Talk:Hospitalized cases in the vaping lung illness outbreak

Non free content

​ The "Hospital girl" image was removed from an article before as it is not compliant with copyright policy and is a flagrant appeal to emotion - Why has it reappeared? Mfernflower (talk) 20:43, 25 October 2019 (UTC)

Ughhh

While I will not edit anything pertaining to this topic as per WP:DISENGAGE I still think this article appeals to emotion too much (and relies on news media sensationalism) and thus is not the subjective content that Wikipedia requires! Mfernflower (talk) 19:58, 11 November 2019 (UTC)

NPOV issues

The intro currently uses breathless language and vague but frightening language that makes it sound like a significant portion of the population, or of vapers, are dying. There are a relatively small number of deaths, so this is (presumably unintentionally) misleading, but along with the "just say no" advice gives the impression this is an anti-vaping essay. -- Beland (talk) 19:18, 7 January 2020 (UTC)

I've fixed this by trimming the intro down to a simple statement that this is a list, and leaving all context to the main article on the outbreak. -- Beland (talk) 14:07, 10 January 2020 (UTC)

@QuackGuru: I see you've restored the longer version of the text, which I consider non-neutral, as part of a larger revert. Was this intentional? If so, could you explain why you prefer this version, rather than leaving background to 2019–2020 vaping lung illness outbreak? -- Beland (talk) 05:02, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

The content is neutral and verifiable. There is no exaggerated claims. It is a good introduction to the topic. For example, see "Lawsuits over respiratory lung injuries purportedly resulting from vaping extend from California to Florida.[4] Teenagers who were admitted to the hospital due to vaping-induced lung illnesses are sharing their stories and telling others to quit vaping.[5] People are being admitted to the hospital and are being placed in a medically induced coma.[6]" No claim fails verification. QuackGuru (talk) 21:12, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

"People are being admitted to the hospital" sounds exaggerated to me by being vague. It sounds like that could be millions, but in fact it's only two or three thousand. Why does it specifically mention teenagers? It sounds more alarmist. It also makes it sound like every single teenager who was hospitalized has shared a story and is now anti-vaping, which is almost certainly not true. This sentence sounds like it's telling medical practitioners what to do: "The CDC states that advising persons to discontinue use of e-cigarette, or vaping, products should be an integral part of the care approach during an inpatient admission and should be re-emphasized during outpatient follow-up." There's actually a big controversy over whether or not encouraging smokers who can't quit to switch to vaping will improve health outcomes, and this seems rather one-sided. Also, there is now much more specific guidance about which vaping products are dangerous, and new regulations have been passed in some jurisdictions so that legally obtained products shouldn't cause this sort of injury. Can you point to any part of the intro that explains any pro-vaping perspective? -- Beland (talk) 02:22, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

See "People across the US have been hospitalized as a result of vaping, with a total of 2,711 hospitalized cases or deaths have been reported to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and two US territories (Puerto Rico and US Virgin Islands).[1]" Now it is more detailed. It is a pro-vaping perspective that there were less than 3,000 cases. Way more people have died in a year from smoking obviously. It specifically mentions teenagers because that is a summary of the body. Most people telling stories are teenagers which is true. Legally obtained vaping products should not cause this sort of injury but it is causing injuries. Legal vapes has caused a death. CDC has recommended people to quit vaping or they could end up back in the hospital. That's not on-sided. That is common sense. What caused the problem should not be repeated. QuackGuru (talk) 12:52, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

The Oregon death you cite is from September; wasn't that before any jurisdictions had banned vitamin E? "Teenagers are" implies it's only teenagers, not mostly. The CDC is not currently recommending that everyone quit vaping; the advice is now to avoid vaping products that contain Vitamin E or THC or are obtained informally; that non-smokers and especially pregnant women and youth should avoid vaping (though not necessarily because of this outbreak); and that people should not switch from vaping to smoking. -- Beland (talk) 14:15, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

I don't know if vitamin E has been banned. The CDC and the FDA is recommending to everyone to avoid vaping: "The CDC and the US FDA recommend that people not use THC-containing e-cigarette, or vaping, products, particularly from informal sources like friends, family, or in-person or online dealers.[1] Adults using nicotine-containing e-cigarettes or vaping products as an alternative to cigarettes should not go back to smoking.[1]" "Teenagers are" does not imply it was only teenagers. Content about smoking has been added. QuackGuru (talk) 15:06, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

If it's not only teenagers, then why isn't anyone else mentioned? Otherwise it is not an accurate summary. The larger question though, is why the intro says in the first place that people are sharing their stories and urging people not to vape. It sounds like a line from an anti-vaping public service announcement, which undermines the neutrality of the article. -- Beland (talk) 17:20, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

The source does not mention adults. That's why adults are not mentioned. If anyone finds a source for people other than teenagers then anyone can add it. The intro says that people are sharing their stories and urging people not to vape is a summary of the body. It is a neutral and true, which exemplifies the neutrality of the article. QuackGuru (talk) 17:31, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

The referenced cases in the article include patients who have shared stories with the press with ages reported as 21, 18, 35, 20, 19, 52, 45, 18, 18, 15, 16, 22, 21, 15, 16, 17, and 15. Seven of those are above 19 and thus are not teenagers, so the intro does not accurately summarize the body. The Buzzfeed story only mentions teens because the story author specifically decided to profile teenagers as a specific angle on the outbreak. It is by no means a representative sample, and it is misleading to present it as the whole picture, especially since it's contradicted by the body. -- Beland (talk) 18:00, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

A source for other people has not been presented. The lede can be expanded but a source should be presented. QuackGuru (talk) 18:10, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

The cases for non-teenagers are referenced in the body. My preferred solution would be to simply remove this sentence from the intro. -- Beland (talk) 18:13, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

I found a source and added balance to the lede. QuackGuru (talk) 18:46, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

I consolidated the two sentences you had into a single sentence for brevity. Why is it necessary to say that both teenagers and other people have shared stories about vaping-related illness, and why is it necessary to take two sentences to do so where we could say "teenagers and other people" if a distinction is absolutely necessary? -- Beland (talk) 23:02, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

Those were entirely two different statements making two distinct claims. Combining them resulting in failed verification content. QuackGuru (talk) 23:16, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

Both of the cited sources support the consolidated claim "Some patients are sharing stories of hospitalizations and life-threatening symptoms.", don't they? -- Beland (talk) 23:30, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

Combining different claims to come to a conclusion that it was "some" is a SYN violation. Both sources don't support the same claim. QuackGuru (talk) 23:42, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

That would be true if different claims were combined to say something that neither source said. But I think in this case I combined claims to make one claim that both sources support. By my reading, both articles describe patients who have had hospitalizations and life-threatening symptoms. Is there one of those sources you saying doesn't support all or part of that claim? -- Beland (talk) 23:56, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

BuzzFeed News verifies teenagers and telling others to quit vaping. The other does not verify that claim. No source verifies "some" patients. QuackGuru (talk) 00:00, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

Are you saying that the teenagers profiled in the Buzzfeed article do not represent some of the patients hospitalized with this illness? -- Beland (talk) 00:09, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

No indivual source supports the proposed change. Buzzfeed News do not "verify" it was some of the patients hospitalized with this illness. QuackGuru (talk) 00:13, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

It reads in part: "Ammirata and other young people who have been hospitalized with injuries they believe were caused by the use of e-cigarettes are using social media to warn their peers about the dangers of vaping and inspiring them to quit." Are you arguing it's possible that these three teenagers are all of the patients hospitalized with this illness? -- Beland (talk) 00:28, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

None of the sources presented verifies the word "some". It is about verifiability not truth. I am arguing we don't conduct our own review of the presented sources and come to a conclusion not found in any source. BuzzFeed News also verifies that they are telling others to quit vaping. QuackGuru (talk) 00:47, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

If you want to be that strict, the Buzzfeed article verifies that at least three teenagers shared stories about the dangers of vaping; it does not say they are "telling others" to quit, only that some people have been "inspired" or "helped" to quit after hearing their stories. It does not verify that "teenagers" in general sense are doing this, since that claim could include all teenagers, whether or not they have been hospitalized (the current claim doesn't specify that the teenagers who are sharing stories were the same ones who were hospitalized). It also means that the other source does not verify "People who had life-threatening symptoms"; it only verifies that 9 people did so, and the claim includes the possibility that all people who had life-threatening symptoms did so. -- Beland (talk) 00:58, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

Both sentences are now closer to each source. See "Ammirata and other young people who have been hospitalized with injuries they believe were caused by the use of e-cigarettes are using social media to warn their peers about the dangers of vaping and inspiring them to quit."[1] QuackGuru (talk) 01:21, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

Very strictly speaking, the claim that "Nine people who had life-threatening symptoms are telling their stories" is contradicted by the fact that there are 15 such stories in this article. Why don't we just drop this sentence from the intro? It is not adding any information - the important fact is that some people have been hospitalized with life-threatening injuries caused by vaping, which is obvious from the statistics in the first paragraph. If you think the cases are important to talk about in detail, then why not simply discuss the cases rather than say that some people have shared information about their cases? Especially if you're worried about the short amount of time some people spend reading Wikipedia articles? -- Beland (talk) 01:31, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

For that matter, why not just have an unreferenced summary of the contents of the article here (in particular the list of cases), as is usually done on Wikipedia articles? It's allowed by MOS:LEADCITE for uncontroversial content, which a summary of well-referenced details presented later in the article usually is. -- Beland (talk) 01:42, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

I moved it to the body. Unsourced content in the lede not supported by any source is strictly forbidden. QuackGuru (talk) 01:47, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

I would not characterize unsourced content as "strictly forbidden", though for many claims it is indeed needed. MOS:CITELEDE says in part: "information in the lead section of non-controversial subjects is less likely to be challenged and less likely to require a source; there is not, however, an exception to citation requirements specific to leads. The necessity for citations in a lead should be determined on a case-by-case basis by editorial consensus.". -- Beland (talk) 02:10, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

Vaping among teenagers

Returning to NPOV issues in the intro, "Chance Ammirata and other teenagers are sharing stories of hospitalizations and inspiring other teenagers to quit vaping" sounds preachy to me. It implies that once readers continue below to the details of these cases, they should come to the conclusion that vaping should be avoided, since that is the only conclusion being mentioned. In fact, many teenagers have continued to vape despite reading these social media posts, so this is a bit one-sided. Many teenagers have lots of friends who still vape, so this omission is very obvious, and because it sounds one-sided will make some less receptive to the facts presented in the rest of the article, especially if they are already skeptical of anti-drug messages from adults. A neutral article should just give readers the details and let them come to their own conclusions without being nudged in any particular direction. -- Beland (talk) 02:20, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

What was not included from BuzzFeed News? I don't think it is one-sided when the source was summarised appropriately. If there are other sources then those should be presented. Are you claiming that vaping should be continued among teenagers? QuackGuru (talk) 02:29, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

This one human interest piece on BuzzFeed does not, and should not be expected to, represent a well-rounded view of the topic. I am not arguing in favor of vaping, I am arguing against putting an obvious anti-vaping POV in this article. -- Beland (talk) 02:42, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

BTW, this is one reason why WP:PRIMARY says not to base an article entirely on primary sources, as this article is in danger of doing. Secondary sources have access to a wide variety of primary sources that each have a narrow focus. Secondary authors can see all the different perspectives and explain the situation in a much more well-rounded way, with the benefit of expert analysis. They can also identify contradictions, mistakes, and out-of-date information. -- Beland (talk) 02:50, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

There's also the issue of worldwide view, not just the CDC. The UK's National Health Service, for example, does recommend that smokers should switch to vaping and asserts that doing so is substantially less risky.[2] Generally speaking, articles should not contain a "call to action"; just present the facts as they are currently known. So for the NHS, it would seem they actually would recommend that teens who currently smoke should switch to vaping as a less harmful alternative. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 02:48, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

Removing the content is arguing in favor of vaping. It is neutral and a mainstream view.. QuackGuru (talk) 03:01, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

No source or organisation recommends vaping among teenagers. It is also common sense it would be best to quit vaping than risk being re-admitted to the hospital. E-cigs are banned in the UK for anyone under 18. QuackGuru (talk) 03:01, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

Well, first off, many public health agencies adopt strategies of harm reduction, where they know that even if something isn't supposed to happen, it in fact does. We all know people under 18 can smoke cigarettes, even if they're legally disallowed from doing so. Regardless, however, if vaping is accessible to teens who smoke at 18 and 19, then the NHS is advocating vaping for teenagers, since their recommendation does not contain any age restriction. So even if one presumes they're only recommending it for those who are legally allowed, 18 and 19 year olds, who can legally vape in the UK, are teens. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 09:29, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

The POV issues are not just about teenagers; anyone who vapes or supports people having the freedom to vape if they want to, and even some people who are against vaping will be less receptive if they encounter one-sided facts. Anyway, it doesn't matter how sensible either position is, or what the consequences of readers' reactions are; WP:NPOV is a non-negotiable site policy.

Letting the facts speak for themselves instead of beating readers over the head is not "arguing in favor of vaping". It doesn't matter whether the facts are positive or negative; neutrality is required either way, but it should be obvious in this case that even just neutral facts in this case show a risk of death or serious injury; I don't see how anyone could interpret that as favorable. -- Beland (talk) 14:10, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

It is a fact that teenagers are sharing their stories and inspiring other teenagers to quit vaping. QuackGuru (talk) 14:15, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

Yes, but highlighting factual advocacy efforts for one point of view is hardly neutral. -- Beland (talk) 14:41, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

Anyone can add other points of view if they think it is one-sided. QuackGuru (talk) 14:49, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

I think adding material that sounds like it was written by two different advocacy groups just results in an article that switches incoherently back and forth between polar viewpoints, rather than having a neutral viewpoint throughout. That's why I removed this text. Given that we seem to have two editors who think this text is inappropriate and one who doesn't, I'm going to remove it for now. -- Beland (talk) 20:04, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

I would tend to agree. In addition, especially for articles about medical issues, I think we ought to use better sources than Clickbait Central. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 22:42, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

Original research and excessive detail concerns

Basically the excessive detail concern is the long list of patient cases of questionable encyclopedic value. There is also a significant privacy concern raised in the overturned AFD.

The original research concern is the determination that these cases are part of the outbreak. In medical cases, that determination needs to be done by medical experts. Wikipedia editors shouldn't be making those determinations; relying on local news media to do so seems unreliable and might result in spreading misleading information.

Maybe we could take the cases one by one, or at least focusing on one to start might help clarify some issues. So the first example is Sherie Canada. By my reading, the article text isn't even asserting that this person's case meets the CDC criteria to be counted as part of this outbreak; it doesn't even explicitly say this person vaped. Do the cited references? What makes this case any more notable than any other vaping hospitalization? -- Beland (talk) 19:26, 7 January 2020 (UTC)

Notability is not the inclusion criteria and the article is short. Any person hospitalized due to vaping or e-cig use meets the CDC's definition. There is no original research in regard to any specific sentence. She liked the e-cig flavors. QuackGuru (talk) 21:24, 7 January 2020 (UTC)

The specific sentences I feel are original research are all the sentences in the "Hospitalization" section, since it seems that editors are making the determination about whether each patient is part of the outbreak. -- Beland (talk) 18:00, 8 January 2020 (UTC)

Based on the referenced source, I changed the article to say that she used e-cigarettes, as opposed to merely being "attracted" to them, which is what it said before.

The CDC criteria for a confirmed case requires that medical tests have been performed that rule out infection. This patient was diagnosed with sepsis, which is a response to infection, so I'm guessing the CDC would not consider this case to be part of the outbreak.

What inclusion criteria would you like to use? -- Beland (talk) 16:38, 8 January 2020 (UTC)

For lists of patients in an outbreak, I can find two Wikipedia guidelines that help set inclusion criteria. WP:LISTPEOPLE says that such lists generally only include people who satisfy Wikipedia:Notability (people) and thus either could or do have an article written about them. None of the people listed in this article are linked to a biography, and none of them seem particularly notable. The exception to WP:LISTPEOPLE is to include a small number of non-notable people in important positions, for completeness. But for medical privacy reasons and lack of news coverage, this list will always be far from complete, and the number of non-notable people would be in the hundreds or thousands. WP:MEDCASE is talking about lists of notable cases in a substantial article (rather than standalone lists), but suggests an even narrower focus, on "only those individuals who have lastingly affected the popular perception of a condition". The lawsuits have the potential to be consequential for the future of the vaping industry, but the other individual cases seem to be one-off news stories with no enduring individual impact on events or public perception. -- Beland (talk) 16:30, 9 January 2020 (UTC)

• User:Beland no consensus to merge as per here. Yet you have merged again? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 03:09, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

The list of cases is excessive both in number, and in the detail in each case. They're written as a series of disjointed factoids which don't really integrate into the rest of the article in any way. I think we'd do better to discuss generally what happened (to the best of what's known; I believe there are some parts still uncertain, in which case we should reflect that uncertainty), and that would be much more informative than a poorly written list of individual cases. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 04:52, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

• • @Doc James: Greetings! Yes, the deletion review verdict said the question of inclusion criteria should be worked out on the talk pages. As mentioned above, I found WP:LISTPEOPLE and WP:MEDCASE, which as it happens were not brought up in the merge discussions. As you can see, I didn't get any reply in this thread, so I cut the content that seems to be outside these guidelines. That left nearly 100% overlap with the lawsuit section in the other article, so I merged the two.

@QuackGuru: Since you restored the cut content, care to comment on your desired inclusion criteria for this list? -- Beland (talk) 04:57, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

The article does not need an official inclusion criteria. It is hospitalized cases reported in the media. The CDC and the FDA did not report the individual cases. There could be cases where the person did not make it to the hospital and died. If that were included then the title would need to drop the word hospitalized. QuackGuru (talk) 21:12, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

Yes, it does need inclusion criteria, else it is indiscriminate. So, yes, there needs to be some threshold. Given the concerns of BLP and medical privacy, as well as just too many individual listings, that threshold should be quite high. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 23:49, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

There is no serious issues with the article. Therefore there is no major issue to fix. I think more detail can be added, especially about the double transplant patient. Taking 20 pills a day will eventually damage his kidneys. In the future he could need a kidney transplant or he could die. QuackGuru (talk) 12:52, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

@QuackGuru: Doesn't following WP:LISTPEOPLE mean that information about this patient should be removed, along with all the others who do not have a Wikipedia biography? -- Beland (talk) 14:21, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

The article is not a stand-alone list. QuackGuru (talk) 14:49, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

Isn't it a list of patients hospitalized in the vaping lung illness outbreak? -- Beland (talk) 17:14, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

It is not a list. A list would just be a list of cases without any detailed content for each case. The title of the article does not contain the word list. QuackGuru (talk) 17:19, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

If you consider this a substantial article and not a list, then doesn't following WP:MEDCASE also mean removing mention of individual patients who don't have a Wikipedia article? -- Beland (talk) 17:23, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

WP:MEDCASE is for articles on medical conditions. It does not apply to an article on a news event or outbreak. QuackGuru (talk) 17:31, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

Lung illness is a medical condition, though. What's the point of listing individual cases when the article would be much more concise if it listed symptoms and complications across the entire population of patients? It comes across like it's trying to provide graphic details to scare people into not vaping, or it's just a series of "if it bleeds it leads" news stories concatenated together. -- Beland (talk) 17:51, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

The article is about people hospitalized in an outbreak. It is not specifically about a medical disease. Symptoms and complications in general are in another article. If your argument is the induvial cases should not be included then you should nominate it for deletion and stop waiting my time. You previously disagreed because you supported a merge rather than outright deletion. QuackGuru (talk) 18:00, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

You participated in the Articles for Deletion discussion that I started in December. The result of the Deletion Review was that inclusion criteria should be discussed on the talk page. I will start an RFC. -- Beland (talk) 18:11, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

For coronavirus, we have a great deal of detail on cases.2019–20 Wuhan coronavirus outbreak by country and territory Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 11:46, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

That level of detail is also substantially excessive. Wikipedia is not the newspaper. But that should be discussed there; it has no relevance here. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 17:33, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

Both outbreaks are ongoing, and I think their articles are suffering from excessive detail as a form of WP:RECENTISM. -- Beland (talk) 20:14, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

Juul

I noticed a pattern that following Juul use people are being hospitalized such as is the case here. I am trying to find a source that summarises Juul use and subsequent near-death experiences for the lede. QuackGuru (talk) 15:43, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

Inclusion criteria RFC

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

Should the inclusion criteria for Wikipedia coverage hospitalized cases in the vaping lung illness outbreak be limited to notable cases? This would exclude most individual cases that receive press coverage from reliable sources simply because they are a patient that is part of the outbreak. We would provide (as we already do at 2019–20 vaping lung illness outbreak) statistics instead and general information like symptoms, treatment, complications, etc. Notable cases might include people who have a Wikipedia biography, or those who are notable in the course of the outbreak, such as being the only case in a particular country, filing a class-action lawsuit, being the first recognized case, or having contributed in an unusual way to medical knowledge about the condition. -- Beland (talk) 19:55, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

Arguments for narrow criteria:

• This is essentially a list. WP:LISTPEOPLE should apply, which excludes non-notable people (anyone not eligible for a Wikipedia biography). (QuackGuru argues this is not a list.)
• This is an article about the outbreak of a medical condition. WP:MEDCASE should apply, only mentioning individual cases notable to the progression of the outbreak. (QuackGuru argues that this advice should not apply to articles about outbreaks.)
• This level of detail is appropriate for news site coverage, but not an encyclopedia; WP:NOTNEWS should apply. Most of the prose of this article is literally a concatenation of summaries of news articles about individual cases.
• Adding details from the medical record of a living person into the encyclopedia has serious privacy implications, though these people did presumably voluntarily participate in press interviews.
• News coverage of individual cases does not come from reliable medical sources. It's likely the medical histories of patients as collected in the popular press from patients (not from doctors) contain errors, vagueness, and unconfirmed facts, which could cause readers to make unwise decisions. If this collection of anecdotes attempts to establish pattern, that is both original research and unreliable compared to scientific techniques.

-- Beland (talk) 19:55, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

• No. We should not limit it notable cases. That would delete all the case and subsequently the entire article. None of the individual cases are wikilinked and a separate articles for any notable case would be better off if kept in one place here. We have List of Ebola patients and Ebola virus cases in the United States. QuackGuru (talk) 20:15, 3 February 2020 (UTC)
• Yes. I can't see an encyclopedic purpose for a lengthy prose-list of non-notable individuals with excessive details about each one's personal medical histories. Schazjmd (talk) 22:00, 3 February 2020 (UTC)
• Yes, as Wikipedia is not the newspaper. This would probably be better covered by a summary in the parent article than the disconnected factoids about non-notable individual cases present here. This also raises WP:BLP concerns regarding medical privacy. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 23:33, 3 February 2020 (UTC)
• No Should we only mention cases of disease in people who have a Wikipedia biography? No the first cases of a new disease are notable in and of themselves. We have 2019–20 Wuhan coronavirus outbreak by country and territory for example. And we had similar for Ebola. Does not belong in the main article but okay with it as a subpage. Cases of people who have a rare disease are notable, cases of famous people who have a common disease are notable. Cases of ordinary people who have a common disease are not notable. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 11:52, 5 February 2020 (UTC)
  • Doc James, I think you're wrong on almost every point. This language about "notable cases" seems to be tripping people up, so let's try to unpack it:
    1. Should we only mention cases of disease in people who have a Wikipedia biography? – WP:Notability doesn't require that someone has already created an article. To answer your question, though, MEDCASE says that if you're mentioning a patient by name, it should be someone who permanently changed the public perception of the disease – someone more like Lou Gehrig, Stephen Hawking, or Terry Fox, and a lot less like the human interest stories that the newspapers run during Breast Cancer Awareness Month every year.
    2. No the first cases of a new disease are notable in and of themselves.
       • There are two problems with this statement. The first is that the use of the word notable here is confusing. The second is that it's making an inaccurate assumption that the named cases are the first ones.
       1. This community doesn't support the idea of WP:Inherent notability (that anything is "notable in and of themselves"), so I'm going to assume that this is the non-WP:N notion of notability, namely a concept that sounds like "the act of identifying a previously unrecognized medical condition is important" rather than "the hospitalization of this individual qualifies for a separate, stand-alone article". In other words, the first cases are important but the are not WP:Notable: we do not write articles about them. I'm willing to agree that the first case, or even the first few, might be worth mentioning in Wikipedia.
       2. However, none of these are actually "the first cases of a new disease". The first case was diagnosed in March 2019.[3] That patient's name is unknown, and the case is not mentioned in this article. The first death was in August 2019, and that patient's name is also unknown and the case is not mentioned in this article. It's not even necessarily a new disease: the actual index case (which is not mentioned in this article) in Canada has Obliterative bronchiolitis.[4] If you apply the standard that the case must be "the first" in some sense, then 15 out of 16 cases have to be removed. Only the one involving the first double-lung transplant could be kept. What's actually in this article is the names and symptoms of just 16 out of 3000+ people who have been hospitalized for this, apparently selected according to a strategy called "everything I could find in Google". This is just a random grab-bag of local news stories.
    3. We have 2019–20 Wuhan coronavirus outbreak by country and territory for example. – and I invite you to count the names of private individuals with COVID-19 infection in that article. I found zero. Maybe not quite the same thing?
    4. And we had similar for Ebola. – No, those are very different. Look at Kivu Ebola epidemic#Democratic Republic of the Congo (first article in my search results) as an example. The index case (and it actually is an index case, unlike any of these) merited exactly one sentence. No names, no symptoms, no "he went to the school nurse", no "Instead of resting he went to the gym to exercise", no "He initially thought he had the flu", just a plain statement that the index case was a specific, unnamed woman, and the next victims were seven of her family members. After that, there are no details about any other individual cases in the outbreak. Cases are reported by number, location, (general) dates, and whether they were confirmed or only suspected. That's a good model to follow. That's not what we have here.
    5. Does not belong in the main article but okay with it as a subpage. – This isn't a subpage. But, seriously, you're okay with posting kids' names with their medical details in Wikipedia just because it's not in the "main" article? There's a 16 year old there who had been unconscious for almost a week and had been unable to communicate at all until the day that the local TV station published a story about her, and was only barely communicative then. The old news article will eventually disappear from search engine results, but Wikipedia won't. We're here for the long term. And you don't think that's a basically evil thing to do to a teenage girl, because it's not in the so-called "main" article? Also, have you read WP:BLPNAME recently? It says that the inclusion of a private individual's name in a newspaper article is not a good excuse for including that person's name in a Wikipedia article. I'd think that should go double for minors, don't you? If she's lucky, it'll turn out that we've got her name wrong anyway, because QuackGuru seems to have just assumed that she and her mother have the same last name. None of the cited sources state the girl's last name.
    6. Cases of people who have a rare disease are notable, cases of famous people who have a common disease are notable. Cases of ordinary people who have a common disease are not notable. – This is the non-WP:Notable version of "notable" again, because we seriously do not write separate articles for each of the millions of people who have one or more of the tens of thousands of known rare diseases, and WP:MEDCASE says to limit even the mention of celebrities with a disease to those who are especially well known for having that disease, and not merely because they happened to die from it. The List of people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis is not a list of every single person who both qualifies for a Wikipedia article and happens to have developed ALS. (The main article mentions exactly two people with ALS.) It is important to mention people who have dedicated years of their lives to changing public perception. It is not important to spam articles full of kids' names just because they got sick. This is a mess, and almost everything about any individual on this page needs to be removed. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:38, 13 February 2020 (UTC)
    • If the people are not notable than yes their names should not be mentioned. Similar to how we have "On 31 January, the CDC confirmed the seventh case in a man in Santa Clara County, California who had recently travelled to Wuhan"[5] Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 05:44, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

      I agree with this way of handling in. The patient's name is not usually significant or encyclopedic information; the case can be described just as well without the name, and so the name ends up being a distraction. In the case of non-notable minors, omitting the name ought to be a rule (across the entire encyclopedia frankly). Levivich 07:17, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

• No Agree with Doc James: the first cases of a new disease are notable in and of themselves. Cloudjpk (talk) 23:29, 5 February 2020 (UTC)
  • Cloudjpk, the people listed in this article aren't the first cases of a new disease. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:21, 13 February 2020 (UTC)
    • They may not be the very first cases. Their appearance in news reporting and the content of the coverage is associated with the fact of them being among the first. Now: I'd be happy to see the article improved by adding the very first cases identified. Cloudjpk (talk) 00:56, 14 February 2020 (UTC)
      • Looking at the dates, these cases are "associated with the fact of them being among the first" two-thirds or so, which does not sound very special. Would you like to limit it to the first 10%? The first 20%? WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:14, 14 February 2020 (UTC)
• No, notability of cases not required I am from WikiProject Medicine and a regular at these e-cigarette discussions. I see the related ANI discussion at special:permalink/939406568#QuackGuru. Anyone editing e-cigarette content should expect high tension and the presence of paid lobbyists. The nicotine industry has billions of dollars at stake and their agents and propaganda come into Wikipedia routinely. I am not aware of any paid editors here, but the effects of the years of propaganda remains present in all nicotine discussions.

I do not interpret WP:MEDCASE as applying here. That guideline is a rule for biographies, not for articles like this one. The context of medcase is is that Wikipedia is like 25% odd biographies, and we do not keep those up to date with social media or primary info. In this article we have news articles from journalism sources about individual epidemic cases, which is outside the scope of MEDCASE.

WP:NOTNEWS applies to individual incidents and for example, means that we should not make individual articles out of single incidents if they only lightly pass WP:GNG. Yes, I agree, "this article is literally a concatenation of summaries of news articles about individual cases". This kind of original research, pulling multiple sources together and making a concept and article at the same time, is something that Wikipedia is supposed to do in preference to multiple weaker articles about individual cases.

Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources (medicine) applies somewhat, but not for removing all these cases. It is correct, these are "medical histories of patients as collected in the popular press from patients (not from doctors)" and "contain errors". The article should be written in a way so as avoid communicating an idea of what symptoms may be common or for anyone to see this as a medical history.

Blue Rasberry (talk) 11:55, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

What? Lane, I believe your memory of MEDCASE has tripped you up. The very first sentence in MEDCASE says "Articles on medical conditions sometimes include lists of notable cases of the disease." The primary reason that MEDCASE exists is because people kept building lists of patients in disease articles (example). MEDCASE does not tell editors whether Queen Elizabeth's knee surgeries should be mentioned in Elizabeth II; it tells them that it shouldn't be mentioned in Knee arthroscopy. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:16, 13 February 2020 (UTC)

• No I agree with the reasoning of Doc James and Bluerasberry. --- FULBERT (talk) 12:52, 6 February 2020 (UTC)
  • FULBERT, I disagree with Doc James, and I've now explained why in detail above. I wonder if you disagree with me. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:48, 13 February 2020 (UTC)
• Comment. I don't agree that named individuals need to be notable enough for an article, but I do agree that the article is problematic, and fewer examples would help. It's written in a breathless news style and it violates MEDRS at several points. For example, with one individual: "Instead of resting he went to the gym to exercise ... He thought he was just tired." What is the relevance of this? And that a doctor noticed he had been vaping: "This probably saved his life." What did the doctors do when they learned about vaping that they would not otherwise have done? With another individual: "doctors told him his lungs are like that of a 70 year old." That presumably refers to lung-function tests, but trying to interpret it is a problem. It would be better to summarize the cases and give examples of the symptoms people reported or the issues we can be reasonably sure the doctors found. SarahSV ^(talk) 21:09, 6 February 2020 (UTC)
  • Agree could use some toning down. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 00:35, 7 February 2020 (UTC)
    • If you removed all the trivia, all the unencyclopedic content, all the unnecessary personal information, all the unrepresentative (and therefore UNDUE) information, and all the random cases (e.g., as opposed to an actual 'first' or other situation significant to the history of this condition), if anything would be left. I also wonder if you'd just be reverted. I haven't tried to clean it up myself because I have assumed it would provoke just an edit war. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:48, 13 February 2020 (UTC)
• Yes otherwise it's just a list of people by medical condition, a huge privacy violation. Levivich 21:05, 13 February 2020 (UTC)
  • I'm glad we're thinking about privacy. As Beland notes: these people did presumably voluntarily participate in press interviews. Cloudjpk (talk) 01:01, 14 February 2020 (UTC)

    In the case of the 16-year-old girl from the Phoenix area, it's her mother who is giving the interviews. The girl is too young to legally consent. And regardless of privacy concerns, there are the NOTDIR and NOR concerns, as with all Listcruft. Levivich 01:53, 14 February 2020 (UTC)

• Yes, per all of the above. Saying "No per Doc James" is kind of a non-!vote, since "the first cases of a new disease are notable in and of themselves" is tautological. The first few cases will be notable, yes, because they'll have non-trivial coverage (i.e., will pass WP:GNG), so they're already going to pass the criterion proposed here. See fallacy of equivocation; "notable" has a specific meaning at Wikipedia and it cannot be redefined on the fly to mean whatever you wish it meant for a topic you are care about more. What we have at this page is not "the first few cases" but an ever-growing "lengthy prose-list of non-notable individuals with excessive details about each one's personal medical histories". This is problematic from multiple policy standpoints, including WP:BLP, WP:MEDMOS, WP:NOT#INDISCRIMINATE, WP:NOT#NEWS, and (given the overall nature of an article like this as an activism vehicle) WP:NOT#ADVOCACY. The BLP matter in particular is troubling; just because some alleged fact exists in a legal document on file somewhere (and some journalist has gone and dug it up) doesn't mean WP should or can use it with impunity.

  And, yes, it is obviously a list. The lack of bullets doesn't make it not one. "I like pizza, chocolate, cats, The Expanse, and coffee" is also a list yet does not have bullet points. Sheesh. PS: The objection, "That would delete all the case[s] and subsequently the entire article" is a fine and dandy result, since this is not an encyclopedic article, and we already have articles on notable cases in their own right, without using WP:OR spackle to tie them to each other. This should probably have been taken to AfD. It's overwhelmingly PoV pushing even in its very title – from failing to recognize that "hospitalized" is generally a self-selecting category that often doesn't resolve to anything conclusive (i.e., it's an OR magnet; e.g., we have no information on what else these people might have been smoking and for how long, etc.), to using loaded, dubious, and scare-mongering language like "outbreak" as if we're talking about a viral infection. While it could be renamed, that wouldn't do anything to resolve the other problems inherent in this exercise. Some anti-vaping blog is a better site for material like this. PS: I say all this as someone who is not in favor of e-cigs (and would support them being banned outright, or at least banned from regular retail sale and left only legal enough that they were a special-order item, like getting clove cigarettes in the US). I just leave my social causes at home.
   — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:18, 18 February 2020 (UTC)

• Yes it should be limited to cases which actually provide information of value to the reader, and the content for each case should also be limited to that which provides meaningful and encyclopedic information of value to the reader. It should not be the equvalent of a prose database of personal circumstances. It should not be a compilation of circumstantial evidence collected from unverified journalism. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 14:02, 18 February 2020 (UTC)

  PS: WP:LISTCRUFT and/or WP:EXAMPLEFARM also apply. Although these are both essays, they do express the problems we see in this article. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 08:51, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

  That's a good way to put it, as to the OR problem (which I didn't dwell on). The fact that the press will report on isolated, unrelated medical cases that seem to indicate a connection to e-cigs doesn't give us license to WP:SYNTH all over the place about it. For all we know, every one of these individuals had an unusual susceptibility to something in their "e-juice", which would tell us nothing about e-cigs in general. Or maybe they had a reaction to something they ate while vaping, or ....  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:59, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

Trim and merger

@Schazjmd, Seraphimblade, Doc James, WhatamIdoing, Levivich, Cloudjpk, Bluerasberry, FULBERT, SlimVirgin, SMcCandlish, and Peter Southwood: Thanks for responding to this RFC. There seemed to be general agreement that there was too much detail on the cases listed, with most of the argument about whether they should be dropped altogether. People were mostly talking in generalities, so in an effort to get more clarity, I did a substantial trimming and most of what's left in Hospitalized cases in the vaping lung illness outbreak#Hospitalizations are lists of problems in individual cases. This is now short enough I think to merge into 2019–20 vaping lung illness outbreak#Patients (dropping all the prose there currently). I was intending to do that in a few days unless there's an outcry in favor of putting most of the chopped details back in. Hopefully seeing a cleaned-up version can also help editors who are theoretically in favor of keeping some cases without Wikipedia biographies decide whether any of these specific cases are worth keeping, and if so, which. -- Beland (talk) 21:47, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

• Thank you Beland, I think this section is much improved, and I agree with the proposed merger. Levivich (lulz) 22:40, 21 February 2020 (UTC)
• No strong opinion either way. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 00:57, 22 February 2020 (UTC)
• @Beland: This is a lot of text changed and at a glance I am not sure that I understand it. I know that typically I should be able to understand by looking, but since there is so much text moved, can you describe what you did? Here are your changes

Special:Diff/941634958/941986192

It looks like you removed all individual cases and then summarized the symptoms. Is that right?

I agreed to having cases shortened but I still feel that the list is useful. If the cases were important enough for journalists in so many places to cover in a similar way, then it seems routine enough for me to have an article about the cases. Also, even with your shortened version, there is enough text here to be a stand-alone article. Why merge and not leave this here? How many references did you remove, and why?

I intend these questions to be casual. Please do not put too much time into answering. Blue Rasberry (talk) 12:44, 22 February 2020 (UTC)

Lane, these are human interest stories. They exist because they sell newspapers. They do not exist because they're "important". From the POV of Wikipedia's policies, the refs to these are all WP:PRIMARYNEWS. They are reliable for individual facts, but they are not what an article should be WP:Based upon, and they cannot be used for Wikipedia:Biomedical information. Citing just one or two of these primary sources, rather than three, doesn't hurt anyone.

The removals take out people's names, ages, and locations (does it actually matter which US city you live in, when the same products are available across the entire country?) and trivial statements such as "Her mother dialed 911" and "He went to the school nurse". WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:22, 22 February 2020 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: Can you say in general why you think these stories are not important? Suppose we considered the general case, and any other new epidemic which just appeared. Wikipedia was at the forefront of ebola and zika and is a source of information about coronavirus. When HIV/AIDS appeared in the 80s there was a mainstream media taboo which elevated the patient stories of journalists as the best available information. I think that Wikipedia has covered epidemics in the past and will cover them in the future, and as a general rule, I support listing popular media narratives for each patient in this way. If these stories are important enough for journalists I think they are good enough to list in Wikipedia. I do not think these are only human interest stories, because to me, a human interest story would be emotional coverage of a disease which everyone already knows, and I see these articles as original journalism trying to describe a medical condition which almost no one knows. I would like for our general practice to be to list such cases and citations for any epidemic. Keeping age, location, and demographic information seems useful to me. Blue Rasberry (talk) 12:40, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

I think we're going need to use some WP:BRADSPEAK. These human-interest stories, when evaluated as pieces of journalism, are unimportant. More precisely, they are of exactly the same importance as the local newspaper writing about the woman who is organizing the local cancer fundraiser, or the local parents grieving the death of their opiate-addicted child, or a story about a local mother dying after childbirth. These are obviously not in the same category as what Woodward and Bernstein published in the Washington Post. They're not even as important as local media outlets that reveal a problem, such as the local paper reporting that the local industry is lying about its pollution problem, or the city politicians being corrupt. This reporting is just on the consequences of using an unsafe product to a local resident. It's not revealing an unknown problem. It's (did you read them?) local journalists writing that a mother feels like a failure because she didn't know that her daughter was vaping. "Emotional coverage" is exactly what we're getting here.

These are not the journalistically important stories, because they are concerned only with the individuals affected locally. These aren't stories focused on a real problem and that happen to use an individual as a way to tell the bigger story. They are focused on the local resident, with maybe a paragraph saying that it's a national problem. The difference between a major story on an unsafe product and a story about a local resident that happens to involve an unsafe product is really significant.

Now, it's not important journalistically, but who would consider these to be important? If you are trying to manipulate public opinion, then publishing a lot of these stories can be useful tools. That's IMO not Wikipedia's job, but if you're the anti-nicotine league, then these stories are valuable. The fundraising teams for some of these hospitals will also consider them valuable (and they almost certainly arranged for the publication of at least some of these stories).

As a defining personal experience, the events will be important to the principal people involved. Emotionally traumatic experiences are important to the individuals, regardless of whether those events involve car wrecks, family disasters, or being injured by an unsafe product. I don't believe that Wikipedia's job involves recognizing those personal events, but I recognize the importance to the affected individuals.

I don't know if you're actually old enough to remember HIV/AIDS firsthand, but I can tell you that patient stories in the local paper were not the best available information. The best available information started with Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report#First report of AIDS in mid-1981, and by the end of the year, there were significant papers in The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine. That, and not the local reports on individuals, was the best available information.

And that brings me to the main point: Making a central list of every local news story you can get your hands on, so that other people can analyze age, location, and other demographic information, is not what an encyclopedia does. Wikibooks might be happy hosting that content, but an encyclopedia article is a balanced summary, not a collection of raw data that has been filtered by willingness to put your (or your kid's) name in the newspaper. We've got proper review articles in medical journals. Why would we want to list details about a semi-random individual, as reported in a local newspaper, when we could be relying on papers written by experts, such as PMID 31767123 or PMID 31938636? What's the added value of saying that one person, who may or may not be representative, had trouble breathing, when we could report that the peer-reviewed paper tells us straight out that the usual symptoms are "difficulty breathing, shortness of breath, chest pains, gastrointestinal sickness"? WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:57, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

@Bluerasberry: That's not a bad summary from WhatamIDoing...I converted the section from one case per paragraph to one case per bullet point. In most cases, the same source was cited over and over again, once per sentence. Generally I found I could sum up the case in one sentence, leaving only symptoms, major procedures performed, and bare facts related to public policy, like underage people being able to buy, or how long the patient had been vaping. In some cases there were two or three news outlets that ran stories about the same person, so for most of those I just picked the story that was most comprehensive and dropped the other references as redundant. Sometimes I needed two sources to cover all the facts retained.

Though it fixes problems with tone and unencyclopedic details, I feel that the result is still very choppy. It reads like "one person vomited and needed oxygen and another person had vomited and had abdominal pain and needed mechanical ventilation" when it would be a lot smoother to say "symptoms have included vomiting, abdominal pain, shortness of breath, etc." and "treatments required for hospitalized patients have included supplemental oxygen, mechanical ventilation, and in one case lung transplantation". But that starts to get into original research territory if based on news reports. In fact we already have these kinds of lists at 2019–20 vaping lung illness outbreak#United States based on much better sources: the CDC and FDA. We have in-depth coverage of social issues like marketing and underage people vaping at electronic cigarette. Picking out these random examples doesn't seem to add anything to that coverage, but does create more text to wade through.

Even if we keep the list, it's about the same length as the text currently at 2019–20_vaping_lung_illness_outbreak#Patients, which is basically just four of the paragraphs from this article copied word for word before I shortened them. Instead of shortening those to four bullet points and linking to this page for the other 11, it seems easier for readers to just have all 15 bullet points there. The other content in this article, on CDC recommendations and whatnot, seem a bit off-topic to me and I think they fit more naturally into Vaping-associated pulmonary injury. And actually there's a "Treatment" section (and "Public health recommendations" subsection) already there that covers this stuff much better, so if there's anything worth adding from this article it could just be merged there. -- Beland (talk) 23:38, 22 February 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the article development. I neglected to read what you wrote, and I incorrectly thought that this was a list of symptom reports when actually it is a list of patient stories. I reworded it to label the section as being patient narratives.

I appreciate the care you describe in reducing redundant sources about the same patient. Somethings there is one piece of original journalism on one patient, then other journalists base their story only on that original story without more interviews or research. When you removed sources, I hope it was the case that you keep the original complete journalism and removed the incomplete copycat sources, which is what I think you are describing.

I prefer a merged from 2019–20_vaping_lung_illness_outbreak#Patients to here. That page is bound 2019–20 when this page is undated and people can add cases perpetually. Vaping is just invented and so is vaping hospitalization. 2020 will come to an end but this article can be a place to catch vaping cases between now and forever and in countries outside the United States. Blue Rasberry (talk) 12:40, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

Outbreaks also come to an end sooner or later, and given the title of this article, this list will stop growing when that happens. If the outbreak goes into 2021, the title of the parent article will be changed. Vaping-associated pulmonary injury is not associated with any particular outbreak, and if there needed to be a list of patients to the end of time, I think that would be more natural. Though in that case, WP:MEDCASE seems to apply directly. -- Beland (talk) 15:37, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

• I support Beland's trim and merger, at least as a start.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:07, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

I've done the merge. If there's further discussion on merging this with other content in that article, it should probably continue on Talk:2019–20 vaping lung illness outbreak. -- Beland (talk) 00:28, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Removal of problem tags

@QuackGuru: Please don't remove the tags on NPOV, excessive detail, original research, and tone. These issues are still unaddressed, and there are active discussions on these issues in the above talk page sections. (See Help:Maintenance template removal.) Thanks! -- Beland (talk) 20:08, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

User:FULBERT deleted two tags. I don't see any evidence of original research. No single sentence has been shown to fail verification. QuackGuru (talk) 23:53, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

Agreed, which is why I removed the tags when going about my ongoing NPP processes. --- FULBERT (talk) 23:59, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

Did you notice the concern raised at Talk:Hospitalized cases in the vaping lung illness outbreak#Original research and excessive detail concerns? If you disagree with the assessment, that's fine, but it's customary to participate in a open discussion about a tag before removing it. -- Beland (talk) 00:50, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

Here's a single sentence, added by QuackGuru which fails verification:

In October 2019, 16-year-old Samantha Ford from Phoenix, Arizona was found unconscious by her mother in her bedroom.

I'll take it phrase by phrase:

1. "In October 2019": The date is correct.
2. "16-year-old": Her age is probably correct, assuming that she didn't have a birthday in between when she was found and when the news story was written, because technically the source reports her age at the time of publication, not her age at the time of being found in her bedroom, but the sentence is about the date when she was found. So this has {{failed verification}}, even if I think that the 2% chance of an intervening birthday isn't worth bothering about.
3. "Samantha Ford": QuackGuru just assumed that the mother and daughter have the same last name. None of the cited sources actually gives the girl's own last name. {{Failed verification}} again.
4. "from Phoenix, Arizona": Look for proof that the girl is actually from Phoenix, and not from one of the suburbs or surrounding unincorporated areas. You won't find it. The dateline on the Martinez source (cited elsewhere in that paragraph) is from Phoenix, but the reporter's dateline not the same thing as the girl's own home address. The Navarette source's headline identifies her as a "Valley teen", which is not the same thing as saying she's from Phoenix. At best, we could guess that she's from the Salt River Valley, but guessing isn't verifying. This has {{Failed verification}}.
5. "was found unconscious": The cited source says unresponsive, not unconscious. None of the sources use the word unconscious. {{Failed verification}} again.
6. "by her mother": The cited source does not say who found her. The Martinez source says that she was found by her friends. So this is both factually incorrect, and it has also {{failed verification}}.
7. "in her bedroom." Well, at least we got something else right.

The only parts of the first sentence that are actually verified in the cited source are "In October 2019, in her bedroom". Everything else in this sentence fails verification.

User:SMcCandlish, I saw your comments above, and I wonder whether you'd be willing to go through the article (or part of it), as an exercise, and blank anything that you think fails verification or is unencyclopedic, and see what's left at the end. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:12, 18 February 2020 (UTC)

I really don't want to wade into this in detail. I have a lot going on already. And my experience with many of the people on the same conflicting sides in previous rounds of "the Great Wikipedia E-cigs War" has left me very wary of editing in this area other than in consensus discussions on talk pages. I think the example above is a good case study, however, in the kinds of problem this article will inevitably attract, and that's just with very basic source interpretation. When we get to the WP:MEDRS material, all bets are off, especially given how overrun this topic area is with WP:GREATWRONGS and other PoV-pushing (from two poles, not just one point).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:50, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

Unhelpful map

As mentioned on the talk pages of the main article, at least one other editor in addition to myself has complained that the map showing all areas of the United States having hospitalizations is not helpful, since it simply repeats that straightforward fact from the first paragraph. It might as well be removed. A helpful map would show something that actually varied from state to state, like hospitalization rate per capita. -- Beland (talk) 14:49, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

We now have a better map that shows the number of cases per state or territory, which I copied here from the main article. -- Beland (talk) 16:30, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

Proposal for lede

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

Should we include a sentence about young people sharing their stories in the third paragraph in the lede? QuackGuru (talk) 23:53, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

• Yes. I propose the following: Young people are sharing stories of hospitalizations and encouraging other young people to quit vaping.

References

Source says "Now, amid a nationwide outbreak of mysterious lung illnesses associated with vaping, leading to at least six deaths, Ammirata and other young people who have been hospitalized with injuries they believe were caused by the use of e-cigarettes are using social media to warn their peers about the dangers of vaping and inspiring them to quit."[6]

It was previously suggested to use the word "some" by combining two sources together but that is an unsupported weasel word and a WP:SYN violation. The reason it would be a SYN violation is because it would be combining two sources into a new conclusion not found in any individual source. This is a new article and other content can be added to the lede to present a more well-rounded summary of the case listing. QuackGuru (talk) 23:53, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

I also propose the following for the lede: Many people who had life-threatening symptoms told their stories.

References

• Yes to both or at least one of the sentences. I think if both are added to the lede it would be a more well-round summary or if editors prefer we could include just one of them. QuackGuru (talk) 01:24, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

I also propose the following for the lede: Certain patients have shared stories of hospitalizations and life-threatening symptoms.

References

• Yes for third proposal. This uses two separate claims into one concise sentence. To avoid confusion I placed each citation where it verifies each claim. QuackGuru (talk) 18:58, 9 February 2020 (UTC)
• No. This sentence is not a good summary of the cases in the Hospitalizations section, which includes people who would not be considered young. The language is not neutral, as it implies to the reader that the correct conclusion after reading the below testimonials is to quit or oppose vaping. It is not necessary to explain that individuals are sharing stories of their medical experiences; it would be more concise to simply relate those stories if appropriate for the scope and level of detail for the article. The intro already says that some people were hospitalized, so it's not really missing any needed summarizing by leaving out the proposed addition. If the outbreak has inspired a drop in the vaping rate among minors or the population generally, that would be a more interesting and more neutral fact to convey, but the BuzzFeed article doesn't say anything about whether the vaping rate has gone up or down. -- Beland (talk) 00:47, 7 February 2020 (UTC)
  • I added a second proposal. QuackGuru (talk) 01:24, 7 February 2020 (UTC)
    • The second proposal is a better summary and more neutral. But I would leave it out as well because it has more of a news tone than an encyclopedic tone, and it doesn't add any information of substance. -- Beland (talk) 02:00, 7 February 2020 (UTC)
      • I added a third proposal that is similar to the previous wording. QuackGuru (talk) 18:58, 9 February 2020 (UTC)
        • The third version sounds even better, but it's still not adding any substantive information to the summary and I think would be better left out for brevity. -- Beland (talk) 03:15, 10 February 2020 (UTC)
• Omit this needless statement. Of course some young people (also, some older people) are sharing their stories and encouraging others to not make the same mistakes. You might as well write that some young have access to the internet. Of course this is happening. There's no educational value in including this statement. IMO what this article really needs is not to say "Young people these days use the internet" but instead to have these (paragraph-formatted) lists of people removed, so that this article complies with the strictest interpretation of WP:MEDCASE and WP:LISTPEOPLE. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:36, 10 February 2020 (UTC)
• Weak No although option 3 is OK, I lean omit here because obvious details needn't be included, as a general rule it's best to avoid cluttering a lead with excessive pedestrian detail that an ordinary reader would know or would typically assume. It's not that long a sentence however so not a major stylistic issue if included. The tone and neutrality issues prevent me from endorsing either of the first two, although 2 is better than 1. I get what the author is trying to do here, but it's not what Wikipedia is for, I do encourage actions that serve that purpose at alternative outlets. 74.73.230.72 (talk) 20:34, 10 February 2020 (UTC)
• Omit, that sounds more like the lead to a news article than an encyclopedia article. As such, it's also rather temporal. Will that still be true in five years? Ten? No way to know. That's better explained in the article body where it can be contextualized. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 22:05, 10 February 2020 (UTC)
  • Would you prefer one of the proposals be added to Hospitalized_cases_in_the_vaping_lung_illness_outbreak#Hospitalizations section instead? That could also work. I used past tense for the third option. The tense can be changed for the other proposals. QuackGuru (talk) 22:12, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

  No, not really. They're rather redundant and more "newsy" than encyclopedic, and look like something one might find in a clickbait piece. We already include specific facts on when that's happened, and I think that's sufficient. So, I tend to agree with Whatamidoing, I don't think they're needed at all. Rather, in the article body, explain what happened, when, and contextualize it. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 23:56, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

  I could probably write a whole article on women being diagnosed with asymptomatic breast cancer via mammogram screening and "sharing their stories" and "encouraging other women" to get mammograms. No shortage of sources. The fact that I can source it doesn't prove that we need it in Wikipedia. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:22, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

• omit per WAID--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 12:33, 12 February 2020 (UTC)
• Omit all per WAID. That some people are "sharing stories" or "telling stories" is not encyclopedic information, and it's also like saying the sky is blue. Alcoholics, drug addicts, the obese, paraplegics, people who have survived car accidents... many people who go through ... anything ... share their story and try to help others avoid it or deal with it. Sorry, but this is magazine writing, not encyclopedia writing. Levivich 21:21, 13 February 2020 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Wow

It's actually looking like an encyclopedia article now. Great work, Beland! Schazjmd (talk) 21:01, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

Yes, this is a substantial improvement.

In a year or two, when the academic literature has had a chance to catch up, I hope that all of this can be replaced by actual research on the actual prevalence of various symptoms, etc., sourced to review articles. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:20, 22 February 2020 (UTC)

Yep. We're not in a position to SYNTH our way into a pre-empting of that process.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:09, 23 February 2020 (UTC)