So much work done and so much more to go. What a crazy two months it has been for GSoW. Personally I (Susan) will be on tour in Australia and Hong Kong for the month of October, we are finalizing the dates and locations. (see below for the dates I have so far).  I have ten lectures and one panel scheduled so far. Each one will be different, so if you are in the area, please come out and support GSoW.

As I write this, awesome things are happening. Four new people are finishing up their final projects and I think you will be amazed at the quality of their work (see Sept-Oct update). Most people who join GSoW have no editing skills and learn from the very beginning. Some struggle with the most basic edits, but with patience and mentoring, we get them through the process of learning the code and onto the exciting fun parts of the meat of the training.

Also keep in mind that below are mostly the big updates, the pages that have been re-created or brand new. There is a lot of work happening in small edits, a few sentences or a photo added that can really make a difference to a Wikipedia page. Those edits are too plentiful to include here on this blog, but we appreciate them all the same.

Please leave us comments (we LOVE feedback) and share this blog on your social media areas. We only exist because of our editors. And we only find these editors from our community. Help us reach out to those people who are a great fit for us.

Susan

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Skeptic Voice Audio additions (Thank you to Derek Colanduno from Skepticality Podcast who is asking his guests for audio and uploading it for us, if you have access to recording audio for us please be in touch and we will be happy to help you make it happen)

John Allen Paulos
Yvette Dantremont

Audio of skeptics


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English

Apostacon - Before& After - As can be seen, this was an extremely poorly written page that read more like an advertisement than an encyclopedic entry when Leon Korteweg stumbled upon it. One would almost call it a miracle that it was never deleted. After some research, it turned out that the 'Midwest Humanist Conference' is the name of an annual skeptical/atheist/freethough/humanist conference, since 2013 known as 'Apostacon', which did ring a bell. A thorough rewrite later, this article was touched by His Noodly Appendage, and included in the List of skeptical conferences, right on time for the next event on 18–20 September 2015.

Dean Cameron (2nd left). Susan Gerbic CC-BY-SA 4.0

Dean Cameron - Before& After - Susan Gerbic - I really enjoyed learning the tiny things like he rarely uses capital letters and that he became a musician because in 9th grade a girl asked him if he played an instrument and he lied and said he did, then spent the next 6 months learning to play the guitar.

Glasgow Skeptics CC-BY-SA 4.0

Glasgow Skeptics - Brand New Page - Leon Korteweg and Julie Tomlinson, reviewed by Janyce Boynton, aided by Ian Scott. It's one of the two great skeptical organisations in Scotland.

Humani (organisation) - Before& After - When discussing religion and creationism in Northern Ireland with fellow skeptical Wikipedian Rebecca O'Neill, Leon Korteweg decided to improve the page on the Humanist Association of Northern Ireland or Humani, one of the most prominent skeptics groups in the region. An infobox with logo (see below 'Humanist logos') was added, references provided and more info supplied.

Jonathan Tweet - Before & After - Susan Gerbic - Recently released the first book on evolution aimed at pre-schoolers called Grandmother Fish. Check it out, Xmas is coming and this is a great book for our little ones.

Jim Baggot. Susan Gerbic CC-BY-SA 4.0

Jim Baggott - Brand new page written by Susan Gerbic - He was lecturing at TAM13 this summer and I don't think I was able to say more than Hello to him, it is so crazy there. He did an interview for Skepticality, and Derek kindly recorded audio and uploaded it for us.

Kiki Sanford. Ryan Somma CC-BY-SA 2.0

Jon Palfreman - Brand New Page - Janyce Boynton decided to write this article about a documentary filmmaker known for his investigate and skeptical approach to audiovisually telling stories on various topics. The page was reviewed and corrected by Lauren Carr.

Kiki Sanford - Before& After - Jerod Lycett did many improvements on this excellent science's communicator's biography.

Michael Marshall. Greg Neilson CC-BY-SA 4.0

Michael Marshall (Marsh) - Brand New Page - Leon Korteweg documented the biography of arguably the most prolific skeptical activist in the UK. Marsh is probably best known as coordinator of the 10:23 Campaign, a frequently heard voice on podcasts, and speaker in many Skeptics in the Pub and conferences about bad PR. The article was proofread and corrected by Jelena Levin, Susan Gerbic, Svetlana Bavykina, Jerod Lycett and Janyce Boynton.

National Federation of Atheist, Humanist and Secular Student Societies (AHS) - Before& After - Leon Korteweg added an infobox and two photos.

Non-Prophet Week - Before & After - Leon Korteweg added a logo and photo, and improved referencing and grammar.

Dutch

Edinburgh Skeptics.

Charlie Charlie Challenge - Before & After - Update by Emile Dingemans: removing unsourced
claims, asking for sources for unsourced but plausible claims, rephrasing, reordering, new sourced info on the origins of the phenomenon.

Dry needling - Before & After - Small update by Emile Dingemans.

Edinburgh Skeptics - Brand New Page - Translated from English by Wim Vandenberghe and Leon Korteweg.

Glasgow Skeptics - Brand New Page. Translated from English by Leon Korteweg, who wrote the original as well (see above), reviewed by Raymond van Es and Coen de Bruijn.

Irish Skeptics Society.

Irish Skeptics Society - The Dutch Irish Skeptics Society page was successfully defended by Leon Korteweg and other non-GSoW Dutch Wikipedians after a nomination for deletion. The resulting discussion concluded there were enough reliable sources, the page was not promotional, and aside from two minor wording corrections that could have been regarded as POV, everything was kept. The English version of this article was also nominated for deletion, but kept for similar reasons without interference from guerrilla skeptics; enough other Wikipedians came to its defence.

Natuurlijk (natural) - Before & After - Minor update by Emile Dingemans: removing unsourced health claims that contained appeals to nature.

Orthomoleculaire behandelwijze (orthomolecular medicine) - Before & After. Emile Dingemans is engaged in an ongoing effort to make the article more evidence-based.

Tea tree oil. Stephanie (strph) CC-BY-SA 2.0

Theeboomolie (tea tree oil) - Before& After - Minor update by Emile Dingemans: adding an
infobox, removing inprobable unsourced health claims or asking for sources for unsourced but plausible claims, adding warnings about the dangers of this product that is praised as a kind of medicine in new age-like circles.

Wetenschappelijke consensus (scientific consensus) - Brand New Page. Translated from English by Emile Dingemans, reviewed and corrected by Leon Korteweg.

Commons

These contributions don't really fall in any language category, but it's important to note several audiovisual additions made recently to illustrate articles on several topics. These include:

Humanist logos - Leon Korteweg. After immersing himself in the European Young Humanist movement at their Summer Weekend in early August (see below), Leon discovered that many Humanist organisations had articles on many Wikipedias, but rarely did they contain their logos, which makes every organisation visually recognisable (at least, that's the goal). It turns out that many of those groups have logos – often featuring nothing 'complex' beyond the well-known Happy Human symbol – that don't meet the threshold of originality, and thus may be uploaded to Commons.
The category:Humanist organisations and several subcategories have been created and filled with existing and newly uploaded logos of humanist groups around the world.
Those with an English article, but a non-free logo, have been sorted and completed at the Category:Non-free logos of humanist organisations.

Podcast intros - Leon Korteweg - After the example given by the Oh No, Ross and Carrie! podcast, Leon decided to try and upload more podcast intros (usually about 30 seconds long), getting the necessary permission where needed. The really cool thing is that random Wikipedia readers can get an impression of what a podcast is like if they happen to stumble upon that page, which can arouse their interest to start listening.

A simple copyright statement on a website. We encourage you to imitate this, so that we can share your work on Wikipedia and thus make you famous!

We'd like to take this opportunity to say to anyone who runs a skeptical podcast: make your material available under a reusable Creative Commons license if you want people to find you! The Merseyside Skeptics Society has given a great example in this, as a result of which we can use all of their podcast stuff in their article, which is just awesome. This way Be Reasonable, InKredulous and Skeptics with a K now have an audible introduction (the latter in their own article as well). Besides them, Skepticality (Derek Colanduno) and The Reality Check (Pat Roach) have also been so courteous to upload their podcast intros for us, and ultimately themselves.

Derek Colanduno CC-BY-SA 4.0

Podcast logos - Leon Korteweg - Some logos of skeptical podcasts have been added as well. The free ones, together with photos of podcasters and the aforementioned intros are all included in the new Category:Skeptic podcasts, the remaining non-free logos, together with lots of non-free covers of skeptical books, have been grouped in the Category:Scientific skepticism media. Again, it would really help if you made your podcast's logo available to us either by uploading it yourself to Commons (properly licensed) or contacting us if you'd like to do so, but don't know how.

All of this should improve the visual presence of skepticism on Wikipedia.

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GSoW in the News

Leon lecturing about GSoW to European young humanists. Els Van Rossum.

European Young Humanist Summer Weekend

Leon Korteweg lectured about GSoW to a captive audience in Esbeek, the Netherlands. Aside from his regular explanation why skepticism on Wikipedia is important, and how the guerrilla skeptics make a change, he gave the attendees, young humanists from 12 different European countries, some practical tips on how to write a page about their own organisation, showing De Vrije Gedachte as an example.
There appeared to be unanimous agreement that this lecture was the most interesting of the entire weekend.
* Jonge humanisten op Europees zomerweekend, Humanistisch Verbond (NL)
* Workshops, Wasserschlachten und Guerilla-Skeptizismus bei Wikipedia, Diesseits, Humanistisches Verband Deutschlands (DE)

The Scathing Atheist - Susan Gerbic interview

Skeptoid guest article by Susan Gerbic

The Skeptic Zone - Richard Saunders interviews Susan Gerbic about the GSoW vaccine project.

Skeptical Inquirer Magazine - Vol 39 No 5 September/October 2015 - pgs 52-53 "Is Wikipedia a Conspiracy? Common Myths Explained" - Susan Gerbic (print version only)

Skepticality"Future Climate Thoughts" Susan Gerbic segment - "Assignment 6"

Skepticality"A Conservative Skeptic" Susan Gerbic segments -  "Interview with Raffaella" and "Vaccine Project Update"


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Sydney skeptics Saturday October 11th 2:00- 6:00 pm Strattons Hotel (more information coming)

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Brisbane Skepticamp on Friday October 16th 12-5pm (I'm not lecturing at this one, but will be attending, it should be the 100th SkeptiCamp ever and I encourage you all to attend) http://lanyrd.com/2015/ausskepcon-skepticamp/

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Then on to the main conference Oct 17-18 http://convention.brisbaneskeptics.org/


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Hong Kong Skeptics - Oct 21 - Oct 23 (dates and location not assigned yet, stay tuned)

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Newest Secret Cabal interview - Susan Gerbic interviews Italian editor Raffaella Vitali.

Hope you all enjoy this update, we work very hard to get this out to you in a timely manner. If you would like to know more about us, or have questions about joining GSoW please check out our  YouTube channel and watch some of the interviews we have with the editors. We want to make sure that you understand what this project is all about, make sure this is a good fit for both of us.  If you have done so and are interested in joining our team, please write to us at GSoWteam@gmail.com

Hello All

These are the notes from the GSoW lecture given on October 17, 2015. Here you will find the examples given on screen and even more goodies.  Enjoy and Share


Australian Skeptics - rewrite by Michelle Franklin - Before & After

Amanda Bauer - Greg Neilson - Brand New Page 

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

Rachael Dunlopnew page (with audio) written by new editor Sean Whitcomb. Rachael was also featured on the front page of English Wikipedia as a Did You Know... Here are the stat views during that day.

Maynard - Greg Neilson - Before& After


Franklin House (Launceston) page rewritten while at the Launceston Workshop - Before & After

Astronomical Society of New South Wales - new page created by Greg Neilson

Astronomical Society of Victoria - Greg Neilson

Launceston Skeptics brand new page created by Susan Gerbic

Northern Rivers Vaccination Supporters (Brand New Page) - This page was written by one of the new English editors, James Williams 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



Bart Bok - Greg Neilson - Before& After

Priscilla Fairfield Bok - Brand new page in Spanish by Monica Quijano

Maynard & Bart Bok

Audio of Skeptics Project- This audio is recorded, edited and uploaded for use on Wikipedia pages.

Recent interviews and mentions 

Skeptic Zone - Maynard interviews Susan Gerbic at the Sydney SitP 28:33

Reality Check Podcast - Interview with Susan Gerbic about GSoW

The Scathing Atheist - Susan Gerbic interview

Skeptoid guest article by Susan Gerbic

The Skeptic Zone - Richard Saunders interviews Susan Gerbic about the GSoW vaccine project.

Skeptical Inquirer Magazine - Vol 39 No 5 September/October 2015 - pgs 52-53 "Is Wikipedia a Conspiracy? Common Myths Explained" - Susan Gerbic (print version only)

Skepticality "Future Climate Thoughts" Susan Gerbic segment - "Assignment 6"

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.

The GSoW tour of Australia, Hong Kong and Dongguan, China is all over. What a blast meeting people, so many of you have been following the project and are big fans of the work we are doing. Thank you for your kind words and support. If you are interested, I have managed to upload lots of video and photos from that trip.  I lectured about GSoW to eight different skeptic groups and have several of these also uploaded.  

We at GSoW are working on some changes for 2016, as we are a all-volunteer group these things take time and will eventually get done, just as time permits.  We hope to roll out a new project soon  called Stat Badger and is made possible by friend of GSoW, Kyle Polich. If you are a fan of statistics you should check out his podcast Data Skeptic. 

Also coming January 2016 the GSoW focus is going to be on creating/rewriting Wikipedia pages for skeptical books. We have a list with over 500 listed on it, only about 10 percent have Wikipedia pages and of those 50 most pages aren't in good condition. We are aiming for GSoW to complete 100 Wikipedia pages, 20 to become Did You Know's.

We are also looking into making GSoW into a non-profit.  This will make it easier for us to receive donations that we can use for outreach. Our audience is the skeptical community, so we need to be present at conferences.  Travel and expenses related to conference attendance can get expensive. 

There are lots of awesomeness below for you to enjoy, please check out the before and afters. Share this blog and leave us comments.  And thank you for being here for us.

-Susan




Dutch Team
Stichting Skepsis updates. The Dutch skeptics foundation, Stichting Skepsis, has been revamping their website. Leon Korteweg checked and corrected whether URLs from Wikipedia to Skepsis.nl still worked. Some WP articles needed no update at all (yet), others just a better referencing format and/or a new URL here and there, and a few are in such a bad shape in general that he had to go and edit them properly. Although most link from the Dutch Wikipedia, some subjects are addressed on English                                                                       Wikipedia as well (see English Team).

Hello there Natural News visitors. Thank you so much for the publicity. Please feel free to engage with me in the comments. I'll be happy to answer any questions you might have. Keep polite and I will also.  Trolls please send your  messages telepathically and I'll respond in kind.

Keep in mind that Big Pharma, Big Government and my Mom will be watching and taking note of your ISP address and putting it on a list.

December 2015 I announced that GSoW was going to focus on Skeptic Books. We had big goals and worked off this Wikipedia list. This list was envisioned and written by GSoW and during the 6 months we focused on this Book Project we completely expanded this list of over 500 books. 

What happened is that GSoW went through a complete turnaround with its training, organization and leadership. It was a massive change that I called GSoW 3.14, because of this we lost our focus on the Skeptic Book Project. 

So I apologize to anyone out there that was expecting great skeptic book pages to be turning out every couple days. The fact is that it takes a very long time to write a Wikipedia page correctly and everyone on my team has busy lives and we are all volunteers after-all. 

Enough with the excuses, lets see what we did turn out. 

Several of these books were not done in the last 6 months, but in the last few years. I'm going to include them anyway as they were created by GSoW and well worth some extra attention from our community. 

Tracking the Chupacabra by Ben Radford was created by Nathan Miller in June 2013. 

I Sold my Soul on E-bayby Hemant Mehta re-written by Christine Daley Feb 2014

Bad Astronomyby Phil Plait was created also by Nathan Miller as well as Plait's other book Death From the Skies! 

God Sent Me: A Textbook Case on Evolution vs. Creationwas a Wikipedia page I wrote after reading a review of the book in a Skeptical Inquirer magazine. The book was written by Jeffery Selman. 

The Psychology of the Psychic written by David Marks was created by April Poff

Paranormality by Richard Wiseman I wrote March 2016

Psychic Blues written by Mark Edward received a brand new page by April Poff

Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmesby Maria Konnikova was written by Janyce Boynton

Flim-Flam!by James Randi was rewritten in August 2014

Mysterious New Mexico written by Ben Radford was written by April Poff

Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend written by Joshua Blu Buhs received a brand new Wikipedia page from Janyce Boynton


Far far less than was our intention. Yet, each of these pages are strong, well researched pages that our community can be proud of.

One more thing. What do the numbers look like? How many views have these Wikipedia pages received in the time that GSoW can say they took responsibility of the page?

This number is only a page view count, we can not know if these are unique visitors or how long the viewer stayed on the page. Just raw page views.

As of the writing of this blog on July 31, 2016 they have received

57,016 total views

4,387 in the last 30 days

975 in the last 7 days


Still quite an achievement.

If you would like to join our project, we would love to have you. Open up a Wikipedia account, friend me on Facebook so I can add you to the Secret Cabal and write to me at GSoWteam@gmail.com

Its been brought to my attention that the last post here on the blog was in January of 2017. That's entirely correct. Normally this is a sign of a dying group, that nothing is being done and there is nothing to report. I assure you that the opposite is true. GSoW has been so busy that reporting everything that is happening on this blog is just too much to keep up with. So I'm going to attempt to catch people up now.




The last blog post I posted that Stat Badger (see the blog before this one to explain) had hit an amazing number.

Eight million page views at that time was just surreal. How many other volunteer projects can say that? These were numbers from Wikipedia pages in all kinds of languages. So lets start off with where we are today. September 3rd, 2017  

This is a 67% increase in 7 months. We have added quite a few pages to Stat Badger in that time. We add about 15K page views a day, insane isn't that.  We have also seen a large spike in an unexpected place. The Stan Romanek Wikipedia page was written in early 2012 by GSoW. The page was a very very low viewed page with 75 page views a day. Then one day in July it hit over 42K. That was just one day. Since its creation in 2012 the page has been viewed 609,247 times.

Hello GSoW fans and detractors. Update from Susan
June 28, 2018

You might have been wondering what happened to GSoW as we rarely post updates here on Blogger. Well here is what happened. This site has become problematic to manage as the traffic shows that nearly all the hits are coming from spam sites. More than half the comments are also spam. I didn't want to turn off commenting completely in case someone really wanted to comment, but it's just frustrating.

So here is what is going on. We received the JREF award for 2017 and with that donation we have set ourselves up as a non-profit. To become a non-profit we had to have a Board, with by-laws and all kinds of fees and insurance and bank accounts, and investments and PO box and all kinds of things I would never have imagined. Thankfully we had a non-profit attorney deal with the majority of the nightmare paperwork pro bono. If we had been a church in the USA we would have had far less paperwork.

Our Board is working on filling out the rest of the paperwork, filing it and paying the fees. We will be a fully functioning non-profit by the end of 2018. We have our tax-ID # and do take donations.

We have also changed our name to About Time and have opened up a website (not dealing with Blogger anymore) which shows all the organizations that fall under About Time. One of which is the GSoW project. Check us out to see all the things we are working on.

If you want to become involved in science activism, please reach out to us, we may be able to help or at least associate with your work. And we are always looking for more people to join not only GSoW but some of the other things we have in the works.

We are mainly using the money to allow us to travel and speak at conferences, as well as at smaller groups. We hope to in the future offer conference scholarships and we still are working on various stings and other projects that require funding.

We will rarely update this Blogger account.

At the moment though GSoW has over 130 people from all over the world working to rewrite stubs, and create new Wikipedia pages mainly focused on science, scientific skepticism and the paranormal. We also add thousands of edits in tiny and large ways to Wikipedia.

We have just added our 654th Wikipedia page. We only count pages that we created completely (no stubs allowed) or pages where we turned a stub into a fully written Wikipedia page.

Those 654 pages are mostly English, but over 100 are non-English pages. We keep track of the pageviews for those 654 pages and just hit 28 million views. That's a lot of educating going on.

So please find our tour schedule and all kinds of information on our About Time website (if you want me to come speak to your group, just let me know. I often will go to a bigger conference and then stay a few days and hit the smaller groups within a 5 hour drive, this really keeps the expenses down)

We are also on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

We haven't gone away, we are growing, grow with us!

Susan