Conclusive Evidence That Wikipedia Is The Focus of Organized Ideological Editing By "Skeptic"/Atheists

While researching today, I came across the Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia  Blog.   Their mast head contains this statement:

The mission of the Guerrilla Skepticism editing team is to improve skeptical content on Wikipedia. We do this by providing noteworthy citations, and removing unsourced claims from paranormal pages. It is also our mission to improve the pages of our skeptic spokespeople. Why? Because evidence is cool. We train - We mentor - Join us.

Looking for evidence to test my suspicion that Wikipedia articles relevant to studying "Skepticism" and parapsychological science were being ideologically "edited", I found that those are exactly the kind of things that the "Guerrilla Skeptics" target

Tuesday, February 19, 2013


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


Phil Plait
Filipe Russo created a brand new page for our very own Bad Astronomer, Phil Plait. 


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.  

"SO TOTAL WIN FOR SKEPTICISM"

Wikipedia is supposed to be a reference source that is protected from exactly this kind of organized ideological corruption by its "open editing". Clearly, since the "Skeptics" are openly organizing to turn it into a resource for their ideology, there is a big problem. And this is only one possible effort. Who knows what's being done covertly? If Wikipedia doesn't do something to protect itself from ideologues then, as I said, it is unusable because it is unreliable.

If anyone wants to deny that's what the "Skeptics" are doing, they're not only doing it, they're bragging about doing it, stating their intentions to make Wikipedia into their ideological tool.

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

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

If Wikipedia is OK with being "the most important tool for "Skepticism" that exists today instead of an impartial reference resource, then it had better change its stated intentions or get used to being, increasingly, seen as unreliable.   I can only imagine what other ideological campaigns it is open to servicing.  As of today, it is known to be unreliable on these topics.

UPDATE:  Looking over more of their archive, It's not only Wikipedia that the "Skeptics" have targeted to make it their tool.   When I was using FireFox I installed the WOT extension, a program that evaluates the safety and reliability of websites.   I soon began to notice a lot of entirely innocuous websites got the red warning.   Well, that would be because "Skeptics" were turning it into their ideological tool as well.   From another "Skeptical" website.  


Web of Trust is a useful tool for skeptics

MARCH 24, 2011 BY TIM FARLEY


... What we need is a tireless skeptical robot, that would catch people right as they were about to buy one of these products and give them a good solid “dope slap” to the back of the head. That would be awesome.

Of course, the robot idea has the same flaw as our outreach efforts: how do you get a robot to everyone who needs it? The marketers of these products are everywhere and have lots of money to spend. We don’t have a budget, and robots are kind of expensive.

But suppose these imaginary skeptical robots had other purposes too? Then folks might seek them out on their own, and we wouldn’t have to pay for their development.
Well, at least for when people buy products via a web site, the appropriate robot already exists. It is called Web of Trust, and (like The Mad Skeptic, who scooped me on this) I think skeptics should be promoting it and helping create its crowdsourced ratings.

In this post I’ll show you how we can use it and I’ll give you a look at what WOT’s ratings of skeptic and believer web sites look like already...



How can skeptics use WOT?

We should be promoting WOT as a useful tool to avoid bad things on the internet, whenever we can. The more people using WOT, the more effect it will have.
But skeptics should also become users of the service ourselves, so we can help give appropriately negative scores to the sites that are selling products based on lies and misinformation. Be sure to create a login on the site to facilitate this.


Then, you can simply rate sites that you encounter that are skeptic relevant. Click the WOT toolbar icon to get the scoreboard for the site, and then choose Edit my rating. You can then click inside the red/yellow/green scales to assign your score on one or more of the four criteria.
Another feature of WOT is the ability to leave comments with the ratings. These comments should explain (clearly, simply, and without snark) why the product or website is fraudulent. Here’s an example on WOT’s rating page for the Power Balance website. It simply says the site is making untrue claims and links to a supporting BBC News story.

As you can see from the PowerBalance scorecard, WOT users have been all over this high-profile product. As another example, in the WOT Forums you can see one user sought out many of the different sites selling Jim Humble’s MMS and gave them negative ratings.


Farley focuses on products deemed to be of dodgy reliability but if anyone doesn't suspect that comes with a nod and a wink to target non-commercial sites for a red flag of warnings, you're clearly not being skeptical enough of the "Skeptics".   Which is why you might find websities dealing with parapsychological and other topics on the "Skeptics" Index of Prohibited Ideas red flagged by the "robot" they've hijacked.

He also has articles on how to "edit" Wikipedia.