{"id":1264,"date":"2013-02-20T06:08:15","date_gmt":"2013-02-20T14:08:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/incredulous\/?p=1264"},"modified":"2013-02-20T06:08:15","modified_gmt":"2013-02-20T14:08:15","slug":"this-week-in-guerrilla-skepticism-ndt-kurtz-psychic-chicanery-and-more","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/incredulous\/2013\/02\/20\/this-week-in-guerrilla-skepticism-ndt-kurtz-psychic-chicanery-and-more\/","title":{"rendered":"This week in Guerrilla Skepticism: NDT, Kurtz, psychic chicanery and more"},"content":{"rendered":"

The skeptical activist project called Guerrilla Skepticism is one of the best such projects out there, period. I’m going to be covering its periodic updates to keep you posted about the fine work Susan Gerbic<\/a> and her volunteer editors are doing. Be sure to check out Gerbic’s SIN interview<\/a>\u00a0if you missed it and don’t know what this Guerrilla Skepticism stuff is all about.<\/p>\n

There are some great updates this week. I especially like some of the before & after links which give you an idea of how substantial the changes can be, even if you don’t speak\u00a0Portuguese. The Guerrilla Skepticism project needs more editors! Contact Susan<\/a> if you’d like to help.<\/p>\n

The following was originally posted at the Guerrilla Skepticism blog<\/a>\u00a0by Susan.\u2014Ed<\/p>\n

Martin Gardner,\u00a0 Paul Kurtz & Neil deGrasse Tyson<\/strong>
\nNix Dorf from the Portuguese team rewrote the Paul Kurtz page.\u00a0\u00a0Here is the before<\/a>… and now the\u00a0after<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0 And then got on to the Martin Gardner page (before<\/a>) & (after<\/a>) and with one hand tied behind his back he rewrote\u00a0Neil deGrasse Tyson<\/a>\u00a0 (before<\/a>) & (after<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Phil Plait\u00a0<\/strong>
\nLu\u00eds Pratas created a brand new page for\u00a0our very own Bad Astronomer, Phil Plait<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I want to add that Nathan Miller did the research in English for the Penny4NASA section (under “views”) on Tyson’s page.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Ken Feder<\/strong>
\nThe English Ken Feder page got a Did You Know?<\/em> (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.\u00a0\u00a0Only 1,190 for that night<\/a>.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 So total win for skepticism.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/div>\n

Jerry Andrus<\/strong>\u00a0– Now with it’s 8th language… English, Dutch, Portuguese, French, Farsi, Spanish, Russian\u00a0and now Swedish<\/a>!\u00a0 Way to go Philip Skogsberg and Wim Vandenberghe!\u00a0 Very proud of you both!<\/p>\n

Karl Shuker\u00a0<\/strong>
\nReceived a call-out from Blake Smith from MonsterTalk podcast asking if we might help out a cryptozoologist.\u00a0 His page had fallen into disrepair, even threats to have the page deleted.\u00a0 Editor Nathan Miller stepped in and cleaned it up.\u00a0\u00a0Before<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0After<\/a>.\u00a0 Nathan stated “This has been a gratifying effort.”<\/p>\n

Point of Inquiry<\/strong>
\nPoint of Inquiry is often used in our work as editors as a source for interviews.\u00a0 This page (Before<\/a>) had been on our to-do list for quite some time until new editor Ric Watts decided he wanted to take it on.\u00a0 And he sure did…. here is the after\u00a0Point of Inquiry.<\/a><\/p>\n

Our Lady of Warraq<\/strong>
\nBefore new editor\u00a0Wim Vandenberghe\u00a0joined the team he had been working on and off on this page for a apparition of the Virgin Mary in Egypt.\u00a0 (before<\/a>) He kept having problems getting his edits to stick, problems with other editors (believers) were mostly the problem.\u00a0 He heard about our project and with a little training and some teamwork this page is in far better condition.\u00a0 (after<\/a>)<\/p>\n

As you can see from the before and after, no mention in the lead about what the “apparition” probably was existed until after we did the re-write.<\/p>\n

Danielle Egnew<\/strong>
\nYou might remember from our last update that someone had added the name of Danielle Egnew to the Psychic page.\u00a0 Listing her as a “famous psychic”.\u00a0 I’ve never heard of her, but she has had an amazing career.\u00a0 Check out some of these claims:<\/p>\n

Danielle Egnew is recognized in the United States, Canada, Mexico, the\u00a0 United Kingdom, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand for her work in the\u00a0 spiritual and\u00a0metaphysical<\/a>\u00a0fields as a\u00a0Clairvoyant<\/a>\u00a0Channel<\/a>, Paranormal Investigator, and Healer. She is alleged to have successfully assisted law enforcement on\u00a0cold case<\/a>\u00a0profiles, as documented on TV pilot\u00a0Missing Peace.<\/a><\/p>\n

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<\/p>\n

Danielle Egnew currently owns and operates her own private metaphysical practice in the Los Angeles area.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

She has more credentials in music, theater and LGBT activism.\u00a0 I’m not concerned with those claims, just the psychic ones.\u00a0 So my editors Nathan Miller and (3-day old Chris Pederson) went to town sorting through the mess.\u00a0 First Nathan rewrote all of the citations so we could see where all the claims were coming from.\u00a0 He discovered that nearly every footnote that supported a psychic claim was coming from her own website.<\/p>\n

Chris did some research to make sure that there wasn’t a good secondary source for these claims elsewhere on the Internet. \u00a0I don’t mean to spoil the surprise, but there were none.\u00a0 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,\u00a0“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.”<\/p>\n

DING DING DING<\/p>\n

Exactly right.\u00a0 Wikipedia is not a place where you get to advertise, it is not a personal brag page.\u00a0 Wikipedia is where secondary sources (not your personal website) backs up claims.\u00a0 Wild claims like how you have solved missing person cases using only your psychic powers needs backing up.<\/p>\n

Here is the\u00a0before page<\/a>… and now the\u00a0after<\/a>.
\n—————————————-
\nAnd now the plea for help.\u00a0 We can not make these updates happen if we don’t have help.\u00a0 We need people to join with us to improve the 5th most popular Internet site in the world.\u00a0 Yes, this is a crazy idea, but it is totally doable.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

But we do need your help.\u00a0\u00a0 As I mentioned before, not just as editors but in all kinds of ways.\u00a0 We also need help getting our message beyond the people who are currently reading this.\u00a0 Do you have a blog\/podcast that you can feature an interview of us or highlight our updates?\u00a0 Can you tweet or post these on your own social network?\u00a0 Can you write to skeptical and\/or science media sources (and conferences) and encourage them to give us some time?\u00a0 Especially need people willing to work in other languages besides English, we train, we mentor and are really nice people also.
\nIf 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.<\/p>\n

If you want to become involved in the project.\u00a0 First read everything on the Guerrilla Skepticism blog<\/a> as far back as you can stand (working from the bottom up is probably the best way to do so).\u00a0 Then friend me on Facebook<\/a> and let me know what your interests are, what language(s) you want to work in and what kind of training you need. \u00a0The next thing you know, you will among a group of people that are happy to see you and will get you helping.<\/p>\n

Thank you<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-guerrilla-skepticism","category-skepticism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/incredulous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/incredulous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/incredulous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/incredulous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/incredulous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1264"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/incredulous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1264\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/incredulous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/incredulous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/incredulous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}