User:Sgerbic

opened account 27 April 2010

Conflict of interest statement
This was the finding of March 3, 2022 by the ArbCom committee. I'm stating that this is true and they have determined that I have a COI which I am clearly stating here.

2) Sgerbic is Susan Gerbic, an activist for scientific skepticism who has a focus on exposing people claiming to be mediums, and who is a columnist for the Skeptical Inquirer. She joined Wikipedia in 2010 and has not been previously sanctioned. Because of her work off-wiki, Sgerbic has a conflict of interest with respect to the people and organizations Gerbic is involved with, which notably includes her work in Skeptical Inquirer and the people she has written about therein, and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, where she has been awarded a fellowship and which publishes the Skeptical Inquirer.

Passed 12 to 0 at 04:47, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

The effort
... to ban GSoW and I from Wikipedia by FRINGE characters, often using non-FRINGE enablers.


 * My side of the issue from the stressful months that I and GSoW were under attack here on Wikipedia.


 * Behold the Power of Wikipedia - Skeptical Inquirer


 * Explaining Jan/Feb 2024 drama.


 * FYI - A collection of screenshots from Jan-April 2024 directed at GSoW and Susan Gerbic - with additional claims about other Wikipedia editors. Threats of lawsuits, petition to remove GSoW and others from Wikipedia, vile comments mostly towards me being female calling me ugly, old and a cu@t and more. These screenshots are almost all from the UFO/UAP community. They have been very clear that in April 2024 they would be escalating their "research" and would make our lives editing Wikipedia uncomfortable and are hoping for bans. It is only a matter of time that these "researchers" will petition Wikipedia admins with their "evidence" of wrongdoing that of course will NOT be shown to the accused. These are a small percentage of the cr@p I receive. Don't look at all if you can't look at this entire document to understand what it is like. When I went though the ARBcom trial in 2022 I stressed many times that "outing" members of GSoW was only going to bring attacks outside of Wikipedia on us. That was ignored and I was hand-waved and poo-pooed. Recently an anti-vaxxer has been stalking one of our team in real life because he had the nerve to edit a Wikipedia article and remove the non-reliable sources that had been added. There are hours of videos from the FRINGE community in the last few months attacking GSoW, myself and other non-GSoW editors ... what do all these detractors have in common? #1 They don't like that we are editing Wikipedia about topics they support #2 They are spreading conspiracy theories and dehumanizing us which allows some of their unwell supporters to escalate. #3 They are all male. - Do we want a safe Wikipedia, where editors are supported? Think about that.

FLotGSoWSC
Congratulations to the GSoW project! On March 16, 2022 we uploaded our 2,000th completed Wikipedia page. I'm so proud of this team - we uploaded our first page on 2010-04-26 - almost 12 years ago, and we are still at it, in fact we are growing stronger all the time. As you know - we never ever write stubs - so the pages we count in that 2,000 are full completed brand new pages OR a page that was a stub and we rewrote into a full page. Just look at this number of page views. It seemed like just a couple months ago we celebrated 100 million page views, and already we are at 110 million page views. Remember the GSoW works in many languages (45% of all the work we complete are in languages other than English) And remember that we focus on all people and topics that fall under the skepticism, pseudoscience or science umbrella - that is a wide net. I would call this a wonderful success, thank you to all who have helped make this possible.Sgerbic (talk) 06:42, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

Hey, why is Wikipedia so biased?
See here for the official WP guidance on bias and POV issues. Also, here is: the Arbitration Committee Decisions on Pseudoscience.

The founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, once said the following. (This was borrowed from editor Roxy the dog):
 * "Wikipedia’s policies around this kind of thing are exactly spot-on and correct. If you can get your work published in respectable scientific journals – that is to say, if you can produce evidence through replicable scientific experiments, then Wikipedia will cover it appropriately."


 * "What we won’t do is pretend that the work of lunatic charlatans is the equivalent of 'true scientific discourse'. It isn’t."

So yes, we are biased towards science and biased against pseudoscience.

We are biased towards astronomy, and biased against astrology.

We are biased towards chemistry, and biased against alchemy.

We are biased towards mathematics, and biased against numerology.

We are biased towards cargo planes, and biased against cargo cults.

We are biased towards crops, and biased against crop circles.

We are biased towards venipuncture, and biased against acupuncture.

We are biased towards water treatment, and biased against magnetic water treatment.

We are biased towards electromagnetic fields, and biased against microlepton fields.

We are biased towards evolution, and biased against creationism.

We are biased towards medical treatments that have been shown to be effective in double-blind clinical trials, and biased against medical treatments that are based upon preying on the gullible.

We are biased towards astronauts, and biased against ancient astronauts.

We are biased towards psychology, and biased against phrenology.

We are biased towards Mendelian inheritance, and biased against Lysenkoism.

Jimmy Wales - Lunatic charlatans article

Reference

 * Here is the plain and simple conflict of interest guide (COI)


 * WikiProjects


 * Principles

Citation #4 - how to cite Newspapers.com when the page continues to another page. this is much neater than I had been doing


 * Edit count


 * Essay with great tips for creating new BLP articles


 * Wikipedia:Everything you need to know article

Committed identity
Looking for a citation template to use? You might find it here.

to make live)