, Janyce Boynton's page about American folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand featured as a Did You Know on English Wikipedia's Main Page. It received over a 1,000 views that day.


Leon Korteweg translated Het Denkgelag (see below) from Dutch to English.

Dutch

The Dutch team has continued translating biographies of Dutch-speaking skeptical activists to English. As reported in early January, we have published the English pages of Flemish philosopher Maarten Boudry (SKEPP, Het Denkgelag) and Dutch physician Catherine de Jong (VtdK), both actively involved in the movement.
Now Leon Korteweg has translated the articles for Jan Willem Nienhuys (reviewed by Ryan Harding, Susan Gerbic and Nienhuys himself) as the public face of Stichting Skepsis, and the late Rob Nanninga (reviewed by Michelle Franklin, Susan Gerbic, Janyce Boynton and Jan Willem Nienhuys), who was the driving force behind Stichting Skepsis as editor of Skepter magazine until his death.

Leon Korteweg also translated the English entry he wrote for Skeptics with a K, which was reviewed by Wim Vandenberghe and Coen de Bruijn.


Emile, Leon, Jozef and Coen at Het Denkgelag in Antwerp.
(Photo: Pieter Van Vlaanderen)
After visiting Het Denkgelag in Antwerp on 26 January together with Jozef, Coen, Emile and others who are allies of GSoW, Leon worked together with them and several Flemish skeptics including Pieter Brauwers, Pieter Van Nuffel, Dries Van Giel and Maarten Boudry to write an article for this young conference that tries to reach people beyond the skeptical choir. We also got an amazing opportunity to interview Julia Galef for a future page about her, as well as meeting Maarten Boudry whose page we had been expanding in Dutch and translate to English for several weeks, for which he kindly thanked us. Vera de Kok aided in the layout of pictures across the page.

The improved and expanded the List of prizes for evidence of the paranormal (see above) has been translated into Dutch by Leon Korteweg and Wim Vandenberghe.

Lanyrd is increasingly used for planning, documenting and coverage of skeptical events, ranging from multi-day conferences to smaller gatherings such as Skeptics in the Pub. Leon Korteweg and Emile Dingemans thought it was time to make Lanyrd known among the Dutch-speaking public by giving them a Wikipedia page in Dutch.

Roguing Emile
Emile Dingemans performed many notable hit-and-run actions while "roguing" the Dutch Wikipedia:

  • Orthorexia Nervosa (disorder of obsession with "healthy" food, which is not yet in DSM-5 but probably will enter in DSM-6). Added explanation and causes of the disorder, with sources from experts. Removed what looked like unsourced laymen interpretations. Changes
  • Complete update for Voedingsadditief (Food additive). Explained what they are, and why they are in our food. How they are documented, and how strict the regulation is (with 1500 views a month, quite popular). Changes
  • Added on Multiple Sclerose (Multiple Sclerosis) a large study that HPV-vaccination is not a cause for MS. Changes
  • Addition to Essentieel nutriënt (essential nutrient). Changes
  • Checked controversial claims about the Partij van de Eenheid (a local Islamic party). Changes
  • Added information on Chemische synthese (Chemical synthesis) to explain the misconception of 'chemical' and 'synthetic'. Changes
  • Rigorous restructuring of Universiteit (University). Including revising the definition as an institution for scienctic education and research. Moving national segments away to their appropriate articles, keeping the focus on University. Removal of POV, unencyclopedic writing, etc. Changes
  • Asked for several sources for dubious claims on Orthomoleculaire behandelwijzen (Orthomolecular medicine). Added criticism on the method by Luc Bonneux and David Gorski. Changes
  • Added explanation on E-nummer (E number). Removed dubious claims and alarmist writings, explaining what they mean after some desk research, and why they are called 'safe'. (has around 2500 views a month) Changes
  • Added information on the dye Amarant (Amaranth) explaining why it is forbidden in the US and not in the EU and how safe intake is controlled. Removed unnecessary alarmist cancer-claims. Changes


Italian

Raffaella Vitali put a lot of effort in translating the Burzynski Clinic to Italian. This fine article now joins our German, Dutch, Portuguese, and Polish versions on the controversial Texas alternative cancer treatment clinic of Stanislaw Burzynski.

Spanish

Monica Quijano rewrote the Spanish page about Chupacabras, the cryptids that are often ascribed mysterious disappearances or deaths of animals in the Americas, but for whose existence there has never been found any conclusive reliable evidence, despite wide popular belief. The page was riddled with unsourced claims or poor citations (16 in total), now it has 53 solid references, providing much more accurate information on the subject. The article was reviewed by Walkiria Nubes and Erik Hess. Before& After


Mentions 

In a special article for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, 'Burzynski Clinic: A Scientifical Year Of Fail', Sharon Hill credits GSoW –among others– for providing 'extensive information and citations of [Burzynski's] failure to produce evidence, his failure to follow regulations, and the consensus that scientists and cancer organizations have discredited the doctor and his treatments' on Wikipedia (in several languages).

Evan Burnstein writes about the Perry DeAngelis page creation. 


In line with the GSoW Vax project, we will now concentrate on providing more accurate and reliable information about vaccination and the anti-vaxx movement. Susan interviewed Leon about his own story with vaccination and the situation in the Netherlands (an abridged version featured on Skepticality #248 @11:10).






The March - April GSoW Updates

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Thinking of joining GSoW? Want to know more about training? Check out our YouTube channel. We have interviews with our editors as well as short videos from past Skepticality podcasts. Most of your questions will be answered by this channel. We are updating the videos often so please subscribe and not miss a single one.


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Here is an example of a unhappy Wikipedia editor who is using GSoW as an example of a group that is astroturfing. This person sites an old JREF lecture to say that GSoW is bullying and attacking believers. They say this great line "I hear them echoed on almost every talk page I visit these days".

To which another editor (non-GSoW) responds thanking GSoW for bringing in quality editors that follow the rules.



And one more. This is a very upset group that has launched a KickStarter for a book about Wikipedia and how it refuses to let the other side of medicine (quackery) in. How dare we insist on truth and citations and peer review. Give generously to this kickstarter as it will keep them busy for quite a while. "We will correct the errors and omissions with truthful, scientific data about the specific alternative health movements and modalities. " Seriously readers this is what GSoW deals with every day. Please, we have a lot of work to do and are fighting to make Wikipedia strong and accurate. If you are looking for a project that educates, and is amazingly important, look no further.  GSoW is where its at. Write to us at GSoWteam@gmail.com

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Vaccination Team:This project is open to all trained team members. We are working on pro-vax and anti-vax Wikipedia pages. We are making small edits to pages like this one that now appears on Charlie Sheen's Wikipedia page (thanks to Gene) and is getting about 4K views a day.




Wendy Sue Swanson - editor Janyce Boynton - Brand New Page created Wendy Sue Swanson (born 1974) is a pediatrician, educator and author best known for her Seattle Mama Doc blog. As a doctor and a mother, Swanson advocates the use of online tools, such as blogs, Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites, to strengthen communication between healthcare providers and patients. Swanson asserts that online technologies can assist patients and families in becoming stewards of their own health. Swanson has dedicated her career to helping physicians learn to use online tools more effectively in helping patients make informed decisions based in science. "While we don't have the capability just yet," Swanson states, "my goal is to prove that an empowered and informed patient reduces health care costs and improves outcomes.

This Did You Know? Appeared on the front page of Wikipedia May 2, 2015



Hungarian Team:

Measles - András G. Pintér - Before & After (Pseudoscientific claims added - Stefan Lanka and the €100 000 to be payed)

Härtlein Károly (huwiki) - András G. Pintér - Brand new page (well known science advocate in physics, chief organizer of Skeptics Conference in Budapest)

Kanyaró (huwiki) - András G. Pintér - Before & After (Hungarian Measles page. Antivax movement section and pseudoscience section added)

Szentágothai János (huwiki) - András G. Pintér - Before & After (the founder of the Hungarian skeptic movement. A section added, mentioning that fact.)

Hungarian Skeptic Society - András G. Pintér - Before & After




HLakos András - András G. Pintér - Brand new page (well known infectologist, MD, specializing in Lyme and other diseases spread by ticks, often debates anti-vax activists)



English Editing Teams:

Team Curie

Facilitated Communication was rewritten by a team of GSoW editors and some people outside GSoW - Facilitated Communication (FC) is a technique used by some caregivers and educators in an attempt to assist people with severe communication disabilities. There is widespread agreement within the scientific community and multiple disability advocacy organizations, that facilitators, not the person with the communication disability, are the source of messages obtained through FC.

Team Rydberg:

We are glad to announce our project has grown enough to launch a new English team! Janyce Boynton (previously on Team Curie) and Greg Neilson (previously on Team Sagan) have agreed to guide Team Rydberg, joined by a record number of members who've just finished their training. We hope to see many fresh and rewritten articles from them.

Team Sagan:

Amanda Bauer - Greg Neilson - Brand New Page - Amanda Elaine Bauer (born 26 May 1979) is an American professional astronomer and science communicator, currently working in Australia. She is a Research Astronomer at Australia's largest optical observatory, the Australian Astronomical Observatory (AAO), where her principal field of research concerns how galaxies form, how they create new stars, and particularly why they stop creating new stars. She is better known to the public through her efforts as the AAO Public Outreach Officer.

Robert Sheaffer - Jim Preston - Before& After - Robert Sheaffer (born 1949) is a freelance writer and skeptic. He is an investigator of unidentified flying objects, having researched many sightings and written critiques of the hypothesis that UFOs are alien spacecraft. In addition to UFOs, his writings cover topics such as Christianity, academic feminism, the scientific theory of evolution, and creationism. He is the author of five books. Sheaffer writes for Skeptical Inquirer (where he contributes the regular "Psychic Vibrations" column), Fate Magazine, andSpaceflight. He was a founding member (with Philip J. Klass and James Oberg) of the UFO Subcommittee of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, and is a fellow of that organization. He is a graduate of Northwestern University and a member of MENSA.



Association française pour l'information scientifique (French Association for Scientific Information) - This brand new page was translated from French to Dutch (see Dutch Team below) and then to English by Leon Korteweg, reviewed by Julie Tomlinson and Janyce Boynton.

Susan Gerbic- Kyle Hamar - Brand new page - Susan Marie Gerbic (born August 8, 1962) is an American professional portrait photographer and skeptical activist living in Salinas, California.Gerbic is the co-founder of Monterey County Skeptics, founder of Skeptic Action, leader of Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia (GSoW), a regular contributor to Skepticality, contributes to Skeptical Inquirer and a frequent speaker at skeptic conferences such as The Amazing Meet!ng (TAM), SkeptiCal and Question, Explore, Discover (QED). Susan Gerbic was born in Salinas, California to Anthony and Tressie Gerbic in 1962. Gerbic manages a Portrait Studio and has a B.A. in social history.

Julia Galef - as we announced in the Jan-Feb blog update, the Dutch team has fulfilled its promise done on 26 January to Julia Galef to create a brand new page about her. Emile Dingemans sought out all sources and wrote the text, Leon Korteweg helped him, Coen took the closeup picture and recorded a voice intro (which will be added later). Susan Gerbic and Michelle Franklin reviewed the text.

Heather Henderson - Susan Gerbic - Brand New Page - Heather Henderson, (born March 7, 1973), also known as Baby Heather, is a professional burlesque dancer, singer, model, filmmaker, producer and host for Ardent Atheists and Skeptically Yours podcasts. In 2012 Ardent Atheist won The People's Choice Podcast Awards in the religion inspiration category. In 1989-1991 Henderson was a regular on the nationally televised Dance Party USA show where she appeared as Baby Heather. In her teens Henderson released a single called Give it up Baby Heather which was given a positive review by Billboard Magazine. She currently is a member of Penn Jillette's No God Band and is a vocal activist for atheism and against psychics.

The Amaz!ing Meeting page rewrite Before& After - Susan Gerbic - The Amaz!ng Meeting (TAM) is an annual conference that focuses on science, skepticism, and critical thinking. The conference started in 2003 and is sponsored by the James Randi Educational Foundation or (JREF). Perennial speakers include Penn & Teller, Phil Plait, Michael Shermer and James 'The Amazing' Randi. Speakers at the four-day conference are selected from a variety of disciplines including scientific educators, magicians, and community activists. Outside the plenary sessions the conference includes workshops, additional panel discussions, music and magic performances and live taping of podcasts including the The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe.

NECSS - Brand New Page - Susan Gerbic - The Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism (NECSS, pronounced as "nexus") is a four-day conference focusing on science and skepticism held each April in New York City. Its purpose is exploring the intersection of science, skepticism, the media, and society for the purpose of promoting a more rational world. It was founded in 2009, run jointly by the New York City Skeptics (NYCS) and the New England Skeptical Society (NESS). The Society for Science-Based Medicine joined as a full sponsor of the conference in 2015. Attendance is estimated at 400 people.
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Recent Graduates Final Projects Team


Dave Thomas - editor David Brown - Before& After - Dave Thomas (born 1953) is a physicist and mathematician best known for his scientific skepticism research and writings. He is a graduate of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, and his work includes the Roswell and Aztec UFO sightings, theBible Code, Climate Change, the 9/11 Truth Movement and Chemtrails. Many of Thomas' articles have been published in Skeptical Inquirer magazine.


Lucie Green- editor James Williams - Before& After - Lucie Green (born c.1975) is a British astrophysicist, solar researcher, astronomer and science communicator. Since 2005 Green has been a Royal Society University Research Fellow (previously the Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow) at Mullard Space Science Laboratory (MSSL) of the University College London (UCL). Green also runs MSSL's public engagement programme and sits on the board of the European Solar Physics Division (ESPD) of the European Physical Society and the advisory board of theScience Museum.


Elizabeth Whelan - editor Gene Roseberry - Before& After - Dr. Elizabeth M. Whelan (/ˈhwlən/; December 4, 1943 – September 11, 2014) was an epidemiologist best known for challenging government regulations in the consumer products, food, and pharmaceuticals industries that arose from faulty science. In 1978, she founded the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) to provide a formal foundation for her work. She also wrote, or co-wrote, more than 20 books and over 300 articles in scientific journals and laymen publications.

Jere Lipps - editor Jerod Lycett - Before& After - Jere Henry Lipps (August 28, 1939) is Director of the Dr. John D. Cooper Archaeological and Paleontological Center and Curator of Paleontology at the University of California Museum of Paleontology. Lipps was the ninth Director of the museum (1989-1997)and chair of the department of Integrative Biology at Berkeley (1991–1994). He served as president of the Paleontological Societyin 1997, and the Cushman Foundation for Foraminiferal Research Inc.

Carol Tavris - editor Lauren Carr - Before& After - Carol Anne Tavris (born September 17, 1944) is an American social psychologist and feminist. As a public intellectual, she has devoted her career to writing and lecturing about the contributions of psychological science to the beliefs and practices that guide people’s lives, and to criticizing “psychobabble,” “biobunk,” and pseudoscience. Her many writings have dealt with critical thinking,cognitive dissonance, anger, gender, and other topics in psychology.

Mark Edward - editor Cathy Smith - Before& After - Mark Edward (born Mark Edward Wilson, May 19, 1951, Los Angeles, CA) is a professional mentalist who specializes in magic of the mind. He wrote several books on mentalism, séance theory and production and appeared on television as both primary consultant and on-air performer in such diverse programming as A & E's Biography: "Houdini, the Great Escape,"NBC's "The Other Side" and "Psychic Secrets Revealed,"The Sci-Fi Channel's "Mysteries, Magic and Miracles," The Discovery Channel's "Forces Beyond," and on two episodes of The Learning Channel's "Exploring the Unknown." His featured segment as a spirit medium on the pilot episode of Showtime's "Penn & Teller's Bullshit!" series entitled "Speaking with the Dead" helped secure an Emmy Award nomination for that episode in 2002.

The Perry DeAngelis Wikipedia page received a 3-minute audio update from editor David Brown who received permission from the SGU to edit down audio Perryisms into something we could use for the Wikipedia page. The audio intro project is a GSoW "thing" be sure to check out our progress.


Dutch Team:

The Dutch team is currently focusing on two main projects: the Vaccination Project (see above) and Skeptical organisations in Europe (the latter of which non-GSoW Wikipedians can also participate in). We are working various Dutch vaccination articles, but cannot report any completed pages yet at this moment. However, on the front of documenting the European skeptical movement, the following has been achieved:
 
(De Vrije Gedachte CC BY-SA 4.0)

De Vrije Gedachte (The Free Thought), a Dutch association founded in 1856 for freethought, atheism, humanism, skepticism, secularism and free speech, was very small before Leon Korteweg got involved with it. He learnt that Tim de Vries was preparing a rewrite, but struggled with what to do next. Leon took over the project and with the assistance of several people including team member Emile Dingemans, photographer and editor of its magazine De Vrijdenker René van Elst, its then-chairman Anton van Hooff, and freethought historian Bert Gasenbeek, executed a major expansion. Right now, the page looks like THIS. An English translation is almost ready as well.



Skepsis ry, the Finnish skeptical association, was first improved in English (before - after) and then translated from English to Dutch by Leon Korteweg, checked by Wim Vandenberghe. However, seeing the Finnish article was much larger and up to date, they wanted to look for a Finnish translator to help expanding both English and Dutch pages. At QED 2015, Leon actually met a skeptic from Finland willing to aid us; we hope to cooperate with him to be able to tell more about Skepsis ry.

Association française pour l'information scientifique (French Association for Scientific Information) is a French group, one of the oldest skeptical organisations in the world, preceding the foundation of CSICOP by 8 years. It was translated to Dutch by Rik Delaet and corrected, improved and illustrated by Leon Korteweg: Association française pour l'information scientifique. Then it was translated to English, see Team Sagan.



CICAP - After Raffaella Vitali had improved and expanded the Italian and English articles of CICAP, the Italian skeptics, Leon Korteweg translated it to Dutch. The text was reviewed by Jurgen Voorneveld, a new associate of the Dutch team.


Wim and Leon are working with Norwegian skeptics to improve their article, and translate it to English and Dutch; we hope to report on those efforts when they come to fruition. We have contacted the Czech skeptics (they were busy testing hundreds of dowsers in Prague, but promised to get back to us). We established contact with COMCEPT - the Portuguese skeptics - who presented at QED, as well as the Greater Manchester Skeptics Society and Glasgow Skeptics. We are trying to get in touch with all other groups in Europe.



(Good Thinking CC BY-SA 4.0)

To our amused surprise, the page for the Good Thinking Society was launched just after QED by someone else! Snatched away right before we could start on it. Apparently we were not the only ones inspired by Michael Marshall's talk on Homeopathy in the UK last Saturday morning. But, as one can see, this article could use further expansion, so we might work on that in the next two months.

We have also launched the Wikiproject Skepticism on Dutch Wikipedia, to increase cooperation between skeptical Wikipedians; they don't have to be GSoW members to participate. We will see how this evolves.

Roguing Emile:

Emile Dingemans again performed many notable hit-and-run actions while "roguing" the Dutch Wikipedia:

  • Added news on the extrication of three psychics by the Belgian mentalist Gili during the Flemish TV-show Café Corsari. He let the psychics wander though and feel the Zuiderpershuis. All three psychics came with a similar story about a murder that had happened in the old factory. A fake story that Gili had put on the official website of Zuiderpershuis. (Added to three articles).
  • Gili Changes
  • Zuiderpershuis Changes
  • Café Corsari Changes
  • Added the biography of a Dutch atheist comedian who only several days later announced in his TV-show to become the first Pharaoh Arjen Henrik I of The Netherlands. He managed to receive enough signatures for his citizens' initiative, to have his idea suggested for discussion in the national parliament. This gave 2.000 hits on his Wikipedia page that day, where people could read about his struggle with his religious background and coming out as an atheist. ChangesView statistics
  • Added skeptics criticism on Ayurveda. Changes
  • Updated and restructured several pages on Dutch patenting system: Octrooi; Octrooi in Nederland; Octrooi in België; Benelux Patent Platform; Benelux-Bureau voor de Intellectuele Eigendom; Europees Octrooibureau; Rijksdienst voor Ondernemend Nederland; Agentschap NL; Europees Octrooiverdrag.
  • Added section on International Agency for Research on Cancer's classification of glyphosate as 'probably carcinogenic', with criticism to the misunderstanding in popular media as if it was a risk analysis, and analysis by Bundesinstitut für Risikobewertung. Changes
  • Update introduction of Dutch article on the controversial MSG (Monosodiumglutamate), pointing out that it is available in 'natural' products like tomatoes, potatoes, mushrooms. Listing essential nutrients. Changes
  • Enlarged Massimo Pigliucci's page with information on the Rationally Speaking podcast. Changes



Italian Team:


European Council of Skeptical Organisations - Having been previously written in English, Dutch and Hungarian, the ECSO page has now been translated into Italian by our wonderful editor Raffaella Vitali.


Russian Team:


Общество скептиков (Skeptic Society) - Several writers, translators and reviewers worked on this multilingual project that resulted in three new articles about the Russian-speaking skeptical community founded by Kirill Alferov in 2013.

In Russian, the page was created by Katy, Jelena and Svetlana (with the aid of Leon and Kirill himself); in English translated by Jelena and Leon (reviewed by Janyce, James and Julie); in Dutch translated by Leon (reviewed by Emile).


GSoW mentions


András Pintér lectured about GSoW at the Budapesti Szkeptikus Konferencia in Hungarian on 28 March 2015.


The Skeptic Zone published an interview in English with GSoW Hungarian team leader András Pintér on 12 April 2015.



Leon Korteweg and Vera de Kok lectured about GSoW at The Hague Skeptics in the Pub in English on 3 April 2015.

Leon Korteweg lectured about GSoW at Vrijdenkerscafé Utrecht in Dutch on 13 April 2015.

András Pintér gave a talk in English about 'The authority problem'during SkeptiCamp Manchester 2015, preceding QED 2015. A part of the lecture was dedicated to Wikipedia and GSoW.

We're mentioned on the cover of Skepter, the Dutch skeptical magazine! Leon Korteweg's article appears on p. 39–41.

May and June GSoW Updates - News and Information

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The GSoW Vaccine project has really helped focus attention on all the people and projects from the scientific skepticism world, I know I've learned a lot. We still have a month more and more surprises in store for you, so stay tuned for a early August blog release recapping all that GSoW has done to help spread the word that vaccines are important and good information is available out there. 

As usual, GSoW is doing a lot more than just vaccines these last two months. See below for all the various goodness and awesomeness we have been involved in. Let me remind you dear readers that below are only the major rewrites and new page creations. The GSoW team is always doing far more to educate the world through Wikipedia than what is listed here on this blog update.  Small edits are made all the time that improve content, but are too plentiful to be mentioned here.

If you are thinking of joining GSoW or want to know more about the project, the best place to get information is from our YouTube channel.  There we have many interviews with the team members, they explain why they joined this project, what its like being here and why they stay. I'm always inspired every time I listen to these interviews. They also talk about the pages they have worked on and it is important behind the scenes discussions like this that will open your eyes about the pages we write.  
Also included on our YouTube channel are 3-15 minute snippets from the Skepticality podcast I'm on every couple weeks. These are actual podcast segments, but they have been cleaned up and photos (often very humorous) added. Check these out when you have a moment, they explain GSoW and its many projects very quickly and simply for the newer skeptical activist aficionado.

If you're into short audio spots, share this with those you think might find it interesting. We would love to have lots of you join us!

Finally be sure to join us at The Amaz!ng Meeting July 15-20 in Las Vegas. I have a completely open calendar set aside these days just to hang out with my fellow skeptics. On Thursday I will be on a panel with Sharon Hill and Simon Singh in a workshop on Skeptical Activism in Every Day Life. On Sunday GSoW has its own workshop at 4:00-5:30 entitled How to Edit Wikipedia like a GSoW editor and Change the World Muhahahaha. Please bring your laptop as we will be teaching you how to edit like a GSoW editor without joining the actual project.

In October join me and several other GSoW editors in Australia. I am speaking at the Brisbane Skeptic Conference October 16-18. But because I'm going to be in the area, I am working on many other speaking engagements all over the country. Canberra, Tasmania, Melbourne, Sydney are on the schedule, dates soon to be decided. I'm also hoping to crash in on the New Zealand Skeptics.  And also very exciting I will be visiting the Hong Kong Skeptics at the end of this tour, and then finishing off with a lecture in China about my cancer treatment and how I relied on my doctors to treat me and not a homeopath or other CAM treatments.

From Brisbane Skeptics President Ross Balch - 
"At some point society is going to become a lot more rational and I think unfortunately no one is going to remember that its a lot to do with us and our activism. I think that we are going to be ... history and no one is going to realize when it happens, but all of a sudden its going to happen. there are some people who they work so tirelessly they deserve to be remembered and as I was talking to you previously about Susan Gerbic. One of the things she does is to make that happen, its a great project Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia because people who deserve to be known they do get known because of that project. Wikipedia is going to be around a lot longer than us in one way or another. Its almost a new history book and that's fantastic. Its actually my great pleasure to let you see this... (video) SkeptiCamp Brisbane July 4, 2015

And now what you actually came to the blog to read about....

English Teams

Brian Deer - Updated by Jim Preston - Before & After Jim felt that Deer's page fell under the Vaccine Projects task list AND Deer will be speaking at the upcoming Amaz!ng Meeting this July. Meet Jim and team at our workshop at TAM.

David Helfand - Colin Hagemeyer - BeforeAfter This is the page that Colin rewrote in order to graduate him from training. Welcome Colin as a brand new GSoW editor!
(De Vrije Gedachte CC BY-SA 4.0)

De Vrije Gedachte (Brand New Page) - The Dutch freethinkers association "The Free Thought" was translated from Dutch (see previous blog and below) by Leon Korteweg, reviewed by Janyce Boynton, Susan Gerbic, Dianne Elizabeth, Julie Tomlinson and Jerod Lycett.

Every Child by Two - Page rewritten by Janyce Boynton - Before & After

Marsh on GTS' UK homeopathy campaign.
(Photo: Andrew Merritt CC-BY-SA 2.0)
Good Thinking Society - As related in our previous blog, to our great surprise the Good Thinking Society was already written before we could start on it. However, Leon Korteweg has been able to improve its contents somewhat with the help of Michael Marshall ("Marsh"), and translate it to Dutch (see below). Before & After

Human Dynamics - Cleanup of un-scientific statements - Ryan Harding & Leon Korteweg - Before & After

Irish Skeptics Society - Leon Korteweg - Expanded with info, more reliable sources and a logo, translated to Dutch (see below). Before & After

Jorge Allende -  Page rewritten by Javier Ardouin Bórquez - Before& After This is the final project from Javier to finish off his training. Welcome to our newest GSoW editor!

Klub Sceptyków Polskich (Brand New Page) -  Written by guest editor Tomasz Witkowski in Polish first (see below), and translated by Tomasz & Leon Korteweg and reviewed by Susan Gerbic and Janyce Boynton. The KSP is amongst the most active skeptical organisations in Europe, and manage to get national media coverage often.

Leon Jaroff - (Brand New Page) - Written by Janyce Boynton, this biography is about the founding editor of popular science magazine Discover, and co-founder of CSICOP, the first successful skeptical organisation in the United States. (reviewed by Leon Korteweg)

Northern Rivers Vaccination Supporters (Brand New Page) - This page was written by one of the new English editors, James Williams, about a group of concerned citizens in the part of Australia with the lowest vaccination rate. The article was reviewed by Susan Gerbic, Janyce Boynton and Leon Korteweg. 

Fun Fact - The NRVS people were unaware of the creation of their Wikipedia page, it was decided that as the Brisbane Skeptics were having a SkeptiCamp on Saturday July 4th and at least one member of the NRVS team would be in attendance, GSoW would delay announcement of the page.  Susan Gerbic and James Williams gave the skepticamp organizers a video where James surprised the audience with the page. Video here

Ryan J. Bell (Brand New Page) - After meeting Ryan Bell at QED 2015 in Manchester, Jelena Levin decided to write his biography. Together with Leon Korteweg (especially for the Dutch sources; we noticed a remarkable interest in Bell's Year Without God from the three main Christian newspapers in the Netherlands) and aided by photographers Andrew Merritt and Al Johnston at QED, and reviewers Kyle Hamar, Susan Gerbic and Gene Roseberry, the article was published and eventually featured on English Wikipedia's Main Page as a Did You Know? on 21 June (over 2600 views that day).

Stephanie Messenger (Brand New Page) - Susan Gerbic - This is the anti-vax author of Melanie's Marvelous Measles which encourages children to seek out and embrace measles in order to make themselves stronger. The MMM Wikipedia page was written by Susan Gerbic in May 2015.

Dutch Team

Louis Fles (Brand New Page) - Leon Korteweg - Important Jewish-Dutch freethinker and arguably the most vocal atheist and secularist in the Netherlands in the Interwar Period. Article translated from English and expanded in Dutch, added photograph. 
On 3 May, Dutch team members met in Utrecht at AronRa's lecture.
Left to right: Rogier, Emile, Leon, Vera, Rian. 
(Photo: René van Elst).

Rob Nanninga - Leon Korteweg - short expansion on his study of crop circle / UFO believers. Before & After

De Vrije Gedachte - More images were added by Leon Korteweg, extra links were created by trainee Jaap. Before & After

Irish Skeptics Society (Brand New Page) - A well-known but nowadays apparently relatively inactive skeptical organisation in Ireland. Translated from English (see above) by Leon Korteweg, reviewed by Raymond van Es.

Good Thinking Society (Brand New Page) - Translated from English (see above) by Leon Korteweg, reviewed by Emile Dingemans.

Charlie Charlie Challenge - Coen de Bruijn got an email from his children's school that pupils were forbidden playing the hype gamen (at its height around late May/early June), wherein the 'ghost' of an unknown Mexican boy or man name 'Charlie' is invoked, who allegedly answers yes/no questions by 'moving' balanced pencils on a sheet of paper. Coen found the school's reaction of prohibiting the game to be 'fearmongering' and referring to 'the Internet' as a source for more information to be very irresponsible.

As expected, the Dutch-speaking Wikipedia entry showed up high in search engine results, but it was full of alarmist paranormal-promoting nonsense without any references or sources, so Coen decided to rewrite it. Wim Vandenberghe soon joined him, and finally Leon Korteweg completed the revision crew. Unsourced material was challenged or removed, reliable sources were added and grammar was drastically improved. Although another Wikipedian had previously nominated the article to be deleted, because it was so misleading and poorly written, the team decided to try and keep it to help anyone who was worried find trustworthy information and calm down instead of forcing them to less reliable sites which would probably only confirm their fears; the page was kept. Before & After 

Polish Skeptics campaign against
pseudoscience in psychology.

Klub Sceptyków Polskich (Brand New Page) - After the page was first written and published in Polish (see below) and then translated into English (see above), Leon Korteweg translated the KSP to Dutch; the text was reviewed by Rogier van Vugt, Emile Dingemans and Rik Delaet.

Five people from the Dutch-speaking skeptical/freethought movement had their voice intros recorded by Leon Korteweg (see below).


Hungarian Team

Richard Feynman - András G. Pintér Before& After Feynman is well known among Hungarians as books of his have been translated to our language and are quite popular. His Wikipedia page, however was rather disorganized and lacking in terms of information, too. It could still be further advanced.


Florence Nightingale - András G. Pintér Before & After She is not part of popular culture in Hungary, but references to her work are available online and in books dealing with the history of medicine, thus finding proper information was not that much of a hassle. Her work is also relevant to skeptics, hence the rewrite.



Italian Team

Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI)
- The first successful skeptical organisation in North America, founded in 1976 as CSICOP, with their magazine Skeptical Inquirer that popularised the term "skeptic" for our movement. Translated to Italian by Raffaella Vitali - Before& After


Portuguese Team

The article on Table-turning (Mesas girantes), recently massively expanded and improved by our Brazilian editor Valério Andrade Melo, it was just featured on the Main Page of Portuguese Wikipedia! Check it out, this is a very big deal - Before and After 

Polish guest editors

Klub Sceptyków Polskich (Polish Skeptics Club) - After Leon Korteweg contacted Tomasz Witkowski of the Klub Sceptyków Polskich, a fruitful correspondance led to an agreement that he, together with Polish Wikipedian Maksymilian Sielicki and photographer Kamil Przyboś, would write the article on the KSP in Polish first, and then translate it to English. After a month of silence, Tomasz called in and showed that the Polish page was done! Maksymilian and Leon just needed to do a few more fixes, referencing and extra sources, and the translations could begin (see above). Also, we had the luck that someone found it so well-written that it was featured on Polish Wikipedia's Main Page on 27 June. Many thanks to our Polish guest editors!


Audio of Skeptics (here)

This area continues to expand - newly added voice intros are American skeptic Julia Galef, American health educator Wendy Sue Swanson, Dutch freethinker and 
historian Anton van Hooff, Dutch religion critic and lawyer Paul Cliteur, Iranian-Dutch ex-Muslim activist Ehsan Jami, Belgian skeptic philosopher Maarten Boudry and Dutch terrorism expert David Suurland.

Videos

At the moment, we are experimenting with video uploading and inclusion. Videos are still rare on Wikipedia, so we can make articles extra interesting by uploading reusable material. We've done this before with the 10:23 Campaign (thanks to Vera de Kok), now Leon Korteweg is exploring further possibilities. Ex-Muslim activist Maryam Namazie's opening address at the Secular Conference 2014 has been added, and excerpts from her interview with comedian Kate Smurthwaite on free speech have been embedded in her page. Also, a video of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales calling for the release of Raif Badawi has been included in all language versions (including Arabic) of the latter's biography.

Skeptical organisations in Europe: our not-so-hidden agenda... :)

Our regular followers will have noticed that we write a lot about skeptical organisations in Europe lately. Leon Korteweg, who found it remarkable that everyone knows all about the JREF, The Skeptics Society and Skeptical Inquirer, but almost nothing about their fellow skeptics in neighboring countries because of language barriers, took the initiative to provide basic documentation on several skeptics groups on the European continent (and that includes the British Isles). This has gradually evolved to a continuous project to write a page about every national or regional group in their own language first, then translate it into English, then into Dutch. Hopefully, more languages will follow, so all of us get to know about each other and form a tight movement across the borders, which will make us more powerful and noticeable by the general public whom we're trying to reach.


Skeptical organisations in Europe with their logos. Made by Leon Korteweg.
Since April 2015, Leon is maintaining a public schedule as part of the Wikiproject Skepticism on English and Dutch Wikipedia to visualise every step of progress:
Skeptical organisations in Europe (English)
Skeptische organisaties in Europa (Nederlands)

It's a real challenge to find people who can provide information in the language we need, and then to translate it into English and vice versa. It's exciting but also hard. If you're not a GSoW member yet but are considering joining us and you can read and write Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Hungarian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Spanish and/or Swedish besides English, this is the project where YOU can really make the difference!

The GSoW Vaccination Project - Feb - July 2015

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From time to time GSoW likes to unite the entire team to focus on one subject. For 6 months we focused on all things concerning vaccinations. It took us a couple months to find our feet and actually get the ball rolling, once done the team was passionate about getting things done. (Not all work mentioned below was completed during the Vax focus months)

We take great pride in showcasing our work, these pages generate hundreds of thousands of page views each year, and will continue to do so year after year. All work is exponential as we can build off the pages created, as well as translate them into other languages.

Officially we finished the Vaccine project, but team members will continue to work in this area as there is much work left to be done. We will be moving on to a new focus Jan - June 2016 on a topic still undecided. If you have suggestions please comment here on our blog or write to us at GSoWteam@gmail.com

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


ENGLISH 

Charlie Sheen's Wikipedia page (thanks to Gene) and is getting about 4K views a day.


Northern Rivers Vaccination Supporters (Brand New Page) - This page was written by one of the new English editors, James Williams, about a group of concerned citizens in the part of Australia with the lowest vaccination rate. The article was reviewed by Susan Gerbic, Janyce Boynton and Leon Korteweg.

Fun Fact - The NRVS people were unaware of the creation of their Wikipedia page, it was decided that as the Brisbane Skeptics were having a SkeptiCamp on Saturday July 4th and at least one member of the NRVS team would be in attendance, GSoW would delay announcement of the page.  Susan Gerbic and James Williams gave the skepticamp organizers a video where James surprised the audience with the page. Video here


Brian Deer - Updated by Jim Preston - Before & After - Science reporter that exposed anti-vax Doctor Andrew Wakefield. 

Every Child by Two - Page rewritten by Janyce Boynton - Before & After Founded in 1991 by Rosalynn Carter and Betty Bumpers to "raise awareness of the critical need for timely immunizations and to foster a systematic way to immunize all of America's children by age two."

Sherri Tenpenny (before) & (after) - Susan Gerbic - with the assistance of Jo Alabaster & Phil Kent (non-GSoW)

Leon Jaroff - (Brand New Page) - Written by Janyce Boynton, this biography is about the founding editor of popular science magazine Discover, and co-founder of CSICOP, the first successful skeptical organisation in the United States. (reviewed by Leon Korteweg)

Stephanie Messenger (Brand New Page) - Susan Gerbic - This is the anti-vax author of Melanie's Marvelous Measles which encourages children to seek out and embrace measles in order to make themselves stronger. The Melanie's Marvelous Measles Wikipedia page was written by Susan Gerbic in May 2015.

Steven Novella - Page updated and rewritten by various GSoW editors

The Mark Crislip/QuackCast page was an embarrassment. It is what I call a "non-scroller" which means you don't have to scroll to see the whole page.  Our community really should be ashamed that we allow pages like this to exist on Wikipedia.   Sean Whitcomb got to work and turned out this amazing transformation.  We contacted Mark for audio and I think he wins for funniest Intro Audio.  After

Rachael Dunlopnow has a brand new page (with audio) written by new editor Sean Whitcomb. Rachael has been sitting on our list since we started collecting people to put on our list. She kept getting passed over, not because we were worried that there wouldn't be enough information, but because creating a page from scratch is a lot of work. I think Sean and team did a terrific job. Rachael was also featured on the front page of English Wikipedia as a Did You Know... Here are the stat views during that day.


Michelle Bachman- page updated by Janyce Boynton with HPV statements.

Bill Maher- Quotes from scientific skepticism community added concerning Maher's anti-vax comments. "Tara Parker-Pope and former Senator Bill Frist have called his criticism of the H1N1 flu vaccinations unscientific. Infectious diseases expert Paul Offit has written that misinformation about vaccines from celebrities like Maher has put children at unnecessary risk. Offit says that celebrities like Maher are seen as "less credible" and would still be considered just "great entertainment" if they weren't joined by the former Director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Bernadine Healy and influential pediatrician, Dr. Robert Sears.  OncologistDavid Gorski has also criticized Maher's beliefs about vaccines several times in ScienceBlogs, and when Maher received the Richard Dawkins Award in 2009, Gorski wrote it was inappropriate. Skeptics, including mathematician and science writer Martin Gardner, neurologist Steven Novella, and magician Jamy Ian Swiss have also strongly rebuked Maher, characterizing him as anti-science, uninformed and potentially endangering the health of fans who take his "non-medical" advice.  Maher responded to the criticism, saying, "What I've read about what they think I'm saying is not what I've said. I'm not a germ theory denier. I believe vaccinations can work. Polio is a good example. Do I think in certain situations that inoculating Third World children against malaria or diphtheria, or whatever, is right? Of course. In a situation like that, the benefits outweigh costs. But to me living in Los Angeles? To get a flu shot? No.'"
Maher's Wikipedia page receives ~50K views a month

David Gorski- Brand New Page created - Oncologist and editor of Science Based Medicine Website - critic of alt-med and anti-vax. 

Scott Lilienfeld - Brand New Page created - Janyce Boynton

Dorit Reiss - (Brand New Page) - Monica Quijano - Immunization advocate focuses on legal issues concerning vaccination.

Measles - András G. Pintér - Before After (Pseudoscientific claims added - Stefan Lanka and the €100 000 to be payed)

Wendy Sue Swanson - editor Janyce Boynton - Brand New Page created Wendy Sue Swanson (born 1974) is a pediatrician, educator and author best known for her Seattle Mama Doc blog. As a doctor and a mother, Swanson advocates the use of online tools, such as blogs, Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites, to strengthen communication between healthcare providers and patients. Swanson asserts that online technologies can assist patients and families in becoming stewards of their own health. Swanson has dedicated her career to helping physicians learn to use online tools more effectively in helping patients make informed decisions based in science. "While we don't have the capability just yet," Swanson states, "my goal is to prove that an empowered and informed patient reduces health care costs and improves outcomes.

This Did You Know? Appeared on the front page of Wikipedia May 2, 2015


HUNGARIAN

Kanyaró (huwiki) - András G. Pintér - Before After (Hungarian Measles page. Antivax movement section and pseudoscience section added)

HLakos András - András G. Pintér - Brand new page (well known infectologist, MD, specializing in Lyme and other diseases spread by ticks, often debates anti-vax activists)

PORTUGUESE

Steven Novella - Nix Dorf - New Page Created

DUTCH

Steven Novella - Rian van Lierop - New Page Created

-----------------------------------------------------------
A lot remains to be done. We barely got a part of the way through all the ideas on our work list. Editors will continue to pluck away at the list, but we will be moving forward. Jan-June 2016 we will focus on a yet undecided area. If you have an opinion on the matter please contact us on our Facebook Page.

As usual if you would like to know more about the GSoW project, please check out our YouTube channel. There you will learn all about the project, what to expect when training and afterwards. This project is not for everyone, so please inform yourself before writing to us at GSoWteam@gmail.com

GSoW TAM13 Workshop flyer for editing class.

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This is the worksheet I handed out at the "Learn to edit like a GSoW editor and change the world Mwahahahaahhaha! workshop.

It is possible that the directions will make little sense without context. If you have questions please contact us at GSoWteam@gmail.com


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


To edit a Wikipedia page...
1) Click on the Edit tab at the TOP right of the page.
2) Make your change
3) Click Preview at the bottom of the edit screen and review your changes. If correct then put a reason for the edit in the “Edit Summary” box.
4) Click Save
5) Congratulate yourself!

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Adding a Hyperlink...

Add two brackets around the word/phrase/name like this...

[[James Randi]]

The words inside the brackets must match the Wikipedia page you want to hyperlink to exactly.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Often an editor wants to hyperlink to a Wikipedia page but wants other words to appear.

Examples...

You want the page to say... “One of his earliest reported experiences is that of seeing an evangelist using a version of the one-ahead.”

You want to explain what the “one-ahead” and “evangelist” is. So you want to make a hyperlink to those Wikipedia pages that will explain what those terms are. The Wikipedia page for “evangelist” is actually called “Evangelism” And the Wikipedia page for “one-ahead” is actually called “billet reading” But those words would not sound correct to the reader of your James Randi page.

One of his earliest reported experiences is that of seeing an [[Evangelism]] using a version of [[billet reading]].”

This is the correct way the edit will look once you are done.

One of his earliest reported experiences is that of seeing an [[Evangelism|evangelist]] using a version of the "[[billet reading|one-ahead]]"

Use the “bar symbol” in-between the words. The “bar symbol” is located below the backspace key. The left side is written exactly as the Wikipedia page you want to link to. The right side is what you want the reader to see.

Here are other examples of how this sentence could look...

According to [[James Randi|Randi]], one of [[Ray Hyman|Hyman]]'s earliest reported experiences is that of seeing an [[Evangelism|evangelist]] using a version of the "[[billet reading|one-ahead]]"


Lesson 2 – Adding a authorlink to a citation...

  1. Randi, James. "Teleportation Magic Established By Science, At Last!”. Swift (Blog). JREF. Retrieved January 19, 2011.
    You want to make the name James Randi hyperlink to his Wikipedia page.
First click on the “Edit” tab on the TOP right of the Wikipedia page.

Find the reference/citation that needs to have the authorlink added to. It probably will look something like this.

<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/1194-teleportation-magic-established-by-science-at-last.html |title=Teleportation Magic Established By Science, At Last! |last=Randi |first=James | work=Swift |publisher=JREF |type=Blog |accessdate=January 19, 2011}}</ref>

You will add this |Authorlink=James Randi|

You will add it right after the word “James” in the citation above. It will look like this when done correctly.

<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/1194-teleportation-magic-established-by-science-at-last.html |title=Teleportation Magic Established By Science, At Last! |last=Randi |first=James |Authorlink=James Randi| work=Swift |publisher=JREF |type=Blog |accessdate=January 19, 2011}}</ref>

Remember that you must write the authorlink exactly as the Wikipedia page you are linking to appears.



NOTES

How to Work with Disambiguation Pages and Redirects

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Greetings all! My name is Nathan, and I have the good fortune to be guest-posting today about Disambiguation and Redirect pages on Wikipedia.

Disambiguation Pages, Redirects, and Keeping it Simple

Wikipedia has a lot of articles. I mean a WHOLE lot. And when I say a WHOLE LOT, I really mean that it ha- ...okay, I get it, you get it. There are even algorithms to describe how many there are.

But did you know that each of those articles is supposed to have its own, unique one-of-a-kind identifier? As you might imagine, this leads to some potential overlap. Remember back in 4th grade math class, when you had three Johns? Our intrepid teacher, Ms. Hypatia, came up with a disambiguation solution. We suddenly had Jon B., John J. and John P.

If you were to ask Ms. Hypatia about "John," she would likely prompt you for further input. Did you want B (who also spells his first name differently), J, or P? This is exactly how Wikipedia handles overlapping identifiers, with a Disambiguation page.

I created this guide out of an example article the GSoW team recently worked on:

  • Sharon Hill is a geologist in Pennsylvania, as well as a science writer and speaker, who has constructively contributed to the advancement of scientific skepticism.
  • Sharon Hill is a borough in Pennsylvania, United States with a population around 5,500.

We had a problem. When we went to publish a new biographical article for Hill, the page for “Sharon Hill” already existed, and would auto-redirect users to the “Sharon Hill, Pennsylvania” article. We could (and did) publish under "Sharon A. Hill," but that auto-redirect page had the potential to frustrate a lot of potential seekers.

We needed to change that Redirect into a Disambiguation page.

Step One: Edit the Redirect

If you go to a Redirect page (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAGETITLE) without disabling the “redirect” function, you would see something similar to the figure below:


The "redirect" function has auto-forwarded us to another page. Altering the URL by adding "?redirect=no" prevents this from occurring (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAGETITLE?redirect=no):


Disabling the “redirect” function allows us the option to edit the Redirect page.

Step Two: Create the Disambiguation Page

We create a Disambiguation page with something similar to the following code:


'''Sharon Hill''' may refer to:

* [[Sharon Hill, Pennsylvania]], a borough in [[Delaware County, Pennsylvania|Delaware County]], [[Pennsylvania]], [[United States]].
* [[Sharon A. Hill]], a geologist, science writer and speaker.

{{disambig}}

Obviously, you'd want to replace the above wiki-code with your own example. Saving this page in place of the old Redirect article will present users with a choice, as can be seen on the current Sharon HillDisambiguation page.

Step Three: Clarify the Article(s)

In order to make it easier for users to identify which “Sharon Hill” they are reading about, and to make it easier for them to

{{about|TOPIC|TOPIC 2|ARTICLE (2)}}

In our case, using the following text...

{{about|Sharon A. Hill, the science writer and geologist|the city in the State of Pennsylvania|Sharon Hill, Pennsylvania}}

...results in:

This page is about Sharon A. Hill, science writer and geologist. For the borough in Pennsylvania, United States, see Sharon Hill, Pennsylvania.

being added to the header of the page. This makes it more obvious to the user which article they're viewing, and gives them the option to select the correct one if they've ended up in the wrong place.

In Conclusion

I hope this example has been helpful. Please keep in mind that not every situation is going to require the same handling. Sometimes Redirect pages will need to be replaced with Disambiguation pages. Sometimes not. You will need to adapt the steps in the above tutorial to meet your own requirements. If you are stuck, don't hesitate to ask another editor for help.

GSoW Rocks the Internet with Major Updates

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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 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 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 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
 


 










Happy 2nd Birthday GSoW! (and updates)

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How very exciting, we are turning TWO!  After the video read on for the latest updates.  







                                 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


New French editor Christophe Michel adds the James Alcock page to French Wikipedia, Christophe will also be interviewed as our French representative for Observatoire Zététique.  The OZ has agreed to support us with updates as the French team rolls them out.  

                                 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Portuguese Team scored our very first non-English DYK on the front page of Portuguese Wikipedia.  Unlike the English page which stays up only 8 hours, the Portuguese DYK remains for days.  So for a week or more in May 2013 Portuguese readers were treated to a photograph and DYK of our very own Neil deGrasse Tyson which they had translated in March.

Looking over the stats from that period you can see that the Tyson page was averaging about 100 views each day.  There are spikes of over 1,000 each day during the time he was featured as a DYK.  But as you can see, the views every day since the DYK are averaging about 300 views.  I'm not sure what the reason is, we released this page in March and it could be from a combination of things.  All we know is that his page views are over 3x's what it was receiving before our involvement.  A win for science!  

Even more interesting.  Look at the stats for Carl Sagan's Portuguese page for the same time period.  Averaging under 100 views each day, now it is averaging 500 a day since our involvement.  The same effect is happening (though smaller) on the Cosmos page.  





                               ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
CFI was kind enough to send me to lecture to the Portland CFI group in May, there I found 3 new editors.  One of which has just finished a re-write of the Rationalism page.  View the before page. Now the after.  Great work Joshua Filmer!


                               ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Leo Igwe was just given the high honor of receiving 3 new pages in one week.  GermanDutch and Russian.

                            


                                ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

English editor Bill Grieb re-wrote the page for Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy book.  Yes, even books can have their own Wikipedia page if they are noteworthy enough.  This is such a well written page, that others on our team will be using it as an example for other book pages they are currently working on.  So stay tuned.  


Before and After


As you know, we try to get our pages noticed outside the skeptical community.  So Bill managed to get the Bad Astronomy page on the front page of Wikipedia for 8 hours as a DYK.  Here are the stats during that period.  


When I knew that the DYK was going to appear, I wrote to Phil Plait to tell him.  To my surprise he wrote a blog about it for Slate Magazine.  That article gave us several new editors. Thanks Phil!  Here are the stats for the Plait WP page.





                                ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


English and Dutch editor Wim Vandernberghe has translated the English ADE 651 page into Dutch.    Maybe some governments will benefit from a good Google search before they invest in their next "bomb" detector.    




                                ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Josh Hunt (from Cleveland, OHIO Skeptics) took issue with the Gore Orphanage Wikipedia page.  As you look at the before page you will see how it was depicted as if this orphanage was really haunted. Many Ohio ghost-hunting groups venture out to the ruins of this orphanage to report back on all the "activity" they find.  Funny that, as Josh discovered that there was no such place called Gore Orphanage, only a Gore Orphanage road.  And even more odd, there was no Orphanage.  At least not one that had been burned down killing children.  Seems that this is all a urban legend once you look into the story, wonder how the ghost hunting groups explain this?  


Because Josh wanted a complete story, he and his wife went out to the site where this was supposed to have happened and photographed the marker.  Awesome job Josh.  After page



                               ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This page has been a long-awaited re-write.  As I've said before, I do not assign projects.  People choose something off the list or come up with something on their own.  Shane Vaughn for whatever reason selected Phillip Klass for a re-write, and I'm very pleased to show you the Before and now the After.   


                                                      ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I've had a few interviews since the last update.  Skepticality Podcast continues to allow me a few minutes each episode, and editors roll in after each one airs.  All of them long-time listeners to Skepticality, I'm told they have been wanting to get involved in a project that  can be done from home that makes a real difference in the world.  They all tell me they have found it with GSoW.  Thank you Derek Colanduno for your support.  

CFI and the JREF have been very supportive of this project, with publicity, retweets, and opportunities to lecture.  Thank you for supporting us.  

There are many other people to thank, including my vast group of Facebook friends who step up when I need something Photoshoped or advice about some bit of research.  The comments, retweets and shares really help our team succeed. 

If you look at our last update you will see that I have had many interviews and shout-outs the last few months.  Everyone has been so nice and supportive even though I tend to ramble.  Skeptical Connections Podcast is just starting out and allowing me a segment to talk about on-line activism as often as I want.  

So that is it for this update.  There are many more projects that are in varying stages of completeness.  We don't just churn these pages out, it can take weeks of research to re-write (or create) a page.  Add in the formatting and code associated with writing for Wikipedia, and you will see this is a very difficult chore we are taking on.  I don't want to scare away potential editors, we do train.  Everything is discussed throughout the process, positive feedback is given and nothing is released onto Wikipedia unless it has been reviewed by several editors.  I promise we won't allow you to blow up Wikipedia.  

I should mention that not every person on the team is involved in research.  We have people who support pages by copy-editing and photography.  Some people caption videos.  Some are involved in small edits that only take a few minutes to finish.  There is a lot of work to be done.   We are in this together, so please consider joining our team.  Friend me on Facebook and I'll get you started.  Lets Go!

Happy Birthday GSoW!

July Updates - Scott - Gorski - Tyson - Radford and MORE

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WoW July is only halfway done and we have so much to talk about.  Lots going on with the GSoW team.  So in no special order lets get started.

The beauty of having a world team like GSoW  is that we can't all be in the same place at the same time.  While many of my team were at the Amaz!ng Meeting - TAM 2013, others were busily at work editing.  Nix Dorf released the Eugenie Scott page in Portuguese.

Neil deGrasse Tyson just received two rewrites, one in Portuguese by Luis Pratas, here is the Portuguese before,  the other, by new editor Michael Steinkeller in German.  By the way Michael joined after watching the JREF workshop video.  If you haven't seen it yet, it is located here.  One more thing, Michael almost didn't join because he has two small children, but somehow he is managing to find a few minutes to work on this project, remember folks you set your own pace at GSoW.

Here was a major event.  You would think that David Gorski already would have a Wikipedia page wouldn't you?  Well someone attempted to create one, but left it in such embarrassing condition we had to jump in and do it right.  This is what we found.  Okay hold your breath and now look at what we created. Introducing the new and improved David Gorski Wikipedia page! Not sure why I always say "Strong enough to stand an elephant on it" but that phrase keeps coming to mind when I think of this page rewrite. Thankfully we released the page rewrite in time for TAM, Gorski's page views tripled during that weekend.

Sometimes it is the little things that give me that kapow feeling.  We managed to get Gorski mentioned on the Steve Jobs page.  Its kinda lost in the mass that is Jobs page, but still with the hit count it receives, it can't hurt. Searching for "Gorski" on the page, I learned that according to Gorski, the 9 month delay with the cancer treatment may not have killed Jobs, interesting.  Another thing I just learned is that even now in June 2013, Jobs is ranked number 70 in top Wikipedia views.

Ben Radford's book Tracking the Chupacabra was front page of Wikipedia as a DYK.  Follows of the GSoW project know what that means, a ton of views for the 8 hour window it is up. Well the results are in, here are the view stats.  The ripple effect caused the page for Chupacabra to also receive a spike. And the movie Species as well.

Bill Grieb rewrote the WP page for Ronald Bailey (before)(after)

Another rewrite for Bill Grieb was this one for the Merseyside Skeptics, what a difference (before)(after)

Fresh new photos I took at TAM have been added to these pages... Daniel Loxton, Harriet Hall, Derek Colanduno, Mark Edward, Donald Prothero and Massimo Polidoro.  This isn't difficult to do, if you have a photo that you think would improve a WP page, please contact me and I'll walk you thought the process.

A GSoW team member reminded me that we are responsible for a lot of quick edits on Wikipedia that are pretty cool.  We do a lot more than just page rewrites.

Braco the gazer got a lot of attention from editors trying to get the first sentence of the article just right.  You would be surprised at how much time we can spend on a single word when dealing with believers and other WP editors.

Here's a fun one,  my son mentioned that Jenny McCarthy was going to be on The View, which led me to getting all ranty on Facebook skeptics needing to do something.  People quickly began posting links to noteworthy articles about this announcement.  I in turn threw the links over to my GSoW team and Nathan Miller quickly responded by successfully adding a couple of the links.  Since then other WP editors (not on my team) have added a whole section under the criticism section.  You will notice that not only is Bill Nye mentioned, but so is Derek Bartholomaus's Body Count website.  And just in time, Jenny isn't as popular as Steve Jobs, but she is sure rolling in the views this last week.

TAM 2013 was awesome.  I'm still not completely recovered.  Here are a few videos I created while there.  This first one is a 3-parter on Crowd-Sourced Activism.  I spoke with Shane Greenup (Rbutr) and Tim Farley (What's the Harm?) and had a major blast.

Susan in the Superwoman pose at the Crowd-Sourcing Workshop


Later in the afternoon I participated in the Preserving Skeptic History workshop with some of my favorite people, Daniel Loxton, Ray Hyman, Tim Farley and Robert Sheaffer. Special guest appearance by Susan Blackmore.

Here is a series of shots I took of people whose pages we created or rewrote along with the WP page. Just for fun.
Tim Farley

Robert Sheaffer

Leo Igwe
Sean Faircloth
Richard Saunders
Sara Mayhew

Recording a Skepticality episode
Recording a Virtual Skeptics episode
 The surprise of all surprises was the wonderful comments from James Randi and DJ Grothe when they presented me with the JREF award for Skepticism in the Public Interest,  It reads "With gratitude for your steadfast advocacy for skepticism on the World Wide Web and at the grass roots."


Backstage with DJ and Randi
Just of few of the GSoW team

Its all about having fun and changing the world

As you can image, we have far more work to do than editors to do it. Please contact me at susangerbic.com if you have questions or would like to join the project.  For the last two years we have been working out of secret Facebook groups.  I'm happy to say we have outgrown Facebook.  In the next few weeks we will be moving to a custom built forum that will allow better communication between the language teams, as well as better training of new editors.  Just like the Facebook groups, the forum will be hidden away unless you have joined our team.

Thank you for your support, and I hope to hear from you soon.

Susan





Leah Remini - Scientology and Wikipedia Stats

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I've long maintained that Wikipedia stats are the purest way of judging popularity.  Nothing interferes. Wikipedia pages are just Wikipedia pages, no advertisements, no followers, no one is tweeting or posting to drive people to the page, its just an encyclopedia.

I've been watching psychic Wikipedia pages for a couple years now, and the top dog was Sylvia Browne.
John Edward replaced her eventually, only to be out viewed by The Long Island Medium, Theresa Caputo when she got her own show.  Fascinating data, and available to everyone for free at this website.  http://stats.grok.se

So I've been following The Underground Bunker, which is a blog by Tony Ortega.  He writes about Scientology.  Apparently there is this actress, Leah Remini who very recently left Scientology, and there has been a lot of fuss made, I guess she is a popular actress and considered a big defection.  Tony Ortega announced that Remini was interviewed on The Ellen show which is the first public appearance where she mentions leaving the church.   He wondered if maybe this show and all the other media surrounding her lately has increased the public's attention to Scientology?

You all know how to handle that question, and it does not involve getting Scientology to release its website views to us.

The media learned she left the church about the 8th of July, 2013.  She appeared on The Ellen show on Sept 9th.  So lets see what the numbers look like. (keep in mind that these numbers might be 24 hours off)

This shows the page views for Scientology from June 15th to Sept 12th.

This shows the page views for Remini from June 15th to Sept 12th.

Daily average for Scientology during these 90 days is 6,955.  Note there are several peaks (Scientology is in the news a lot) but the biggest peaks are on July 12th with 35,160 views and on Aug 9th with 23,940 views.

Daily average for Remini is 4,246.  The page has two peaks, July 12th, with 43,770 and on Aug 9th with 20,469 views.

On July 8th The Underground Bunker broke the story that Remini left the church, it took a few days for the news to trickle to the media, but that corresponds with the Wikipedia hits on July 12th.  The Ellen Show broadcast Sept 9th, and there is a spike on both pages.  10,326 views of Scientology on Sept 10th.

All Summed up:
What does this all mean?  The question is, did Remini's defection from the church increase the public's attention to Scientology.  Using just Wikipedia page views I can firmly state...

July 12, 2013 when the defection hit the news media, Scientology's page views went up 500% over normal. 28,000 more views.

August 9th the views jumped (on both pages) 345% on Scientology (17K more views) and 482% for Remini over normal.  I don't know what happened on this day, but both pages received a massive hit, so I can only assume that they are associated.

Sept 10th (Ellen Show) Scientology's views went up 67% over normal.  About 3,000 more views.

So to answer Ortega's question.  Yes, Remini's defection has increased exposure to the Scientology Wikipedia page.

To be clear, I have been watching the Scientology Wikipedia page for several years, and don't think I have ever contributed to the page.  This is because that page is very closely watched by editors very dedicated to it not being changed, it is considered done, and I have nothing to add.  A page that receives over 200K views every month is a very powerful page, every sentence is carefully written, and backed up with a citation.  To further see how editors decide what will be allowed on the page, visit the Scientology talk page.  (every Wikipedia page has a Talk page)

Behold the power of Wikipedia.

If you would like to join the GSoW team, we are nearly ready with our super-duper cool secret lair.  Several of my team, have created a forum that allows all languages to interact as well as socialize, train and mentor. We are going to be more organized and focused, you will be seeing and hearing more from this project over the next year. We have simply outgrown Facebook (as far as using for work) and will be moving in the next few weeks.  I will be making an announcement when it happens.  You can always contact us at GSoWteam@gmail.com

New GSoW Forum - Species - Tyson - Krauss - Scott - Cochrane

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The GSoW team is now officially moving from the cramped quarters of Facebook to a spacious custom designed forum.  This will really open up our teams to be able to train, mentor and move from language to language.  Expect to see a lot more from us as we work smarter.

The move of all the editors, files and creating help documents/videos have been keeping my "Away Team" busy for months. They wore their red shirts but we didn't lose a single person.  I want to give special thanks to several people who made this happen.  Our resident vampire, Nathan Miller, Chris Peterson, Bill Grieb, Leon Korteweg, Fred Green, Lei Pinter, Nix "Mini-me" Dorf, Ryan Harding, Zooterkin and Svetlana Bavykina.  But extra special thanks go to Walkiria "Paddling" Nubes and Julie Tominson for their relentless attention to the project.  

Dutch editor Emile Dingemans suggested we start a GSoW fan page on Facebook, and so we have.  It will work a bit like this blog, where you can follow and comment.  Here is the link to the Facebook Fan Page for GSoW, at the moment it appears to be full of photos of guerrillas, just our way of celebrating I guess. Of course the blog you are reading now is superior, as you can search for posts on specific topics of interest. Plus you will find a comment or three from Mabus the Internet troll for your reading pleasure.  I also know that there is at least one comment from the Amazing Randi himself on a post about his dear friend, Jerry Andrus.

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

Not everyone has been working on creating the forum, some remained editing Wikipedia as you will see. I should point out that GSoW is 
constantly editing on WP, small changes make a lot of difference, but to highlight all those changes would be too much to relate here.  I'm only highlighting the more glamorous changes with these our latest updates!  If you have questions or would like to join our team, please write to us at GSoWteam@gmail.com.

Nathan Miller updated the Wikipedia page for the film Species, and I'm sure you are asking yourself, how is that related to scientific skepticism?  Nathan wrote the Wikipedia page for Ben Radford's book "Tracking the Chupacabra", which explains how Radford believes the legend of the Chupacabra started.  Sorry to give away the conclusion but even knowing this, you will still find it a great read.  Just learning how poultry can appear to have all their blood drawn out of their bodies was worth the price of the book.   
Before and After   
The Dutch team seemed to develop a burst of energy this month. The Portuguese team better watch out, they might just loose the title of the most prolific non-English editors.

First up is Gok van Pascal,which in English is known as Pascal's Wager.  Leon Korteweg translated this using Dawkin's "The God Delusion".

Wim Vanderberghe translated the English page for Scotsman Archie Cochrane for Dutch readers.  Very interesting man and I'm glad Wim brought him to my attention, I'm sure you will agree.

Leon also translated the Neil deGrasse Tyson page into Dutch.  We are trying to get ready for the release of Cosmos in 2014 by getting all of the Wikipedia pages that are associated with the series, ready and waiting for the thousands of visitors that will be arriving..  We are making progress, English, Portuguese, German, and now Dutch are finished.

Leon decided that because Lawrence Krauss will be appearing with Richard Dawkins in The Unbelievers his WP page needed some work.  Consequentially Krauss will also be speaking in Amsterdam in October 2014 so even more important that the Dutch page be in great shape.  Look at the difference.   Here is the before link.  And now the after.

The Spanish team is slowing down this month, but still Nix Dorf managed to get another page translated. This time it was for Eugenie Scott, who just announced her retirement from the NCSE by the end of 2013.

That's all the updates I have for the moment.  There are a few that are only a couple days away from finishing, they will just have to wait as we want them completely done before launching them.

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

In case you have missed GSoW in the news, here are a few links to our more noteworthy shout-outs and interviews.

Two from Scot Bestows's blog Do You Think? This one features a conspiracy theory about the upcoming CFI Summit. Which BTW I've been asked to lecture at, so please try to make it.  His first blog on GSoW was one mainly about me being a Rational Hero for that week.

As usual every episode of Skepticality since January 2013 has had a podlet featuring GSoW.  And most of the Skeptical Connections podcasts have allowed me to record a segment, mostly I talk about how to get the skeptical message beyond the choir but please give them a listen, lots of great content from other people are in these episodes.

This was a blog by Robert Blaskiewicz which talked about what is being done RIGHT in the skeptical movement today and we were on that list.  Really cool.  Skeptical Humanities Blog

From a column I wrote for CFI about some of the pages we have written that concerns the history of scientific skepticism.

Ed Clint writing for the Richard Dawkins blog talks about how to get involved in skeptical activism.  Half the blog is given up to discussing GSoW, and the other half to another project I am active in, the Independent Investigative Group (IIG).

CFI asked me to lecture at their leadership conference this summer in New York.  Here are the videos of that lecture.

Janis Callister gave me a long interview allowing me to explain the GSoW project for the Just Skeptic's podcast.

The French language podcast Scepticisme Scientifique interviewed one of my French team members Christophe Michel about the GSoW project.

Sharon Hill's Doubtful News blog highlighted my JREF award from TAM 2013.

Our very own Chris Pederson was interviewed for Freethought Blog about her involvement with GSoW.

I was listed as one of the inspiring women at TAM 2013 on Ed Clint's blog.

Skeptoid Blog mentions the guest lecture given by Shane Greenup and GSoW Swedish team leader Philip Skogsberg at the European Skeptic Congress, held in Stockholm Sweden this August.  I was supported to be the one giving the lecture, but my oncologist would not allow me to travel from California to Sweden during this time.

Recorded at TAM 2013, I was a guest host for Virtual Skeptics podcast.

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

Upcoming events...

Wednesday October 9th, 2013 I will be lecturing for the Bay Area Skeptics in Berkeley, CA.  Here is more information.

October 24-27, 2013 find me at the CFISummit in Tacoma, WA.  Here is the website.

Saturday, Jan 18th, 2014 I will be lecturing for the Santa Barbara, CA Humanist Society.  (more info to follow)

Egg Balancing and more (lots more)

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Just so you know, all the conspiracy theories about GSoW you have been reading the last few months are true.  We are a bunch of mean skeptics that are doing everything we can to make sure every Wikipedia page is backed up with great noteworthy citations, proving all the claims made on the page.  Evidence rules!  We are always actively looking for more like-minded people to train in our guerrilla warfare.  I address the Rupert Sheldrake and Deepak Chopra drama near the bottom of this blog, as well as offer you a few videos, podcasts and blogs that have appeared about our project in the last month or so.

But before we get to all that nasty drama, I want you to see what we have really been doing with our time with a few of the more glamorous updates to Wikipedia.

One of my more devious editors, Nathan Miller just updated this page with an image.  I offer this as evidence of our nefarious conspiracy to improve Wikipedia.  EVIDENCE HERE  (insert evil laugh here while looking at this page)

From a brand new editor, CFI Fellow Andrew Skolnick's page was given a makeover.  Note: We are looking for a photo of Skolnick as well as a photo or two from his investigation with Ray Hyman of the Girl with the Normal eyes.  Before and After

From the Dutch team - Bart Ehrman's page received some improvements and updates on the English page first, then they translated it for Dutch readers.

UK Skeptic Chris French received a nice rewrite from the English team.  Before and After

Dan Ariely's page received a cleanup courtesy of our Lei Pinter.

You might want to sit down before looking at the before and after.  I met Eddie Tabash at CFI's Student Leadership conference in August.  When he learned that I am both a portrait photographer as well as a Wikipedia editor he asked if I could "someday" do something about the image on his WP page.  So I took him outside, snapped a couple shots and within 15 minutes he had a new image for his page.  That was that for a few months, but the page nagged at me, it badly needed a total re-write and I knew I would be seeing him in Oct at the CFI Summit.  So I put my nose to the grindstone and managed to get it re-written in time.   Before and After

Spontaneous Human Combustion was one of my biggest terrors as a child.  The idea that you could be walking down the street and suddenly burst into flames was horrifying.  I was told that even with STOP - DROP and ROLL you would not be able to put out the flames as they came from inside your body.  The thought still makes me shutter!  Why do we tell kids this kind of thing?  When I started editing WP this page was one of the first I visited and added a few citations from Ben Radford, Brian Dunning and Joe Nickell.  I also took out an entire section of examples of SHC that happened hundreds of years ago.  Regardless of all the edits I added and removed, this page needed more improvements, including a lot of organization.  This page has been a pet-peeve for Joe Nickell who tells everyone that it badly needs to be updated.  Just like with Tabash, I knew I would be seeing Nickell at the CFI Summit and wanted to surprise him with a newly rewritten page.  Editor Nathan Miller stepped up and pulled a few all-nighters (which is why we call him our vampire) and got it in shape just in time for the Summit.    Before and After   Guess how many people viewed the SHC page Nov 2013 before viewing this link.

Susan Blackmore received a makeover with a few new images, this page was improved by a member of GSoW along with the general WP editors.  Before and After

Burzynski Clinic page was updated with the FDA findings as well as the USA Today article. Then Portuguese editor Nix Dorf within a day came through with the newly created page translated into Portuguese.

Another brand new editor that found us from the Skeptic Zone podcast, Caitlin rewrote the Pet Psychic page.  Before and After  As you can see, sometimes this means that we remove most of the article, Caitlin removed dead links and unverified information, plus she cleaned up the grammar and made the article flow better.  In all she removed over 3,000 characters from the article.  We had a bit of a laugh during the discussions of this rewrite, I totally misunderstood what this page was about and kept suggesting that Caitlin look into Sheldrake and Wiseman's work with psychic dogs and not to forget Clever Hans and the investigation that the IIG did with Sparky the Wonder dog.  Finally someone explained that this is a WP page for PEOPLE who communicate with animals with their minds, not animals that communicate with people. Duh Susan.

This is our first news article.  Bill toiled over this page creation for quite some time.  Rose Marks and the family psychic fraud page is a bit different from a normal page, as it reads more as something that is updated as events unfold, and not something static.

Also from the Dutch team we see a rewrite of the Nederlandse Vereniging Kritisch Prikken  Dutch Association for Critical Shots page.  Apparently this is a anti-vac group formed by naturopaths.

Nix also finished improving the James Randi page in Portuguese.

Lei wanted to point out that we finally got a photo for the Vashti McCollum uploaded for her page. Thanks everyone that wrote to me giving suggestions on where to look.

****  The GSoW conspiracy  ****

The drama of Rupert Sheldrake and Deepak Chopra has almost been laughable.  Every morning for a few months I wondered "what is waiting for me in my inbox?" Would you believe that there are more than 20 anti-GSoW blogs that have been written in the last few months.  Three came from a skeptic blogger who thinks we are making her job talking to the paranormal community more difficult. She thinks we should be working with their community to write WP pages.  My response is ... we already do this, its called being a Wikipedia editor. We might write an article, but once it is live, then it no longer belongs to us and we are at the mercy of all editors, paranormal believers and not.

I was attacked by all sorts, an astrologer wanted me to debate him.  Others made fun of my hats (can you imagine!) Rupert's latest blog misspelled my name, Susan Gerbik, so much for his investigative skills.  Tim Farley and I discuss the drama and what led up to it on this episode of Skepticality  Jerry Coyne jumps into the fray and defends us in a series of blogs.  This is the first one.  Here is a blog by an astrologer (not sure if it was the same one that challenged me) This is the first in a series by a person who tried to edit Sheldrakes page, got into arguments with just about everyone and ended up storming off complaining about my team. The really funny thing is that this person only made one tiny edit to the Sheldrake page and accused us of having an agenda, this person has only ever edited on the Sheldrake talk page and no where else on WP. Looking over my notes, this appears to be the very first blog from from all this drama and it dates back to 2012, and just tonight I discover that this person has written a book about this mess and I'm in it (with my name spelled correctly, Sheldrake are you listening?).  Amazing!

Must mention that Tim Farley did an awesome write-up investigation of the whole drama on his blog here.  They of course never read this.  Eyes - Wide - Shut

The stories and drama I'm sure will continue.  My team has been very open about what we edit.  In fact every single WP editor's edit history is available with a couple clicks. Its easy to find out who edited what, when and even the time they edited.  But they didn't care about that evidence stuff.  The only thing important is the conspiracy.  Its everywhere you know.  Well just read back a few months through my blogs and you can see the giant conspiracy we have been involved in.

Other mentions in the media recently...

This is a nice article written about us in Swedish for a blog called Borje Peratt explorer.

GSoW has joined the Candle in the Dark team - apparently

This is a very sweet blog by my friend Kitty all about my hats.  Its got lots of pretty photos too

Skeptic Blog - Mark Edward writes about GSoW and the Sheldrake/Chopra drama.


Susan Gerbic wondering if they can balance an egg on my head






GSoW Year End

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I haven't done this before but thought before this becomes an overwhelming task I would release a list of articles GSoW has either rewritten or created from scratch.  Even though it has only been 2 and a half years, this took me several nights to put this list together.  I was pretty amazed to see everything in one place like this.  

Keep in mind GSoW is busy with all kinds of other edits as well as other support functions to train, mentor as well as keep the forum running.  These are just the more "glamorous" edits.
 

I'm so very proud of my people, these creations are no small task.  Keep watching through 2014, we have a lot planned.  Or better yet,  join the team.  GSoWteam@gmail.com


2011

Brian Dunning  - Before - After

Sean Faircloth - Before  - After

Jennifer McCreigh -  Before  -  After

Ben Radford  - Before  - After

James Underdown - New page

Playing Gods - Before - After


Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture - Before - After

William B Davis - Before - After




2012


Alison Gopnik - Before - After 

Sikivu Hutchinson - Before - After


Tom Flynn - Before - After


Robert Ingersoll Birthplace - Before - After


Kendrick Frazier - Before - After


Bryan & Baxter - New Page


Jennifer Ouellette - New Page


Tim Farley - New Page


Mary Roach - Before - After


Kiki Sanford - Before - After


Barry Beyerstein - Before - After


Jerry Andrus - Before - After

Jerry Andrus - Portuguese (our very first World page)
Jerry Andrus - Arabic
Jerry Andrus - Russian
Jerry Andrus - Spanish

James Alcock - Before - After


Loren Pankratz - New Page


Ray Hyman - Before - After


Skeptic's Toolbox - New Page


Penn & Teller - Portuguese - Before - After


Bob Carroll - French - Before - After

Bob Carroll - Dutch - New page

Nina Burleigh - Before - After


Indre Viskontas - New page


Bell Witch - Before - After


Vashti McCollum - Before - After


SkeptiCamp -  New Page


Reason Rally - Before - After 


The Steve Allen Theater - New Page



2013


Erich von Däniken - Portuguese - Before - After

Indigo Children - Portuguese - New page 


Power Balance - Portuguese - New page


Paul Kurtz - Russian - Before - After


Mark Boslough - Before - After


Stuart Firestein - New page


Danielle Egnew - Before - After


Sara Mayhew - New page


Kenneth Feder - Before - After


Paul Kurtz - Portuguese - Before - After


Martin Gardner - Portuguese - Before - After


Phil Plait - Portuguese - New page 


Jerry Andrus - Swedish - New page

Karl Shuker - Before - After


Point of Inquiry - Before - After


Our Lady of Warraq - Before - After


SkeptiCamp - Spanish - New Page


James Randi - Dutch - Before - After

James Randi - Portuguese - Before - After

Michael Shermer - Dutch - Before - After


Devraha Baba - Before - After


Leo Igwe - Before - After

Leo Igwe - German
Leo Igwe - Dutch
Leo Igwe - Russian


Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers - Before - After


Donald Prothero - New Page

Skeptical Inquirer Magazine - Portuguese - New Page

10:23 Campaign - Portuguese - New Page

Ruth Hurmence Green - Before - After

Skeptic's Guide to the Universe - Portuguese - New Page

One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge - New Page

Long Island Medium - Portuguese - New Page

Stan Romanek - New Page

Sharon Hill - New Page

Desiree Schell - Before - After

Deseret Travers (psychic) - Page Deleted for not being noteworthy

Skeptic Magazine - Portuguese - New Page

Jeff Peckman - New Page

Child's Healthcare is a Legal Duty (CHILD) - Before - After

James Alcock - French - New Page

Rationalism - Before - After

Bad Astronomy - Before - After

ADE - 651 - Dutch - New Page

Gore Orphanage - Before - After

Phillip Klass - Before - After

Eugenie Scott - Portuguese - New Page
Eugenie Scott - Spanish - New Page

Neil deGrausse Tyson - Portuguese - Before - After 
Neil deGrausse Tyson - German - New Page
Neil deGrausse Tyson - Dutch - New Page

David Gorski - Before - After

Tracking the Chupacabra - New Page

Ronald Bailey - Before - After

Merseyside Skeptics - Before - After

Pascal's Wager - Dutch - New Page

Archie Cochrane - Dutch - New Page

Lawerence Krauss - Dutch - Before - After

Andrew Skolnick - Before - After

Bart Ehrman - Dutch - New Page

Bart Ehrman - Before - After

Chris French - Before - After


Dan Ariely - Before - After


Eddie Tabash - Before - After


Spontaneous Human Combustion - Before - After


Susan Blackmore - Before - After


Burzynski Clinic - Portuguese - New Page


Pet Psychic - Before - After


Rose Marks - New Page


Dutch Association for Critical Shots - Dutch - New Page


Annie Laurie Gaylor -  Before & After 



















































































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