What are some good initiatives for skeptics to cross with?

Question

Let's put together some ideas on how our content can be used and cross-marketed with other initiatives.

StackExchange has put forward the idea that we do political fact checking by partnering with some popular politics site. While of course very interesting, I don't think there is anything that prevents us from trying to have the same kind of partnerships or cross-breeding with other sites and initiatives.

What are some good complementary sites or initiatives that we should contact to promote our site through cross-marketing and partnerships?

Answer 1

One possible initiative is LazyTruth. It's a GMail plugin that allows automatic fact checking and we could provide content, maybe?

Thanks to Oddthinking for the idea.

Answer 2

Rbutr - pronounced "rebutter"

rbutr is an application which allows people to follow inter-website debates and easily find counter arguments to pages they are viewing.

The idea is a plug-in that, when you visit a page that has been tagged, will link you to a page that provides a rebuttal to the arguments presented.

It seems natural that Skeptics.SE be the destination to many of these links.

[Hat Tip to @Tim-Farley who reviewed it.]

Answer 3

There are some interesting organisations in the UK that have roles that overlap with or are synergistic with the purposes of Skeptics.SE. One of my favourites is Straight Statistics.

They are merging with another fact checking group, FullFact whose role is to promote accuracy in public debate.

Both sites sometimes deal with exactly the same sorts of questions as Skeptics.SE (and I've even used some of their evidence in answers where they find it before I do).

There is also the BBC Radio 4 programme More or Less (jointly produced by the Open University) which applies skeptical analysis to widely quoted numbers.

Perhaps some cross fertilisation is possible? Perhaps some of the related organisations in other countries might also show some overlap?

Answer 4

Symphony of Science has been doing some great work by taking statements and documentaries featuring notable skeptics (Sagan, Myers, Plait, Russell, etc. etc.) and creating songs out of them.

While not directly applicable to us, it would be quite interesting to see if the author of SoS is interested in doing anything with our content.

Answer 5

Hypothes.is

Hypothes.is will be a distributed, open-source platform for the collaborative evaluation of information. It will enable sentence-level critique of written words combined with a sophisticated yet easy-to-use model of community peer-review. It will work as an overlay on top of any stable content, including news, blogs, scientific articles, books, terms of service, ballot initiatives, legislation and regulations, software code and more-without requiring participation of the underlying site.

This seems to be still in the planning stages (?), and the fit with Skeptics.SE doesn't seem quite as obvious as rbutr, but there may be opportunities here.

Answer 6

I'm a regular reader of Science-Based Medicine. From their site:

Science-Based Medicine is dedicated to evaluating medical treatments and products of interest to the public in a scientific light, and promoting the highest standards and traditions of science in health care. Online information about alternative medicine is overwhelmingly credulous and uncritical, and even mainstream media and some medical schools have bought into the hype and failed to ask the hard questions.