TobaccoTactics Wiki Stats Debunked - UPDATED with Awesomeness

[This post was originally published at 12:08 p.m. on Friday, 10 May 2013. It has been updated with further awesomeness and republished accordingly. See Updates 1 and 2 below.]

With all of the half-truths, distortions of fact, misdirection and flat-out lies that the tobacco control industry ejaculates on a hourly basis, sometimes the lies are so fantastical that the mind boggles.  I suppose we're used to it, or at least we expect it. Even so, you would think they would at least be clever enough to lie about something that no-one could ever prove false.  This is not the case it seems.

On the main page of the University of Bath's TobaccoTactics wiki, under the heading "Is TobaccoTactics.org meant for me?" and in sub-section "Visitor Statistics" is one such falsehood that can be proven false.  It reads:

Since it was launched in June 2012, the website has received 1.4 million hits, with over 800,000 pages served with a daily average of nearly 6,300 hits! These April 2013 statistics, along with positive feedback from users of the site, reflect its success and popularity.

Here's a screen-capped image, just to confirm the above:

Over 1 bazillion served! We would we lie to you? (Don't answer that.)

Really?  C'mon, pull the other one, ladies. 1.4 million hits from web viewers all over the world in 10 months' time is a huge number of hits for a brand new web site that doesn't have stolen images of nude celebs or Lolcats.  But the statistics the editors of TobaccoTactics have put on their main page do not seem to be true or accurate.  I know this because Tyler knows this the site's own statistics show an entirely different story.  Have a look:

Click to enlargify - see highlighted text

Those statistics shown above are screen-capped from the TobaccoTactics wiki statistics page on 9 May 2013. You can view the current stats here via this link.

The truth according to the wiki software, which is designed to keep track of this kind of stuff, is that the wiki has had only 409,826 views as of this writing.  That's a far cry from "1.4 million hits and 800,000 pages served."  And of those views, how many were generated by the wiki's editors and didn't come from outside of the University of Bath?

But it's worse than that.  Because apparently Anna Gilmore (the Queen of Junk Science) and Eveline Lubbers not only suck at lying, they might also suck at maths, too. The Visitor Statistics statement on the main page says they get "a daily average of nearly 6,300 hits."  OK, 6,300 is an average, a median, so some days the wiki would get less and some days more, but it's impossible for me to know what the highs are and lows are without having access to daily stat information.  We'll just have to go with their bullshit figure of 6,300.

So let's completely waste our time by doing some basic calculations.*

Let's put the date of the launch of the wiki at 1 June 2012 (it was actually around the 5th, 6th or 7th of June, I can't recall which day, but I'll give them a few extra days).

The statistics they gave were taken from 1 June 2012 to 30 April 2013, or eleven months, or 334 days.

1,400,000 divided by 334 =

4,192

But Eveline Lubbers wrote that the daily average was 6,300.  OK, let's calculate for that:

Let's multiply 334 by 6300.

We get  2,104,200 hits.

So the figure they gave is 1,400,000 hits, which is 704,200 hits fewer than the result calculated for an average of 6,300 hits daily.  Something isn't right.  I mean, sure it's possible that they they could have 20,000 hits in single day to come up with such a high average, but that possibility is extremely unlikely.

None of that matters, though.  Because the statistics page's View Statistics says they've only had 409,826 proper hits.  That's a difference of 990,174 hits, even after nine extra days have passed from the end of April.

The statistics page also says that "Views to non-existing pages and special pages are not included."  Is it possible that the special pages of the wiki, an area that few people would bother to look at or even knew existed, received a whopping 990,174 hits, more than twice the number of actual content page views?  Anything is possible in the fairy tale land of tobacco control, as we all know, but in this case probably not. The only possible explanations I can think of are spammers inundating the site with referral link spam all day long, or a few hundred web-crawlers (such as Google or Bing) indexing the entire site per day. Even those are beyond the realm of probability.  Another explanation is that the extra views are generated by the editors as they edit and upload files to the wiki.  If the latter is the case, it's incredibly disingenuous to count those as page hits on your main page. One last explanation I can think of is that maybe, just maybe, the statistics page is broken or was reset, but I think that is also unlikely.

So what do we know? We have 409,826 "proper" page views or all-time content page hits by 9 May 2013.  What's the real average?  Let's calculate from 1 June 2012 to 9 May 2013. That is 343 days.

409,826 divided by 343 =

1,195 (avg)

You know, 1200 hits average per day is not shabby. It's a decent figure. It's not huge; it's not tiny. It's a fair amount of hits for an anti-smoker hate site set up to attack bloggers and anybody that disagrees with the tobacco control industry. Sure, the wiki is not overwhelmingly popular by any stretch, but what anti-smoker site is? Regardless, why do they feel the need to state an average figure that is five times higher?  Why do they claim they have received almost 3.5 times more hits overall?

Well, maybe the answers to those last two questions is the tobacco control industry cannot help but make shit up to give the appearance of massive support. This is a public relations confidence trick. Tell people you have a huge fan base, and you hope that people will believe you are a force to be reckoned with. The truth, however, is that their support is marginal.

The truth is that we can never trust any person or organisation in the tobacco control industry. We certainly never trusted Anna Gilmore in the past, so no reason now to start trusting her or sidekick, Eveline Lubbers, either.

*If my maths are incorrect or if I missed something, please let me know in the comments so I can correct -- I had "indulged"with a few drinks last night whilst writing this post.

UPDATE (10 May 2013, 21:20) : I have just received a message that the TobaccoTactics wiki is updated with evidence of from their server logs or something. I haven't checked myself because I'm in the middle of something right now, but in the in interest of fairness I wanted to put a quick note on this post that they have responded. I will check later and certainly I will update this post further after I have looked at what they've posted. -- Jay

UPDATE 2 (11 May 2013, 00:20):  I have now had a chance to review Eveline's web statistics.  I thank Eveline Lubbers for having the courage to post them up.  I am pleased to say that my post above remains a more accurate picture of the traffic the TobaccoTactics wiki receives. I will explain below.

But first this very important message to Eveline Lubbers:

Look, Eveline. I don't know you, and I don't mean to be cruel, but you know absolutely fuck all about the Internet (using Google, Twitter and editing a wiki does not make you an expert) and you know even less about correctly interpreting web statistics. There must be hundreds of capable IT persons at the University of Bath.  I would strongly advise you to consult with any of them, and after that kindly update your wiki's main page accordingly. Or you could hire me.  My fee is twice the amount they are paying you. The upside to hiring me is that at least you know I would be honest and fair (if not a bit foul-mouthed at at times). The downside for me is that I'd have to spend time with the Tobacco Control Research Group and I cannot think of anything more horrible at present (excluding Karen -- she's a cutie). And if you think for one second that I enjoy writing about this shit, you're wrong. I'd rather be doing anything else, but there's no way in hell I'm going to sit back and let the tobacco control industry deceive everybody.  I certainly don't need to teach you how to analyse data. But hey, if you want a propaganda war, I will beat you at it every time -- I will "pwn" you.  I think you should stick to being an author or whatever you do best, and this gig with Anna, no matter how well paid it is for you, it is not for you. I hope we are very clear, Ms Lubbers. I'm sorry I have to tell you these things. You're ruining your reputation every day you work for the tobacco control industry. 

OK, so let's begin analysing the wiki traffic stats.  This is the image that Eveline posted up on the wiki to show their traffic:

Click to enlargify Source: TobaccoTactics

So I know that looks impressive -- 1,527,557 "hits" -- but hits are misleading until you understand what they really mean.  For now, let me highlight the only two important columns in your charts you need to concern yourself with to understand your "true traffic" stats.

The only data you should look at is "Visits"

See there?  The visits column is what you want.  And over the last eleven months you got 227,649 visits.  This is, unfortunately for the TobaccoTactics team, even worse that what the wiki statistics show and what I wrote above.  But here we have real data to look at and to do some maths on.  So I will.

The first thing to do in complete fairness, however, is to toss out the June stats, because I think the TobaccoTactics team didn't start their web traffic analysis until the last week or so of June, based on the stats.  June's stats appear to be very, very low.  So, as you do with statistics, we're eliminating them from the calculations (I'll add them back in later by assuming that the 2,345 is one week's worth of data). Likewise, I will exclude May's statistics, since we're only 10 or 11 days in, but will not add that in.

Here is a screen cap of my calculations based on the above data:

Jay's super awesome calculations in Excel

So from July 2012 to April 2013, you have had a total of 216,756 visits, with (and this is naughty, because averaging averages is absolutely rubbish maths, but the hell with it, the results are mostly identical for figures this small) an average of 713 visits per day during this time period.

That is respectable traffic. That is nothing to be ashamed about.

But I want to be fair. So I'm going to include June's data, and I'm going to have to adjust June's stats because the data provided above looks like an aberration. I will assume that the June data of 78 views and 2345 hits is only one week's worth of traffic. It could more, it could be less.  But I don't know, and neither do you, it seems.  So, I will multiply the Monthly visits by four, or 2,345 x 4 = 9,380.  I admit this seems a bit low, but... give me more and I'll fix it.  Here's an adjusted spreadsheet:

We should have left June out of the calculations

Right. The TobaccoTactics traffic is actually better off by excluding June altogether as you can see (and see how fair I am to you guys? I'm Mr Fairness. Definitely fair. So fair that ... eh, never mind).

If we count June, then we have an overall average of 677 visits daily and a total of 226,136 visits during those eleven months.  This isn't shabby either.  It's better than what I get on my blog -- granted, I haven't been posting much lately, but I digress.

So you're probably wondering why the crackers "hits" don't matter.  That's because one page view can generate 4, 5, 6, a dozen or more hits. Why? Because it does. It's a quirk of how the Internet works. But I don't want you to take my word as fact, so I've found this guy, whose job it is to analyse this stuff, to explain it to you:

Source: Elbel Consulting Services, LLC

See? I'm not making it up.  You might also want to read this page from that guy which explains how to interpret web stats much better than I ever could.

So, there you have it.  And now you know why we will never trust any research or data that comes out of the Tobacco Control Research Group at the University of Bath.  Because ... well, my friend Bucko The Moose put it most succinctly in his tweet this afternoon:

I favourited this tweet for its awesomeness.

Can you update your fucking wiki with the proper visitor stats now, please?  Thanks.

UPDATE 3 (11 May 2013 17:50): Grandad weighs in here with his post 9.2 million hits. Nice one.

UPDATE 4 (12 May 2013 18:12): Simon Clark of FOREST also wrote this piece called "Stats life – welcome to the fictional world of tobacco control."

Gross Negligence: Prof John Britton and Stephen Williams MP Should Resign

In this blog post, I aim to make the case that both Professor John Britton and Stephen Williams MP should resign due to both gentlemen evidently exhibiting gross negligence in the course of their duties.  Let's start at the very beginning.

If you haven't read the Hands Off Our Packs blog post by Angela Harbutt, titled FOI reveals arrogance of ASH, please do so now, as it will give you the necessary details of what I am about to cover. 

In the latest HOOPs blog post, we learn that a junior Research Fellow at The UK Centre for Tobacco Control Studies (UKCTCS) at the University of Birmingham sent an e-mail, to numerous unknown parties in tobacco control, that asked colleagues to wantonly cheat the plain packaging consultation by signing multiple charities' petitions in order to falsely inflate the numbers of those who support plain packs.

Who sent the morally-bereft e-mail asking others to sign multiple petitions is hardly the issue here.  No, what we need to concern ourselves with is the person who approved the e-mail to begin with. That man is Professor John Britton, of the University of Birmingham, who is one of the directors of UKCTCS as well as a board member of ASH UK.  

The FOI also reveals that Professor John Britton personally approved the e-mail that was sent to a unknown number of people.  If in fact he did not see one of his junior research fellows asking people to sign multiple plain packaging petitions, that is gross negligence. If, however, he did notice it and said nothing until someone pointed it out, that is also unforgivable and negligent.

The simple fact is this:  Professor John Britton failed to do his job properly. It matters not at all who sent the e-mail, which was seen by untold scores of tobacco controllers and public health workers, people who may or may not have signed multiple petitions as initially directed, believing it was sanctioned by UKCTCS. The only thing that matters is that Britton approved the e-mail the first time around, which was sent out and redistributed.

It is evident then that Professor John Britton, Director of UKCTCS, board member of ASH UK, is to blame for this atrocious breach of the public's trust.  For this reason, Professor Britton must step down from his roles with UKCTCS and ASH immediately.  If the anti-smoking movement is to have any legitimacy, any integrity, it cannot be whilst Britton is at the helm of any tobacco control-related matters.

Britton's resignation from UKCTCS and ASH would be mandatory, however, perhaps Britton should also retire from his role as an educator.  Whether this man has any business influencing the minds of our young adults is certainly a matter for debate, but we would expect Britton to do the right thing and remove himself in order to satiate the public's need for order and trust in Britain's finest educational institutions. We believe that Britton remaining at University of Birmingham as an educator dishonours every British citizen who believes in fair-play, integrity and responsibility as fundamental aspects of our educational systems.  For the sake of Britain's respectability, for the sake of its students past, present and future, Professor John Britton should step down and retire.

* * *

There is also the case of Stephen Williams MP to consider.  Stephen Williams, elected by the good and decent peoples of Bristol, to honourably hold the office of Minister of Parliament and to act on the people's behalf, shamelessly signed off a document created by ASH UK, the secretariat for the APPG on Smoking and Health, that falsely suggested the that Hands Off Our Packs Campaign was complicit in falsifying signatures for its petition against plain packaging.

The covering letter, dated 19 October 2012, signed by Stephen Williams MP

An excerpt of the article in the APPG on Smoking and Health winter bulletin.

To understand the scope of Stephen Williams's gross negligence, it is important to note several things.

First, the covering letter is dated 19 October 2012, signed by Williams and therefore this is a de facto endorsement of the contents of the enclosed bulletin.

Second, as Simon Clark notes in his blog post on this matter, he provided a response to the Department of Health's Andrew Black on 30 August 2012, in which it is written that the signature gatherer acted on his own accord, not at the behest of the Hands Off Our Packs campaign team.  Nearly 50 days had elapsed between Simon Clark's response to the Andrew Black and when Stephen Williams sent out the winter bulletin to members of Parliament.

Third, note the language in the bulletin.  It says "campaigners running a petition against plain packaging cheated to boost their results" in the opening paragraph.  This is untrue. We know that it was only one person. Using the word "campaigners" and displaying the Hands Off Our Pack logo next to the article deceptively implies that many or all of the people working for the Hands Off Our Packs campaign had falsified signatures to boost results. This is most untrue.


And this winter bulletin, signed off by Stephen Williams MP, was subsequently distributed to other MPs in a most false and deceptive ploy to tarnish the good names of hundreds of thousands of British citizens who signed the petition in good faith as well as the HOOPs campaign team

Did Stephen Williams MP seek out to verify the circumstances of the incident at any time over the preceding 50 days before the bulletin was distributed to ministers?  No, he did not. And whilst a young man took it upon himself to add two signatures to the petition, which is completely unacceptable, that is hardly of an order comparable to UKCTCS's actions, where a person knowingly and wilfully told others to falsify signatures on multiple petitions. At no time did Stephen Williams MP seek to understand or clarify the incident with the HOOPs campaign or FOREST before sending out the document to MPs.  Almost 50 days had passed, more than enough time to write the truth in the winter bulletin. It would seem, however, the Stephen Williams MP is not interested in facts or the truth.

Is this the behaviour we should expect from our MPs? To defame honest British citizens working on a campaign and to deliberately mislead fellow MPs?  I put to you that it is not. We should not stand for it, and we expect a much higher standard of those we elect into public office. This is scandalous behaviour.  For distributing the defamatory winter bulletin and endorsing its contents, Stephen Williams MP has disgraced and tarnished every member of the APPG and all of his fellow ministers in Parliament. He should at once apologise for his transgressions to all of the good citizens of Britain.  His only recourse at this time is to immediately and voluntarily resign from his role as the Chairman of the APPG on Smoking and Health.  If Stephen Williams MP had any integrity whatsoever, he would immediately resign as an MP as well. 

It is evident to us that both Professor John Britton and Stephen Williams MP have acted irresponsibly and with gross negligence. They have tarnished the reputations of their colleagues, perhaps irreparably.  We therefore ask both men to do the right and honourable acts of resigning from their positions of enormous influence on the good and decent citizens and young students of Britain.  To do anything less shames all of us and destroys the confidences we have held in our trusted public figures and esteemed educators for centuries.

Blackout

Ever since the plain packaging consultation began, there have been quite a few curious happenings at the Department of Health's Freedom of Information site.  In case you aren't aware of how the DH typically releases FOIs to the public, it works like this:

Once every three months, the DH quietly posts up a full disclosure log document listing the FOI requests that were received and released to interested parties over a given quarter, for example:  FOI releases to requests made from 1 January to 31 March 2012. 

It's not exactly a "full disclosure."  If you want to know what was released, you have to write to the DH and request copies of the correspondence relating to a particular FOI.  I don't know why they do it this way, but if I had to guess, I'd say it's to make it a lot more difficult for people to be aware of what's going on. How many people in the general public are going to take the time to write to the DH for a particular matter?  The answer is likely to be very few, and I would think that the DH counts on it. What the public doesn't know, and what the press won't tell you, won't hurt the government.  

Because it would be just as easy to dump all of the documents on the site -- to make them all available to all UK citizens at once when they release their disclosure log.  We know that the DH can do it.  They've done it recently.  For some "unknown" reason last September, the DH released all of the documents pertaining to this FOI request:  

FOI release – correspondence about the Government’s consultation on the packaging of tobacco products:

Click to enlargify

Obviously, somebody at the DH believed this particular FOI, as opposed to 1,647 FOIs released over the previous seven months (Jan 2012 - July 2012)  in the typical fashion, was in the greater public interest to provide all of the documents on their server. The question is not necessarily "who did it?" (we may never know the answer to that, but I can of course speculate wildly) but rather "why was this done this way?"  Whose purposes are best suited by publishing the FOI in this manner?  Because the documents released seem to indicate that one signature gatherer for the plain packs opposition was cheating, caught out by none other than the man responsible for the plain packaging public consultation, Mr Andrew Black.

Indeed, "filling in screeds of made up names," said Simon Chapman on Twitter on 20th June 2012, a time before anyone else in the general public had been made aware of Andrew Black's confrontation with a signature gatherer near Waterloo station.  How on earth did Chapman come to know this information? Who shared it with him? And just as important, why did someone in the DH share that knowledge with a man who lives in Sydney, Australia, or at least share it with someone else who later shared it with Chapman?  Again, we need to ask, whose purposes does it suit to do this? 

(And just another curious aside here:  the very first mention anywhere of the FOI release up on the DH's site was by Mr Collins, a volunteer ambassador for CRUK, a man who tirelessly campaigned for plain packaging. Do note, I'm not saying that Collins made the FOI request, but he certainly knew about it before most people. How? Maybe I ought to ask him...)

Another thing to pay careful attention to when noting the curiousness of this release is the length of time it took the DH to publish the data on their web site -- just a few short days over a month.  They sure did not waste any time -- it takes longer than that to post up the disclosure log for previous quarters.  To be fair to the DH's FOI office, they are incredibly efficient when responding to FOIs.  Here's a table of their performance for this year -- it's perfect, even in February when they received a massive 672 requests:

Source: https://www.wp.dh.gov.uk/transparency/files/2012/10/FOIperformancestatisticsJan2011todate.doc

Also in fairness to the DH, it also broke usual form again in posting up another FOI release from someone who had requested documents about the pro-plain packs campaigners, also in just over a month and some change, which was:  FOI release – correspondence about the Government’s consultation on the packaging of tobacco products:

Why they published this request is also a mystery, although we must assume they did it to placate the opposition to plain packaging, to avoid a scandal, perhaps.  "We published both sides' FOIs," they can claim. Regardless, we know that the DH can release the full contents of any FOI request when it suits them. But normally, they just release the disclosure log and (one assumes) quietly hope that nobody notices it and/or bothers to write in for the materials pertaining to any given request.

But what is missing from all of the FOI correspondence the DH has released to date is Simon Clark's response to Andrew Black in respect of the "screeds of made up names" by a lone signature gatherer for the Hands Off Our Packs campaign.  And we must ask the "why question" again.  Why has the DH not released that information?  

Well, we know it fell out of the time period of the first FOI request, so it cannot appear in that batch, obviously, but even so, the public deserves to have all of the information to hand about the plain packs consultation.  The DH has released two FOIs so far.  Surely, the answers to the first FOI are equally important?  Yes?  No?  Apparently not, because there is no more information to be gleaned from the DH's FOI site, and questions raised there remain unanswered. Publicly, at least.

And there is something else -- something that is most unusual and disturbing -- happening on the Department of Health's Freedom of Information page.  As I wrote above, they usually release three-months' worth of FOIs in their full disclosure log, all at one time. Yet all of a sudden -- well, let us have a look at what they've done recently by comparing it to how it used to be done:

Here is how FOIs are typically released on the DH's site.

And here is how they are doing it this month. Spot the difference!

Did you spot the difference? What's changed?  And what's missing?

Well, they've switched from releasing three months' worth of FOIs in one posting, to posting up the months individually.  And can somebody explain what happened to September's posting?  Why, that's curious. It's not there.  Where is September?  Why isn't September posted?

Better question:  What, exactly, is the DH hiding by not releasing the disclosure log for September 2012? Is there something in September's releases that damages the plain packs supporters?

OK, OK, OK, I know.  Let's not jump to conclusions. I gotcha. True, this is all circumstantial. Right?  We have no evidence of any deliberate attempt by the DH, a government body, funded by the taxpayer, to obfuscate the truth by withholding information from the general public. The DH may have a very good reason for not releasing September's disclosure log. Maybe they forgot.  It could happen.

But when you add up all of the circumstances that we already know to date -- that the DH clearly wants to implement plain packaging, and the early release of the plain packaging FOI request, and how Simon Chapman knew about the "screeds of made up names" well before anyone else on this side of the world ("screeds" is certainly a gross exaggeration, but then we come to expect nothing less from the Root of All Evil), and of course the sudden changes to how the DH is presenting their full disclosure logs, and ...

... it stinks.  Something is curiously amiss. Something is going on. I can feel it, balls to bones.

It certainly appears to me as though the DH is desperately trying to influence the opinions of the public and our ministers in Parliament by presenting a wholly-biased view of the facts and by withholding vital information about what happened during the consultation, to deliberately mislead them into believing that those who oppose plain packaging had cheated.  Appears that way to me. But I do not know.

There is, however, one man who certainly does know.  Andrew Black. We must ask our MPs to investigate whether a known tobacco control advocate has any businesses at all presiding over a public consultation that must remain unbiased and fair.  This is scandalous. Yes, scandalous.

And I would wager anything that Stephen Williams MP also knows what is going on, along with the other anti-smoking members of the APPG on Smoking and Health and ASH. But of course I have no proof of collusion, no proof of deliberate obfuscation, and no proof of corruption throughout the Department of Health. But I suspect there might indeed be something in September's FOI release that is going to hurt them. And I suspect that the reason why we aren't seeing it is because they don't want you to know what is happening. Because all things being equal, it is a clear lack of transparency to exclude the disclosure log from September, especially when we are expecting the report on the consultation any week now.

There are many unknowns at present. I would not be surprised if the DH tries to throw out the signatures gathered against plain packaging. It's a likely scenario as any. But if they do not throw out the signatures, then perhaps they will probably ignore the public's will and do what they like. That is equally likely. 

The game is afoot, except this is no game. This is very real for a great number of Britons. The livelihoods of real people, ordinary and hard-working citizens in Britain, are at stake here, and they will indeed by greatly harmed by plain packaging if the government goes against the public's will and proceeds to implement it.  

It's almost time we made our move and put an end to this rampant bullying against a significant percentage of the population.  So stay tuned for more details over the coming days.

UPDATE:  Rather timely, Simon Clark has just posted up his response to Andrew Black regarding the signature gatherer incident at Waterloo station.  You ready for this? The kid that Andrew Black confronted added two signatures!  Two! How the hell does two forged signatures constitute "filling in screeds of made-up names"?  It just proves that the people working in the tobacco control industry are deliberately and maliciously deceiving everyone. And this includes some of our elected representatives in Parliament, like Stephen Williams MP.  Do not trust these people! They are not telling the truth.

UPDATE 2:  Dick Puddlecote shine more light on the corrupt and deceptive practices of the APPG on Smoking and Health, and it's corker!  I really don't want to spoil it for you. ;)

UPDATE 3:  On 22 November 2012, the DH finally released the September 2012 FOI disclosure log.  I cannot be certain that this blog post had anything at all to do with that, but it's a nice thought.

Consumers Launch Tobacco Control Tactics Wiki

How angry have smokers become over being marginalised in debates that affect their lives, and by constantly being denigrated by the Tobacco Control Industry? Angry enough to start a wiki war?  You bet.  So today we see that unfunded, grass-roots consumers have launched their own wiki called Tobacco Control Tactics.

From the beginning of the press release:

No, The Debate is NOT Over. No, The Science is NOT Settled.

Adult consumers are fighting back against the actions of and the unfounded allegations made by the Tobacco Control Industry which are ruining lives, damaging health and trashing the economy.

Unfunded and unsupported grassroots members of consumer organisations across the world have cooperated in creating the Tobacco Control Tactics Wiki which challenges the claims and tactics used by the recently unveiled University of Bath’s Tobacco Tactics website.

This is an excellent response to UBath's wiki, which was partly funded by taxpayer money and from donations from so-called charities.  I would have liked to have contributed to TC Tactics wiki, but unfortunately I had to spend time doing other things and before I knew it the wiki was done. So I would really like to thank those people who devoted hours and hours and hours of their free time to make it possible.

Also for more background info you may wish to read Pat's take on it.