User talk:Alexander Davronov/Archives/2021/April

April 2021

When adding links to material on external sites, please ensure that the external site is not violating the creator's copyright. Linking to websites that display copyrighted works is acceptable as long as the website's operator has created or licensed the work. Knowingly directing others to a site that violates copyright may be considered contributory infringement. This is particularly relevant when linking to sites such as YouTube or Sci-Hub, where due care should be taken to avoid linking to material that violates its creator's copyright. Wikipedia takes copyright violations very seriously, and persistent violators will be blocked from editing. Please take care not to link to illicit copies of copyrighted journal articles Alexbrn (talk) 02:19, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

ANI notice

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Thank you.

You're already aware of the discussion thread (which you opened); but I've added a specific recommendation.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:17, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

Rethinking your approach to sourcing in med/sci articles

Re, "All the sources agree on one single thing: Malassezia spp. feeds on human sebum which ...":
I don't doubt that's true, but primary research papers saying this are not appropriate sources. Cf. WP:SYNTH and WP:TRUTH. I think everyone here is going to keep repeating the same message to you until it sinks in: WP relies on high-quality secondary medical and scientific sources for medical and other scientific claims, not primary new-research papers, which are often proven incorrect by later research, and not secondary news material, which is not reliable for sci-med claims. It has nothing to do with this exact subtopic; it's just how WP operates generally with all such subjects.

If you actually work[ed] in this field, I think what's happening here – which is looking more and more like some kind of cognitive dissonance, a disbelief, an unwillingness to accept, a desire to circularly argue until you get the result you think is Right and True – is a common problem WP has with incoming editors from the sciences. Academics, research scientists, and medical professionals are used to following and being excited by the current primary research, which is where all the "action" is, and tend to treat systematic and literature reviews as boring old news, as dull homework to pass over unless they have some specific need to skim some of it for a background fact (and even then try to foist it off on some hapless grad-student assistant, the same way an attorney would have a paralegal do the grunt work of Shepardizing some caselaw). And they tend to think of science books written by their colleagues as popularization junk for the masses, thus beneath their professional attention.

WP is exactly the opposite: it depends entirely on the boring old news, and on analysis, evaluation, interpretation, and synthesis performed by competent off-site experts. WP wants nothing to do with recent and untested or partially tested claims published in journals. As I noted before, we tend to only cite primary research papers as "backup citations" for expert interest, after a secondary citation. (Well, in Good to Featured-status articles, anyway. Lots of crappy articles are sloppily written with misused primary-source journal citations, and these have to be replaced with secondary ones as the article improves. That is, mis-using primary citations may help keep an article from getting deleted outright, early on, but in the long run just creates more cleanup work for other editors to do, so it is bad idea from the start.) A primary-research journal paper can also be used as the sole citation for something permissible to cite to a primary source. E.g., if we're writing that a particular claim was controversial, the original paper is a proper source for what that claim stated (just as a novel is a proper source for a plot summary or a direct quotation from the work). Such a paper is not a proper source for the veracity/factuality of the underlying claim. That's the problem with the sourcing you're trying to do with primary-research papers. New research is akin to an accusation in this sense: the publication is proof that the accusation was made, but not that it is true. Even if other primary sources also make the same accusation. WP reports the claim as true only when a preponderance of reliable secondary sources (actually reliable for the subject at hand) agree that it is.

If you are thinking, "But that means sometimes WP will not have caught up to the current state of scientific knowledge", this is correct, and it is true of all encyclopedias and all tertiary sources like encyclopedias, by their very nature. This is not a bug for you to fix. Rather, be on the lookout for top-shelf secondary source material that permits updating the articles you want to update, within WP's parameters, not the parameters you may be used to from academic or clinical contexts.

PS, a minor nit-pick: See MOS:ORGANISMS; the correct formatting is "Malassezia spp." (interpolations like "spp.", "var.", "×", etc. do not take italics, only the Greco-Latinate name parts like "Malassezia" do).
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:10, 8 April 2021 (UTC)

@SMcCandlish: Don't you think it's better to write Essays on personal sub-pages instead of commenting on every user's talk page? You can easily back up it with a bunch of provisions etc so everyone can see it.

@SMcCandlish: but primary research papers saying this are not appropriate sources ... WP:SYNTH...
This provision disagrees with you: «Do not combine material from multiple sources to reach or imply a conclusion not explicitly stated by any of the sources. Similarly, do not combine different parts of one source to reach or imply a conclusion not explicitly stated by the source. I»^WP:SYNTH. By that statement about Malassezia spp. metabolism above I don't cross the limits of the WP:SYNTH as I don't draw any conclusions (doing so quickly breaches WP:RS) so I just dismiss this argument as lacking ground. You and others just have to admit that relatively to this you have no good way to justify opposition to addition. The same goes for notability. Just don't waste time.--AXONOV (talk) ⚑ 11:39, 8 April 2021 (UTC)

"Every" user's talk page? Let's not get too hyperbolic. Specific advice/complaints of an inter-editor nature belong in user talk, not article or guideline talk. I leave detailed messages on user talk pages when I think they may make a difference. The purpose of user talk pages is for editors to communicate with each other (and, whether we'd like it to be otherwise or not) mostly about disputes and problems. You can "dismiss" whatever you want to, but your interpretation of our sourcing policies is very clearly off, and everyone is telling you that it is off. The material you're quote and highlighting in odd places has nothing at all to do with the material you quoted from me. You just are not parsing this material correctly, not even close to correctly. You can either actually absorb how sourcing works on Wikipedia, or continue in the same vein. Doing the latter will eventually result in a topic ban, since it is disruptive. These things really don't work out any other way. WP has to be understood and edited on its own terms, not yours.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:06, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

Upstream

On your claim that "Upstream is a git-specific technical terminology": nope. On wikt:upstream you can find examples from 2002. The term "upstream kernel" was already used in 1998. And that's only what I could find with a 2 minute search. Nemo 20:52, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

@Nemo bis: Please, see Talk:Libreboot#Upstream. --AXONOV (talk) ⚑ 15:03, 14 April 2021 (UTC)