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Deleted Articles Proposed for Reinstatement -Post SSRI, Post-5-alpha reductase inhibitor sexual dysfunction

Some of you will remember or have been involved in discussions to delete the "Post-SSRI Sexual Dysfunction" article a few months ago, and a similar article on 5-alpha reductase inhibitors (finasteride, etc.) a few months before that. The post SSRI article was deleted based on lack of MEDRS compliant citations and undue weight. The 5-alpha article was also deleted, but I don't know the full story on that.

Shortly after the post-SSRI article was deleted (at my nomination), David Healy contacted me by email (my personal email was present in an old and deleted version of my home page) and requested a phone conversation. In said call he harshly criticized the deletion of the post-SSRI article and brought my attention to several posts on his website highly critical of the decision and of several Wikipedia individual editors involved in the decision. The page is here but the criticism seems to have been deleted and there is a large white space in its place. http://wp.rxisk.org/post-ssri-sexual-dysfunction-pssd-wikipedia-stumbles/

Healy, a long term critic of SSRIs and psychopharmacology in general, has now published a review article of the very limited set of case reports in the literature of individuals who say they have experienced permanent sexual dysfunction as a result of exposure to these drugs. I cannot see the article as it is behind a paywall, but it is medline indexed and so I suppose this represents a MEDRS compliant source. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24902508

There is now a request in place to restore the post-SSRI article , and my guess is that there is a request filed somewhere to reinstate the post 5-alpha sexual dysfunction article too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Sandstein#Proposed_restoration_of_.22Post-SSRI_Sexual_Dysfunction.22_page My guess is that the publication of the paper, the request for reinstatement of the articles, and the disappearance of the harsh criticism of specific Wikipedia editors from Healy's website were coordinated, but I have no evidence to support this (and its probably not relevant to the discussion).

I've posted my arguments on Sandstein's webpage regarding the SSRI article. Others who have an opinion are welcome (from my pov) to do so also, whether they agree with me or not. Formerly 98 (talk) 16:39, 29 July 2014 (UTC)

Is the "post-SSRI sexual dysfunction" diagnosis associated with Healy? If so, WP:GNG which governs which articles are notable for having their own article would suggest review articles published by Healy should not be given large weight for WP:N purposes as we want independent sources to establish notability of that diagnosis. Just a thought, I have no idea what their role with this diagnosis is. Yobol (talk) 17:38, 29 July 2014 (UTC)
No, this mainly came out of an academic group at University of Iowa as a bunch of case reports, and there was a review in a non-MEDLINE indexed journal that was written by a counselor from the student health clinic there who sometimes publishes with the aformentioned academic group. I'm not surprised that Healy got involved, as he has a pretty strong anti-SSRI angle, but he is technically an "independent" source as near as I can tell. Though it would be interesting to hear whether he is collaborating directly with the UI group. I'm sure he is monitoring this discussion, and would welcome his participation. Formerly 98 (talk) 19:02, 29 July 2014 (UTC)
I unfortunately do not have access to this particular article, so cannot comment in detail. One review article looking at 120 case studies would seem to be on the light side as far as the type of secondary sources we normally base a stand-alone article on. I think WP:WHENSPLIT would be the general guide on when to break off content to its own article, and the current material in SSRI does not seem to justify this. We should also be careful not to crease a WP:POVFORK needlessly. Is there any rush not to develop the specific section on the SSRI article first, and then organically split it when enough material is present? Yobol (talk) 20:00, 29 July 2014 (UTC)
Historically the problem with lack of MEDRS compliant sources has kept a cap on this over at the SSRI article as well. There are some very well-meaning people who want to add this material in as a way to gain attention for their cause and legitimacy for their claims, and I have not opposed adding a few sentences to the SSRI article even if the cited references fall a little short of the usual standards here. What I have opposed is 1) an entire article that did not contain a single MEDRS compliant reference and that was mainly original research based on case reports and in vitro studies, and 2) A huge paragraph over at SSRI that makes it sound like this syndrome is universally accepted as a well-established phenomenon. Its quite possible that this really is drug related, so I try to be sympathetic. But that has to be balanced with creating the impression that something highly speculative and apparently rare is well-established, mainstream, and very common. That would not be fair to other readers. Formerly 98 (talk) 20:46, 29 July 2014 (UTC)
The other issue would be that if Dr. Healy has added more SSRI cases to the original 20 or so, I'd be interested to know if he actually physically examined them or just interviewed them over the internet as part of the paid "Drug adverse effect evaluation" service he offers for $250-$500 on his website. If he has expanded the number of cases beyond that which was in the literature, that part would be primary research and I would hope that he at least had physically examined the cases. Formerly 98 (talk) 20:52, 29 July 2014 (UTC)

Article requests

Hi, I'm currently working on Female genital mutilation to prepare it for peer review, and wondered if someone could send me copies of any or all of the following (in order of preference):

  1. Shah G1, Susan L, Furcroy J. "Female circumcision: history, medical and psychological complications, and initiatives to eradicate this practice", Canadian Journal of Urology, 2009 Apr;16(2):4576-9.
  2. Dave AJ, Sethi A, Morrone A. "Female genital mutilation: what every American dermatologist needs to know", Dermatology Clinics, 2011 Jan;29(1):103-9. doi:10.1016/j.det.2010.09.002
  3. Momoh C. "A day in the life of ... a female genital mutilation/public health specialist", Midwives, 2010 Aug:50.
  4. Elchalal U, et al. "Ritualistic female genital mutilation: current status and future outlook", Obstetrical & Gynecological Survey, 1997 Oct;52(10):643-51.
  5. Momoh C. Female genital mutilation, Current Opinions in Obstetrics and Gynaecology, 2004 Dec;16(6):477-80.

Many thanks in advance, SlimVirgin (talk) 19:31, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

I'm somewhat surprised, normally I have very good access, but I was only able to get hold of #5. If you want it send me a Wikipedia-mail and I can attach it. -- CFCF 🍌 (email) 08:55, 29 July 2014 (UTC)
Thank you, will do. SlimVirgin (talk) 23:04, 29 July 2014 (UTC)

Help requested with an edit to Odontoma

I fielded a question, as an OTRS agent from a reader, who noticed an inconsistency in Odontoma. I posed that question at Talk:Odontoma, where User:Axl has helpfully contributed. I don't have enough subject matter knowledge to edit the article, although Axl's edit suggests that a broad edit noting the variety of conclusions on the literature might help. Would someone be willing to make an edit to the article, so that future readers are not confronted with the apparent inconsistency? (Bluerasberry suggested that this would be the best place to ask for help).--S Philbrick(Talk) 11:59, 30 July 2014 (UTC)

Peer Review: Endometrial cancer

@Keilana: has requested a peer review of Endometrial cancer to prepare it for a GAN. Thought you guys might be interested. Review page can be found here. Zell Faze (talk) 00:39, 31 July 2014 (UTC)

Sex differences in medicine

Illness doesn't seem to be quite as commonly used any longer. This might be due to some people trying to separate the experience of a condition (do I experience any symptoms?) from the physical aspects (am I unhealthy, but asymptomatic?) Disease or medical condition might be more typical. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:36, 31 July 2014 (UTC)

Male contraceptive article

Comments are needed on the following matter: Talk:Male contraceptive#Removed content. A WP:Permalink is here. We have an IP who objects to the article stating that medical professionals do not regard the pull-out method as an effective method of contraception. For example, here the IP cites a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) source and states that the pull-out method is 96% effective. In this WP:Dummy edit edit, I've asked the IP to point to which part of the CDC source states that, since it's such a long source. Perhaps the phrasing that the IP objected to was worded a bit strongly, but there are many health professionals that recommend against the pull-out method or call it outright ineffective, and not just against sexually transmitted infections but with regard to preventing pregnancy as well. Flyer22 (talk) 23:42, 31 July 2014 (UTC)

Search the page for the words "Table 1". The IP is talking about perfect use. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:28, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

Page move

“No-Touch” surgical technique for penile prosthesis implantation should presumably be moved to No-touch surgical technique for penile prosthesis implantation (regardless of whether it gets merged, because the redirect would be kept). However, it's on the title blacklist, which means that moving it will require admin intervention. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:44, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

Done Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 23:56, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

injuries at work

could some editor please comment on whether and how we could start a new article that relates to injuries at work. have been looking at the how to guides for the past few days but still have got nowhereDocsim (talk) 06:12, 31 July 2014 (UTC)

Is there a how to guide for medically related articles?Docsim (talk) 06:15, 31 July 2014 (UTC)

Found a relevant article that already is in place on Wikipedia occupational injury. But would still consider the assistance asked for favorablyDocsim (talk) 06:26, 31 July 2014 (UTC)
Is this what you had in mind: WP:MEDHOW? -- CFCF 🍌 (email) 14:33, 31 July 2014 (UTC)
thanks that helps a lot.Docsim (talk) 01:50, 2 August 2014 (UTC)

Ebola virus disease

Got about half a million page views yesterday. Could use a few more eyes. May need protection. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 05:04, 2 August 2014 (UTC)

Edit request needs some knowledgeable help

I considered making the requested edit to Inguinal hernia surgery identified here. However, a comment that the journal may be unreliable (possibly added by User:Chris Capoccia in this edit) left me concerned, and I'd like someone with more knowledge to help out.--S Philbrick(Talk) 13:48, 2 August 2014 (UTC)

MEDRS difference of opinion at SSRI discontinuation syndrome

Would appreciate input on the discussion on the talk page of SSRI discontinuation syndrome. Mainly sourcing issues. Thanks. Formerly 98 (talk) 13:27, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

There are new sources and discussion and one of the sources was incorrectly listed. The correct source #7 is now up for review. Thanks! Alatari (talk) 11:02, 3 August 2014 (UTC)

User:Muffinator's edits on sex differences in medicine etc.

This user continues to try to adjust all autism related articles to fit his own world view of the condition.[1] I guess the question is what should we do about them? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 02:24, 31 July 2014 (UTC)

Autism is medically categorized as a neuro-developmental disorder, not an illness. There is nothing about the edit you've cited that violates medical consensus or Wikipedia policy. If you have a reliable source saying otherwise, then by all means keep that articles as is. I am operating as an agent of Wikipedia's policies. If there is any real issue here, it is on the part of User:Jmh649, who is being disruptive by obsessively reverting edits for the irrelevant reason that he lacks education in the field they pertain to. If you want to follow Wikipedia's policies, add a section to the article declaring a content dispute; neither this WikiProject page nor the administrative noticeboard are appropriate places to harass me. I'm editing the section header to reflect the nature of the content dispute, since it is exactly that and not about me personally. Muffinator (talk) 02:41, 31 July 2014 (UTC)
I have restored the text I wrote. Please do not edit it. Disorder and illness are used interchangeably. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 02:43, 31 July 2014 (UTC)
This appears to have solved this issue [2] Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 02:48, 31 July 2014 (UTC)
...and without any inquisition as to what we should "do about" you. That wasn't so hard, was it? Muffinator (talk) 02:54, 31 July 2014 (UTC)
Muffinator You aren't gaining in popularity for insulting people. Your previous edits were controversial and in defiance of the consensus, I suggest you refrain from any large-scale terminology change. -- CFCF 🍌 (email) 10:16, 31 July 2014 (UTC)
Wikipedia isn't high school; it's based on facts and relevance, not popularity. I don't go out of my way to insult people, nor do I care about being popular. Muffinator (talk) 18:23, 31 July 2014 (UTC)
The article should follow mainstream scientific opinion and terminology. 188.30.202.183 (talk) 07:03, 2 August 2014 (UTC)
WP:RM is for articles, not categories. That's WP:CFD. Autism comes under the medical project, obviously. And, whatever you may think, the proposed change does not meet the narrow definition used there of "uncontroversial" & should get a full CFD nom, per the instructions. Johnbod (talk) 11:10, 3 August 2014 (UTC)
Thank you for the technical correction. A notice on my talk page would have been more appropriate than this one since autism has nothing to do with medicine, obviously (you may have noticed that my use of the word "obviously" is similarly not an actual argument.) You seem to be attempting to recruit editors of a specific viewpoint. Muffinator (talk) 11:34, 3 August 2014 (UTC)
And what exactly is my "specific viewpoint"? I haven't a clue, and haven't actually looked at the pages. Johnbod (talk) 13:07, 3 August 2014 (UTC)
Most opinions about autism can be categorized as either pathology(typically uses medical model) or neurodiversity(typically uses social model). By coming to a medicine-related forum and telling people to "watchlist the current category name" you are attempting to weigh discussions in favor of pathology. Muffinator (talk) 21:00, 3 August 2014 (UTC)
!! Trust me, I have no favourite model of autism. But the subject has always been in the scope of this project. Johnbod (talk) 21:49, 3 August 2014 (UTC)
You said "Autism comes under the medical project, obviously." indicating that you have a medical view of the neurotype. That's okay; you're allowed to have opinions. No editor is free of bias, recognizing that is a vital step towards the neutrality. Muffinator (talk) 22:14, 3 August 2014 (UTC)

I feel that this section of this talk page should be relabeled as "Sex differences in medicine", or "Wikipedian categories", or basically anything but "User:Muffinator". This discussion is NOT about User:Muffinator. It is about an particular article edit, and more recently, a misplaced requested move, both of which happen to have been executed by Muffinator. There is no attempt to identify a pattern, nor has Muffinator even been accused of violating a particular Wikipedia policy, and even if they were, the appropriate place to address the issue would be Wikipedia:Requests for comment/User conduct, not WikiProject Medicine. Muffinator has not shown a particular interest in medicine-related articles and is not a member of the project. To continue to label discussions of a user's edits as discussions about the user constitutes harassment. Muffinator (talk) 12:34, 3 August 2014 (UTC)

Nonsense, we are discussing your edits and nothing else. I've removed the RfC and relabeled the heading. -- CFCF 🍌 (email) 12:48, 3 August 2014 (UTC)

Copy and pasting

This user User:Nnayak83 appears to be copy and pasting from sources in this article Quinvaxem . Thoughts? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 08:15, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

Have deleted Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 08:34, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

Ketamine

A COI editor Geraldwgaines has expressed concern about this article. This editor feels that ketamine is a promising treatment for mental health conditions and the article is likely to receive a high number of views. I have formatted the references providing free links to everything I could. I have identified possible additions on the talk page of the article. The article could use some work. If there is/are an editor(s) who can give the article some attention it is probably worthwhile. A higher quality article could withstand efforts to promote The Truth™ and attempts to right a great wrong better. - - MrBill3 (talk) 18:43, 2 August 2014 (UTC)

I'll try to find some time to join in on this one. I don't think he's completely out of the mainstream on the potential of the approach, there was a tremendous amount of enthusiasm for this at the NCDEU and other psychiatry meetings I attended in 2012. My database shows 5 ketamine products in development by 4 different companies, mainly involving different modes of administration. That in itself speaks volumes about how promising people see the approach, as pharma obviouly doesn't like to spend money running trials on generic drugs Formerly 98 (talk) 09:15, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

Draft:First Nations nutrition experiments / Lionel Bradley Pett

I have begun these two articles which are on the fringes of Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine. Draft:First Nations nutrition experiments still has a LONG way to go. I'd appreciate eyes, and advice on the name of the Draft: Stuartyeates (talk) 10:05, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

Cancer Research UK images

Diagram showing how the oesophagus, duodenum and small bowel are reconnected after Roux-en-y surgery for stomach cancer

Wiki CRUK John What is this?

Blue Rasberry (talk) 13:13, 30 July 2014 (UTC)

Hot from the upload - these are all the 390-odd body diagrams promised from CRUK. Please use them, and also help add more categories, or more precise ones. Some of them have a font issue - if you see any that don't look right please add https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Images_from_Cancer_Research_UK_(check_needed) to it, and they will be sorted out. Other types of images (infographics, lab shots, scientists...) will follow in due course (probably rather slowly). The OTRS ticket is being sorted out and will be added later. Thanks. Wiki CRUK John (talk) 15:38, 30 July 2014 (UTC)
W00t. This is fabulous - truly thrilled that this is working out! Well done Wiki CRUK John JFW | T@lk 20:16, 30 July 2014 (UTC)
Amazing, and especially great seeing as they are in svg format so they can be edited easily. Very clear and precise images! -- CFCF 🍌 (email) 10:13, 31 July 2014 (UTC)
As far as WP:COI is concerned, how do people feel about me adding these to articles? So far I have only done this twice, and I'm unlikely to have the time to do anything like as fully as they deserve, but I would like to do more of this. I'm listing the ones I do at: User:Wiki_CRUK_John#COI_corner. Some of the series showing the different T stages etc should probably get a mini-gallery. I am spending time adding more categories on Commons to the images, which I don't think involves COI. Let me know if you disagree. When I remember I will do this as User:Cancer_Research_UK_uploader (me again) which is the corporate upload account whose actions the OTRS ticket authorizes, and which is intended to outlast my time at CRUK (on Commons "role accounts" are ok). Anyway, comments on adding images would be welcome, whichever way. Wiki CRUK John (talk) 15:37, 4 August 2014 (UTC)
I am happy for you to add these images to articles. However if you are adding more than one image to an article, it may be better to use a gallery at the end of the article. Axl ¤ [Talk] 22:12, 4 August 2014 (UTC)
Yes, I can't see any individual COI at all there. 31.48.175.145 (talk) 08:46, 5 August 2014 (UTC)
On a related point, if you find an image and no article for it (we are still missing some articles on diseases), then you can list it at Wikipedia:Requested articles/Images and at Wikipedia:Requested articles/Applied arts and sciences/Medicine. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:19, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

Recent blog post about efforts to improve Wikipedia

[3] Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 09:02, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

Great stuff James! I do have one concern, regarding the public reiteration of the WP:VnT concept as such, simply stated. Both technically, because VnT is not now part of policy (cf the historical footnote in the first paragraph of WP:V) and from a communication angle, because I'm not so sure what the general public may make of a bare statement like that. 31.48.175.145 (talk) 10:57, 6 August 2014 (UTC)
As much as the general public en masse may hate to admit it—especially since science is supposed to be objective—I think most individuals understand that my truth isn't always the same as your truth. I suspect that "Oh, that's how they do it," won't be an uncommon reaction to James' summary of VnT. —Shelley V. Adams ‹blame
credit› 12:17, 6 August 2014 (UTC)

Nestle Nutrition Workshop series

For COI reasons, I am contributing towards an article on A2 milk via the talk page. The discussion is at the talk page and my proposed edit, because of its length, is currently at my sandbox. The proposed edit comprises two sections: one on the health concerns that led to the creation and commercialisation of a range of milk products free of the A1 beta-casein, and one on scientific reviews—the independent analyses of that science. I have included two major reviews by food safety authorities (2004, 2009) and two other reviews (2005, 2007). An editor has suggested that WP:MEDDATE would dictate that all but the 2009 review are outdated. He has suggested this source, a paper called "Milk A1 and A2 Peptides and Diabetes" included in a Nestle Nutrition Institute Workshop series pediatric program. All the papers at that workshop were edited by Roger A. Clemens (also the author of this paper) and were published by Karger and available through PubMed. Clemens' paper is nine pages long and cites and discusses 12 papers including some of the early New Zealand research and two of the reviews I propose using.

Two questions: (1) Given its method of publication, is this paper acceptable as a source for this purpose? (2) And because it focuses only on the possible links between milk and diabetes, does it in fact supplant those older reviews, which take a broader look at diabetes, coronary heart disease, atherosclerosis, schizophrenia and autism and their possible links to milk proteins? BlackCab (TALK) 03:25, 6 August 2014 (UTC)

Tricky one, imo, especially given a general lack of recent candidate MEDRS in a topic area with some (though not very much) relatively little recent primary research, coupled with a potential conflict of interest in the single author of the secondary source you're proposing proposed (PMID 21335999), given his strong links to Nestle. Maybe someone else can come up with something more substantial than an invitation to cautious wording and, perhaps, brevity in the light of the sourcing difficulties. 31.48.175.145 (talk) 18:59, 6 August 2014 (UTC)
Here's another look at the source from the publisher; it looks to have 3 editors (two other than the article), and published by Karger. Yobol (talk) 21:13, 6 August 2014 (UTC)
When there are so few reliable independent secondary sources I feel caution and concision in any redrafting or eventual changes should be priorities here. Just my 2c, 31.48.175.145 (talk) 08:03, 7 August 2014 (UTC)
Your own concision here is left me with some confusion. I have added the Clemens review (in two sentences): in essence his conclusion on diabates (the sole focus of his review) mirrors that of the EFSA: no proven link. Given the lack of a controversial finding, my feeling is that his contribution can safely be included alongside those of the NZFSA, Truswell and Kaminski, all of which consider a broader range of possible health effects. But this is what I'm also seeking guidance/consensus on. BlackCab (TALK) 00:14, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Cancer etiology and molecular pathogen

Hello again medical experts! One more old AfC submission in danger of being deleted. Is there anything here that should be kept? —Anne Delong (talk) 00:31, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

Fungation

A behavior of some malignant tumors... where is the best page to link this term to explain it please? 188.30.204.87 (talk) 23:14, 7 August 2014 (UTC)

Fungating lesion, maybe? WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:24, 8 August 2014 (UTC)
Perfect, thank you. 94.72.198.147 (talk) 09:16, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

Domestic violence article -- whether or not females are affected by domestic violence more than males are

Eyes and assistance are needed at the Domestic violence article from WP:MED editors. The preponderance WP:Reliable sources on the topic indicate that females are affected by domestic violence far more than males are. I stated at the article's talk page that per the WP:Due weight policy, we go by what the preponderance of WP:Reliable sources state; in other words, we give far more weight to what the majority of sources state than we do to what the minority of sources state. We also adhere to Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources (medicine) (WP:MEDRS) on medical topics -- what high-quality sources state. If men's rights editors (MRAs) are editing that article, that also needs attention, per Talk:Men's rights movement/Article probation.

See Talk:Domestic violence#The gendered nature of DV (and editors who seek to change this in the article) and Talk:Domestic violence#Neutrality Issue in Gender Aspects of Abuse Section for discussions on this matter. Below the latter discussion, an editor also created a "Gender Symmetry and IPV" discussion. WP:Permalinks are here and here. Flyer22 (talk) 14:35, 7 August 2014 (UTC)

As I've just commented on that article's talk page, with regard to "whether or not females are affected by domestic violence more than males are", it should really be differentiated between adults as victims and children as victims. It may well be that the gender difference is quite different for child than adult victims. --Hordaland (talk) 15:12, 9 August 2014 (UTC)
See my comment: Talk:Domestic_violence#Children--Penbat (talk) 15:37, 9 August 2014 (UTC)

Autism Research Institute

Proposal to cut and paste rewrite from Talk:Autism Research Institute/draft into blanked article. I think needed changes can be made after the cut and paste and that the draft is acceptable improvement of existing article. - - MrBill3 (talk) 18:29, 9 August 2014 (UTC)

Advance care planning

While patrolling the speedy deletion queue this morning, I came across a draft article on advance care planning that had basically been ignored by the articles for creation process. It looks reasonable to my eyes as a non-medical person, so I decided to salvage it and put it into mainspace: Advance care planning.

Could some WPMED people take a look at it and if it isn't reasonable either PROD it or nominate it for deletion? It just seemed a bit unfair that someone had gone to some effort to work on this article and then it was just going to be summarily deleted without anyone even looking at it. —Tom Morris (talk) 07:30, 9 August 2014 (UTC)

On a quick look the content seems reasonable, but there is probable COI by the author, whose only edits set this up. Many refs are links to a small Australian website, whose status is not explained, but which seems to offer training courses. Johnbod (talk) 07:55, 9 August 2014 (UTC)
My understanding is that the english, united states of america and canadian models differ quite a lot and should be included in this article.Docsim (talk) 01:33, 10 August 2014 (UTC)

MEDRS and High Functioning Autism.

I am pretty sure that WP:MEDRS applies to High functioning autism, however, an editor disagrees. Any help would be appreciated. [[4]]. Dbrodbeck (talk) 00:17, 9 August 2014 (UTC)

This same editor's edits were the topic of discussion here recently. [5]. It seems (s)he thinks HFA is not a medical condition so MEDRS does not apply. Anyway, I would appreciate a few more eyes on the talk page. Thanks. Dbrodbeck (talk) 00:24, 9 August 2014 (UTC)
User might need a topic area restriction. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 23:22, 9 August 2014 (UTC)
Yes, perhaps, this user's edits to autism related pages have become a real time sink. Dbrodbeck (talk) 23:23, 9 August 2014 (UTC)
After watching this editor's behavior on a medical topic while trying to claim it's not, I was going to say the same. It's rather difficult to claim this isn't a medical topic, though it seems the editor has convinced themselves otherwise. I'm not sure what else could be done since discussion doesn't seem to be going anywhere. Kingofaces43 (talk) 04:12, 10 August 2014 (UTC)

Alternative Medical System Section Order Disparity

Hi everyone, I have a question I would like to open to the community here about something I've noticed on alternative medicine pages. I have noticed several pages such as herbalism, ayurvedic, homeopathy, naturopathy, and applied kinesiology have a certain order but others such as acupuncture and chiropractic (more the former than the latter article) serve as examples of contrast and do not put the history section in the beginning (though the chiropractic article does have conceptual basis in the beginning and it could be argued that is at least somewhat related to the history section). So, is there a page that guides us on this or a policy about how to order sections in alternative medicine (system) articles? If so, can someone direct me to this page please? If not, perhaps we should discuss this issue since there seems to be a lack of uniformity in the articles. TylerDurden8823 (talk) 06:45, 10 August 2014 (UTC)

Not sure if there would be an advantage to uniformity. The altmed space is diverse enough that different topics may require different ordering. Generally, a chronological basis for ordering gives a natural reading order - so if there is a "History" section having it first would be reasonable. One thing to be alert to is a propensity from some POV-pushers to try and gather the "negative" material in one section and then push it down the article. Alexbrn talk|contribs|COI 07:41, 10 August 2014 (UTC)
WP:MEDMOS, we can discuss it further. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 14:43, 10 August 2014 (UTC)
Sure, let's move the talk there. TylerDurden8823 (talk) 15:50, 10 August 2014 (UTC)

ORCID

Further to discussions with some of you at Wikimania, may I encourage all those of you who contribute to medical articles - particularly, but not only, if you also contribute to academic literature - to register for an ORCID identifier, and to display it on your user page, using the {{Authority control}} template?

If you write a biography of a researcher, or other person with an ORCID, please include it in the article, or, better, in Wikidata.

Further details are on the project page at WP:ORCID. Thanks,

Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:50, 11 August 2014 (UTC)

Ebola

Tons of poor quality sources are being added. Would appreciate further input from medical editors. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 16:24, 10 August 2014 (UTC)

I see a lot of stuff that is in animals, primary research and the like, that I would normally cut. But also think people are probably pretty interested in experimental drugs for this given the virulence of the disease and the lack of approved therapies. What do you think is best?Formerly 98 (talk) 20:09, 10 August 2014 (UTC)
The article already makes clear that there are no approved treatments beyond supportive care. In addition, the latest appropriate secondary sources (PMID 23813435, PMID 22559078) already have been cited. All the animal studies are clearly identified as such and are in a separate research section segregated from the treatment section. Given the lack of approved treatments, I think mentioning the experimental treatments is acceptable and of high interest to readers. Boghog (talk) 20:59, 10 August 2014 (UTC)
Any very high-profile experimental treatment should be covered in a "research directions" section. If there are no peer-reviewed secondary sources available but there is consensus that something should be mentioned, the popular press is sometimes the only useful source. JFW | T@lk 21:44, 10 August 2014 (UTC)
Lots of stuff should stay in, with judicious use of 'animal studies', 'not yet peer reviewed' etc. Stuartyeates (talk) 23:59, 10 August 2014 (UTC)
Yes am okay with primary source being used a bit in the research directions section. Unhappy with them spreading throughout the rest of the article. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 06:33, 11 August 2014 (UTC)
Second that. Wiki CRUK John (talk) 14:27, 11 August 2014 (UTC)
Yes, that seems sensible. Maybe it would be useful to insert a See also header in the Treatment (and maybe eventually Vaccination) section to provide an internal link to #Research? 86.157.144.73 (talk) 14:53, 11 August 2014 (UTC)
When subjects are in the news, it's often best to wait a few weeks, until the attention dies down. WP:There is no deadline for removing lower-quality information, and being generous in collaboration might win us a few new editors. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:58, 11 August 2014 (UTC)

I added content this morning on treatments that the FDA is allowing to actually be used under Expanded access on the basis of the Animal Efficacy Rule and phase I data. I think this is important to help people understand that drugs are being tried in people experimentally and that it is not "wild west"-y but rather carefully regulated. Jytdog (talk) 16:28, 11 August 2014 (UTC)

Are they using acupuncture ? Alexbrn talk|contribs|COI 16:40, 11 August 2014 (UTC)
wise guy :) Jytdog (talk) 17:56, 11 August 2014 (UTC)

FRINGE and alt med (i know, i know) - seeking the messy middle

For those of you who are familiar with me, you know that I generally work on health and science related topics, and strongly uphold use of secondary, independent sources to determine what mainstream science/medicine has to say. I have been reflecting a lot on application of WP:FRINGE in alt med topics. I am coming to a conclusion that there are specific applications of specific alt med modalities, specifically as complementary medicine, that have become mainstream. For example, acupuncture as a field is (in my view) pseudoscience, since its notions of the body are pre-scientific. However, some applications of acupuncture have been more or less empirically validated enough that they have become widely accepted and are used in major medical centers as adjuncts for treating conditions like pain, some side effects of chemo, and some psychosomatic-like disorders... and are discussed in major medical textbooks. That is ~about~ as mainstream as it gets. So... my questions are, how do we discuss and source mainstream applications of alt med? I very much don't want to open the door to a) pro-acu folks rushing in to say things like "see, acupuncture (as in "all applications of acupuncture and the foundations of acupuncture") is not pseudoscience so stop treating it all under WP:FRINGE!" and b) more broadly, all altmed folks banging open the barndoors and pouring crap content into WP. It is hard to have a nuanced discussion about this, as POV-pushers from both sides render it more bitter & extreme than it needs to be, but I thought I would try to see if we can find the messy middle on this, which surely not satisfy purists on either side. Again, my questions are 1) how do we discuss and source the narrow applications of acupuncture that are relatively mainstream (using acu as a complementrary approach for pain, some side effects of chemo, and some psychosomatic-like conditions), and separate them from the FRINGEy stuff (like using acu to actually treat cancer)? 2) How do we do that, with the fierceness of POV on either wing? Thanks Jytdog (talk) 20:10, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

For homeopathy, also a WP:FRINGE thing which nevertheless has popular acceptance and which is used in "mainstream" medicine, there is a separate article, Regulation and prevalence of homeopathy which is summarized in the main article. Could a similar approach work for acu*? Alexbrn talk|contribs|COI 20:36, 5 August 2014 (UTC)
IMO, there is much too much time and energy spent trying to label (or unlabel) something as WP:FRINGE or pseudoscience. There are plenty of "mainstream" (i.e. widely prescribed/performed) treatments that have no evidence for them (or have good evidence against their use), as there are alt med treatments. If they are widely used, we state that. If those widely used treatments have not been shown to be effective, we state that too, and this should apply to all medical treatments, "alt-med" or not. How to deal with POV pushing, however, has been a chronic issue that we will not likely solve on this talk page. Yobol (talk) 20:57, 5 August 2014 (UTC)
I second what Yobol said. TylerDurden8823 (talk) 01:27, 6 August 2014 (UTC)
Thanks for these initial answers. Alexbrn, this to me, is not "messy middle" that is mainstream, but rather tells the story of government after government not funding it. I don't think homeopathy has the same kind prevalence as CAM does in the US. (I am using CAM to mean the set of stuff that has semi-mainsteam accept as adjunct to medicine for certain uses). Yobol I hear you, but my purpose in raising was exactly to begin asking, how to do we achieve this? If not here, then where do you think the most fruitful general conversation this can be had? I chose to open this here, because any solution that is figured out without including WikiProject Medicine will not hold. Thanks. Jytdog (talk) 02:13, 6 August 2014 (UTC)
Taking a global view, it seems I think that homeopathy is more mainstream in Europe/Asia, not so much in America; acu* is more mainstream in Asia/America and not so much in Europe? In any case there are many meta-similarities between these topics and it's interesting that our homeopathy article is generally more quiet and stable (and better written) than our acupuncture/chiropractic articles. I suspect this may simply be down to there being more editors active on homeopathy and clearer sourcing. I suspect also than many of the WikiProject members here judge they have better uses for their time than engaging in the endless to-and-fro over certain aspects of these few contentious altmed articles (and I think they'd be right!). Alexbrn talk|contribs|COI 04:48, 6 August 2014 (UTC)
I haven't ever followed that article, but I've heard that the primary reason it's in such good shape is because of the efforts of one pro-homeopathy editor, back in the early days (before FRINGE was written). WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:39, 6 August 2014 (UTC)
@Jytdog: I think that POV pushing has been an ongoing and troubling pattern since the start of Wikipedia, and infects every controversial area, not just alt-med. I'm not sure where a discussion of this would start, but I know controversial topics like alt med is why certain subject areas are under discretionary sanctions. How to fix the problem is way above my pay grade, unfortunately. Yobol (talk) 21:09, 6 August 2014 (UTC)
A rapid glance at the Wikimania presentation titles seems to suggest that POV pushing doesn't garner much attention there. Yet the problem must surely be a priority for the WMF as well as the community, both as an intrinsic concern and because of its attritional effects on long-term content editors. 86.157.144.73 (talk) 08:46, 7 August 2014 (UTC)

The solution is to include only the highest quality sources

1) how do we discuss and source the narrow applications of acupuncture that are relatively mainstream (using acu as a complementrary approach for pain, some side effects of chemo, and some psychosomatic-like conditions), and separate them from the FRINGEy stuff (like using acu to actually treat cancer)?

It's simple - Just accept only review articles from high impact factor journals or authoritative medical textbooks and nationwide health organizations. Everything else has to be removed.

1)2) How do we do that, with the fierceness of POV on either wing?

We do that by removing all health claims and opinions that aren't sourced from a high impact factor journal or an authoritative medical textbook or nationwide health organization. -A1candidate (talk) 14:27, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

in some ways... one can only say "yep" to that... but it doesn't get to the heart of actually implementing this in a complex topic like acu, where positions can be pretty dug in. I think we need to perhaps refocus - and get everyone editing there to agree (!) to focus the article on how acu is actually used in the mainstream and dramatically reduce the focus on fringe-y uses and underlying mechanisms... Jytdog (talk) 15:34, 8 August 2014 (UTC)
The problem with this proposal is that on the WP:FRINGE there are often NO "review articles from high impact journals" on a topic that describes it in sufficient detail to fill out an entire Wikipedia article, which is part of the reason why we have WP:PARITY, and why we can use "pro-fringe" sources as a description for what the fringe advocates believe (though not necessarily that their beliefs are correct). Yobol (talk) 16:19, 8 August 2014 (UTC)
(edit conflict) (I agree with Yobol, too.)
This is a fairly lousy rule. "Only high impact factor" translates into avoid specialty journals, non-English sources, small journals, and new journals, none of which are exactly signs of poor quality! It means choosing journals that that publish very rapidly, that like to publish papers with dozens of co-authors, and that run short articles and/or reviews instead of detailed articles on major scientific advances—none of which are exactly signs of high quality (although the overweighting of reviews is convenient for us). It also means that you'd risk accepting articles outside of a journal's expertise, which MEDRS discourages (who cares if the editors know anything about the subject? It's got a high impact factor!).
My suggestion would be more work: Look over all the textbooks and all the review articles in all the academic journals. Then figure out what due weight is, based on all the POVs.
(On a completely unrelated note, if anyone has ideas about how to convince the California Board of Registered Nursing to stop accepting classes on aura management and non-contact therapeutic touch as continuing education credit for nurses, please leave a note on my talk page.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:16, 8 August 2014 (UTC)
yobol and WAID, i agree that this is what each and every editor ~should~ do in order to develop a complete and nuanced perspective and to be able to really express the range of idea from the mainest-stream to the fringiest, with care and nuance. respectfully, this does not address how to reach the messy middle in a contested articles with POV-warriors all around, where even agreeing on what sources are acceptable can be difficult to impossible. restricting all sides to using what the most mainstream sources say would probably leave the article silent on many things, but clearly discussing what is mainstream, without the clutter/clatter of the zillion side topics one could go into. yes? Jytdog (talk) 17:51, 8 August 2014 (UTC)
I've pretty given up on the major altmed articles. There are too many true believers (on both sides). You will never get agreement about what sources are acceptable. It's an open secret that people on both sides first check possible sources for POV before considering anything else. If we could topic-ban anyone who cares about the subject, we might make progress—but if you don't care, why would you bother working on the article? WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:25, 9 August 2014 (UTC)
(as for the nursing CME...oy, california! birthplace of so much of what is most rotten, what is best, and most just deeply weird in Ameircan culture! Jytdog (talk) 17:54, 8 August 2014 (UTC))
I suppose soliciting public ridicule from their out-of-state colleagues would be seen as provocative? Just askin'... LeadSongDog come howl! 18:28, 8 August 2014 (UTC)
I don't know, LeadSongDog. Shame can be very effective, but what if all the nursing orgs are permitting this? I might prefer not to find out that nurses everywhere are doing this.
(To be clear, I wouldn't mind a practical class on 'how to cope with your patients who believe in astrology, auras, or whatever', but 'let's teach you how to heal someone's aura' is IMO a religious activity, not a professional one.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:25, 9 August 2014 (UTC)

Should we conform to scientific consensus on acupuncture?

Mayo Clinic
"The current scientific theories provide a basis for stating that acupuncture has an effect on the nervous system" [1]
Johns Hopkins School of Medicine
"The modern scientific explanation is that needling the acupuncture points stimulates the nervous system to release chemicals in the muscles, spinal cord, and brain." [2]
National Cancer Institute (USA)
"Acupuncture may work by causing physical responses in nerve cells, the pituitary gland, and parts of the brain" [3]
A Scientific Statement From the American Heart Association
"In the manual form of acupuncture, the mechanism of effect appears to be through sensory mechanoreceptor and nociceptor stimulation induced by connective tissues being wound around the needle and activated by mechanotransduction. In the case of electroacupuncture, the effects appear to additionally involve the stimulation of peripheral nerve fibers, including vagal afferents, that in turn activate central opioid (and other) receptors or anti-inflammatory reflex pathways. Reflex increases in sympathetic activity may also be reduced by electroacupuncture. The role of mechanoreceptor stimulation in the BP reductions in animal models is supported by the ability to attenuate this effect by gadolinium, which blocks stretch-activated channels. Both forms of acupuncture have similar central nervous system effects, although electroacupuncture tends to have a greater intensity of effect as determined by functional magnetic resonance imaging studies in humans." (PMID 23608661)
National Health Service (Britain)
"It is based on scientific evidence that shows the treatment can stimulate nerves under the skin and in muscle tissue." [4]

-A1candidate (talk) 02:16, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

Interesting image

A doctor contacted WMF (OTRS) and provided a scanned copy of a hand colored copper plate image of a brain, showing the limbic system. This came from a book in his collection, which he has packed for a move, so I do not know the title for sure, but my guess is that it is the book: Traité d'Anatomie et de Physiologie by Félix Vicq-d'Azyr published in 1786.

The doctor suggested it would be useful in Limbic system. In addition, I think it should be in the article about the author.

I'm reaching out here for two reasons, first, on occasion, we get something that isn't what it purports to be, so I'd like someone with expertise to take a look at it.

Second, I don't think I should just drop the photo into either article by itself, so I hope to find someone who can add some relevant text.

I've uploaded the image here (probably need to improve the title)

Drawing of brain

(Originally posted to Doc James, but he seems to be on vacation)--S Philbrick(Talk) 13:41, 9 August 2014 (UTC)

Doc James planned to speak at Wikimania 2014. --Ancheta Wis   (talk | contribs) 15:18, 9 August 2014 (UTC)
  • Comment: I think the image looks way too colorful for something published in 1786. Most of the anatomical drawings that I've seen from this era are largely black and white. If I had to make a guess, I would put the date of publication somewhere around the middle of the 20th century.
For comparison purposes, see this drawing published in Gray's Anatomy (ca. 1900). Perhaps French anatomists were ahead of everyone else, who knows?
Anyway, the Hagströmer Library at Sweden's Karolinska Institute has a fine collection of drawings found in Traité d'Anatomie et de Physiologie, which you can see for yourself here. They all look very different from this image.
-A1candidate (talk) 16:19, 9 August 2014 (UTC)
I found this discussion of the book. It states, "The atlas has some of the finest coloured plates of the brain and nervous system that are to be found in neurological literature.'. Not offering as proof, but as support.--S Philbrick(Talk) 16:59, 9 August 2014 (UTC)
Oops, I looked at the Gray's image, but not the next link, which appears to be the same link as yours. Oddly, I thought it was supportive, while you concluded the opposite.--S Philbrick(Talk) 17:02, 9 August 2014 (UTC)
This link identifies nearby libraries with the book. Perhaps someone is near enough to a library to check. I see that a copy sold at Christies for $22,500, so it may not be in the open stacks.--S Philbrick(Talk) 17:09, 9 August 2014 (UTC)

Clarify, why would we need to go review the book so that it is what it is? I have no problem believing this is pre 1923 and PD, which means it doesn't even need to be attributed properly. Any other assumptions are WP:Bad faith -- CFCF 🍌 (email) 12:31, 10 August 2014 (UTC)

Added- -- CFCF 🍌 (email) 12:37, 10 August 2014 (UTC)
it appears as number 16 or 17 on this BnF search, but the linked server [6] seems to be unavailable right now. Title does say "planches coloriées", so it seems plausible. LeadSongDog come howl! 22:37, 10 August 2014 (UTC)
It's back up. Scanned monochrome of the same drawing is here. So definitely Félix Vicq-d'Azyr. LeadSongDog come howl! 22:56, 10 August 2014 (UTC)
Further, here and here is the numerical key and explanatory text for Plate XX. LeadSongDog come howl! 23:35, 10 August 2014 (UTC)
I will note as an aside, for the sake of clarity, that public domain works certainly do need to be attributed properly. While adding an unattributed PD image to a Wikipedia article (or any other document) wouldn't violate copyright, failing to include proper attribution absolutely would constitute plagiarism. (And, of course, providing full attribution information makes it easy to verify the origin and contents of the work, and its public domain status—something that may be important to future editors of the Wikipedia article, and to individuals who may wish to reuse the image in other contexts.) TenOfAllTrades(talk) 05:01, 12 August 2014 (UTC)
My question simply concerned why we put this image under such scrutiny, noone as far as I know has checked any of the 6000+ images that I have uploaded once I've already given the PD-source. (And yes of course they need to be attributed on Wikipedia, I just meant if it is older than 1923 - which it most certainly is, copyright law wouldn't require us to do so.) -- CFCF 🍌 (email) 07:49, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Clete Kushida

Dear medical experts: Here's another of those old AfC submissions. Is this a notable medical person? Should the article be edited to NPOV instead of being deleted as a stale draft? —Anne Delong (talk) 15:47, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

This researcher sounds notable, having served as president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Sleep. However, the references need to be improved. -A1candidate (talk) 17:29, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

Linking to "authors"

Hey All. I think linking to authors has the potential to 1) increase our transparency to our readership 2) make clear to potential editors that they CAN edit Wikipedia and thus possibly increase editor numbers. I have created an example of how this would look here on the heart failure article. To make this change widely of course would require a massive discussion / RfC. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 14:57, 10 August 2014 (UTC)

I actually like it a lot after looking at the HF page. I agree that it's a nice idea. TylerDurden8823 (talk) 16:08, 10 August 2014 (UTC)
This is super handy, I like it very much. Keilana|Parlez ici 19:06, 10 August 2014 (UTC)
I like it, is there any way to put the pie charts closer to the top?Formerly 98 (talk) 20:02, 10 August 2014 (UTC)
Yes this is possible and is something I am working on.
Anyone who uses the gadget (under special:preferences) "Display an assessment of an article's quality as part of the page header for each article." is going to see this: HF Screenshot. One option is to simply move the text to the next line using wikitext instead of html, since that's what causes the problem here. Simply moving it to the right isn't really feasible, since the length of that text can be pretty long in some articles. E.g., using that gadget and viewing amphetamine displays "A good article from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Currently a featured article candidate." Seppi333 (Insert 2¢ | Maintained) 20:50, 10 August 2014 (UTC)
I think it needs widespread project-wide consensus as part of a Village Pump or RFC. I see a lot of benefit but I wouldn't want it to be on some articles and not on others. Could it be made into a tab at the top of the page? For the average reader, it is more meaningful than "history". JFW | T@lk 21:44, 10 August 2014 (UTC)
Yes agree. Just starting discussion here. I do realize that we are going to need the support of 800+ Wikipedians to make it happen. I am going to draft a proposal that is more complete soon. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 06:40, 11 August 2014 (UTC)
EpochFail gave a presentation at Wikimania about giving credit to contributors and he has some mock ups of how this could look. Blue Rasberry (talk) 09:59, 11 August 2014 (UTC)
Bug report: The "Authors" link overlaps with the text "A B-class article from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia" under the title. (I have User:Pyrospirit/metadata's gadget turned on (in your prefs, "Display an assessment of an article's quality as part of the page header for each article."). WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:52, 11 August 2014 (UTC)
This is a mockup only. The actual change will be done in a different way that will not cause problems. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 05:14, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

My personal preference is a tab, but I think this is an excellent idea, and will back it fully. For readers to see that articles are often the work of a collaboration of a few editors will hopefully get more people to understand how to start contributing. -- CFCF 🍌 (email) 07:42, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

Yes having a tab was discussed. Much harder to do technically. Also IMO this fits well in the byline Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 18:24, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

Dan Olmsted

User:Parabolooidal recently removed this project's banner from Talk:Dan Olmsted. As neither that user nor myself are members of this project, I thought the issue should be brought to the project's attention: Is Dan Olmsted within the scope of this project, or should the banner stay removed? Muffinator (talk) 20:23, 11 August 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for asking here, Muffinator, as I suggested in my edit summary. You beat me to the punch! Parabolooidal (talk) 20:26, 11 August 2014 (UTC)
I think that one could go either way. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:26, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

Clean up needed

Environmental toxicology needs some attention. This edit added some "sources" that are just plain numbers. The article has been blanked and reverted a couple of times (copyvios?) in the past, so these sources might be recoverable in the article history, but it needs someone to sit down and sort through what happened. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:48, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

Good catch. I have a few similar articles on my watchlist since one of my areas of expertise is pesticides, but I hadn't seen this one yet. That one might take a little work, so I'll have to put it further down the to-do list, but I'd be happy to bounce ideas around if anyone else from medicine or other science related projects want to work on it in the meantime. Kingofaces43 (talk) 05:00, 13 August 2014 (UTC)

Template for discussion: Autism cure movement

Hello WikiProject Medicine,

There is currently a bit of a pickle about a template I nominated: Wikipedia:Templates_for_discussion/Log/2014_August_10#Template:Autism_cure_movement. There's also proposal to rename the template to Template: Medical model of autism. However, the article Medical model of autism was originally called Autism cure movement. The editor who proposed the rename has done a good job in removing some of the sociological "movement" aspects of that article, but, as I wrote at the TFD: "I'm still concerned about it being misrepresented in terms of how much it is 'promoted' in the cultural sense. From the limited research I did on Google Books, it seems to be more of a scientific topic, not an advocacy one. Autism awareness/research/treatment 'movements' certainly exist, in the same way there is a 'movement' to cure breast cancer, but I think that they use the medical model as a basis, rather than the two terms being synonymous. Perhaps some folks who do regular work on medical articles and are familiar with the Medical model of disability can weigh in as well?"

Any input would be appreciated. --Holdek (talk) 05:29, 13 August 2014 (UTC)

User:Overagainst

Is repeatedly removing high quality content at vitamin D without consensus. Has not joined the discussion on the talk page. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 04:52, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

And now we have people adding primary sources. Why can we note maintain a middle group (not use primary source but not delete high quality recent review articles). Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 17:12, 12 August 2014 (UTC)
What Doc James calls "high quality content" is reviews of research. It would be barely acceptable if under a section called 'Research on supplementation' he had his 9 subsections on everything from mortality to cancer. But instead he completely altered the article and under the lede we have an extended discussion of supplementation (we all get most of our vitamin D from sun synthesis) that does not mention the emerging evidence of adverse effects from supplementation which the Institute of Medecine cautioned about. :Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Medicine-related articles"Ensure that your writing does not appear to offer medical advice [...] Wikipedia is not a collection of case studies, and excessive examples should be avoided". In the light of that look at the current Vitamin D 'Pregnancy' subsection which Doc James thinks approriate:-
"Low levels of vitamin D in pregnancy are associated with gestational diabetes, pre-eclampsia, and small infants.[43] The benefit of supplements, however, is unclear.[43] Pregnant women who take an adequate amount of vitamin D during gestation may experience positive immune effects.[44] Pregnant women often do not take the recommended amount of vitamin D.[44] A trial of supplementation has found 4,000 IU of vitamin D3 superior to lesser amounts in pregnant women for achieving specific target blood levels.[44]"
Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Medicine-related articles:- "Wikipedia should concisely state facts about a subject. It should not discuss the underlying literature at any length." How is this and the other subsections not synth of research and implied medical advice. We need to get back to an article based on the Institute of Medicine Dietary Reference Intakes for Calcium and Vitamin D ( 2011 ), which states: "Outcomes related to cancer, cardiovascular disease and hypertension, and diabetes and metabolic syndrome, falls and physical performance, immune functioning and autoimmune disorders, infections, neuropsychological functioning, and preeclampsia could not be linked reliably with calcium or vitamin D intake and were often conflicting". Conflicting means that sometimes the outcomes were WORSE. When sources contradict one another; the IoM is saying there are indications of harm. We can't ignore that, and add wild speculation that pregnant women in general are vitamin D deficient and may improve their health by taking 4000IU a day. The most authoritative medical source says research on effects of vitamin D supplementation on health are contradictory and explicitly cautions that there are indication of harm from vitamin D supplements, and further says that a dose of 4000 IU is where harm may begin to appear.Overagainst (talk) 17:57, 12 August 2014 (UTC)
Great to have the discussion. "The benefit of supplements, however, is unclear." is not medical advice but a statement of fact. Probably best to have this discussion on the vit D talk page though. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 18:04, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

The reason why Overagainst is wrong is that while on the one hand vitamin D is a controversial topic within the medical community, Overagainst will prefer to have a Wiki article that not only takes one particular position but which would pretend as if there is a large scientific consensus in favor it. The IoM had the difficult task to make decisions regarding the RDA and the UL, and they must take the most conservative approach here based on accepting any hints of harm while demanding very rigorous proof of benefits. Wikipedia can use the IoM report as a tertiary review, but we must be careful when taking IoM recommendations at face value; not only are we not in the business of giving medical advice, but the scientific arguments for the IoM's recommendations are not based on an evaluation principle that is suitable for a pure scientific review (because of the wide safety margins).

See also this Nature News article: "A vociferous debate about vitamin-D supplementation reveals the difficulty of distilling strong advice from weak evidence." Count Iblis (talk) 18:29, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

Doc James, I already gave almost the exact same arguments at the vitamin D talk page here and got little response from you beyond the rationale of 'high quality sources' (and bikeshed screeds from Count Iblis). You came here to get an opinion, and now I have given my side. Lets just wait and see what others on the board think.Overagainst (talk) 18:40, 12 August 2014 (UTC)
I've looked over the article quickly. My first thought is that it would be good to re-organize the ==Effects==. Right now, it's basically ==Effects of supplementation==, with ===Deficiency=== and ===Excess=== almost as afterthoughts. The article would IMO do a better job of providing basic educational information with an outline that looked more like this:
==Effects==
A paragraph or so about what it does in the body
===Deficiency===
===Excess consumption===
===Supplementation===
(the rest of the article)

or perhaps more like this: 

==Effects==
A paragraph or so about what it does in the body
===Deficiency===
===Excess consumption===
(middle of the article goes here)
==Recommendations==
===Supplementation===
(I currently like the first one better.) The overall idea is that anything about supplementation goes in the specific section, and anything not about supplementation goes in the others.
Also, Overagainst has a point about providing too much detail. For example, the entire ====Autoimmune diseases==== subsection could probably be reduced to a single sentence: "Low levels of Vitamin D have been linked to asthma and multiple sclerosis, but supplementation does not appear to help." WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:50, 12 August 2014 (UTC)
I suspect vitamin D supplementation (its effects, controversies, etc) has probably enough material for an entire article all by itself. Yobol (talk) 22:00, 12 August 2014 (UTC)
The article looked much better in the past, it was better organized and all the details about the effects of supplementation were not included then. But it was precisely all the campaigning by Overagainst to warn against vitamin D supplementation the past few years that led to the article being focussed too much on supplementation. Obviously if we were to focus primarily on the biology of vitamin D (as we should), then the article would have to be based on the appropriate sources for that. If we then write something about toxicity, you'll be forced to consider review articles like this which will tell you that: "...the wealth of animal studies and human anecdotal reports of vitamin D intoxication indicate that plasma 25(OH)D3 is a good biomarker for toxicity, and the threshold for toxic symptoms is ≈750 nmol/L. This threshold value implies that 25(OH)D concentrations up to the currently considered upper limit of the normal range, namely 250 nmol/L, are safe and still leave a broad margin for error because values significantly higher than this value have never been associated with toxicity."
This clearly doesn't fit in Overagainst's agenda. He wants the article to warn against using a few thousand IU's per day, but there are only a few odd results that suggests harm at those levels; these results typically get debunked when new evidence comes in. However, at any given time there is always such an odd article that has not yet been debunked. We deal with that problem on Wikipedia by only allowing secondary review articles to be used. But an article focussed on supplementation will be based on the IoM report which allows for extremely weak suggestions of harm at low dosages being included. This then opens the door to get the information from such dubious primary articles suggesting harm to be included. We can read here: "Another criticism levelled at the report has to do with the IOM's warning that too much vitamin D could cause harm. In the only clinical trial claiming risk, elderly women treated with a single 500,000-IU dose of vitamin D annually fell and fractured their bones more often than those in the placebo group. Many researchers find the study ridiculous. "No one absorbs 500,000 IU a day from the Sun, so why would you give that as a supplemental dose?" says Edward Giovannucci, a nutritional epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts."
Putting criticisms of the IoM aside (they obviously need to be extremely cautious), we can still see that a single article that would normally not be taken seriously in a review article article and would therefore normally not find its way in a Wikipedia article made its way into Wikipedia at the expense of what the literature says about toxicity. Count Iblis (talk) 22:48, 12 August 2014 (UTC)
On looking the article over, and then doing a Pubmed search on the subject, I am left with the strong impression that the article is pushing one side of a controversy. It looks like NICE's draft guidance is suggesting supplementation for those at risk of what current standards call "deficiency". https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/gid-phg71/resources/implementing-vitamin-d-guidance-draft-guideline2 Formerly 98 (talk) 23:01, 12 August 2014 (UTC)
Yes, in Britain a supplement is recommended for pregnant women, but it is of 400 IU (10 ug) a day, not 4000IU (100mcg) a day, which is the dosage the current article pregnancy subsection mentioned as appropriate, and was non too subtly advocating by using synth of research reviews. Overagainst (talk) 11:00, 13 August 2014 (UTC)
There are many reliable sources that do recommend taking 4000 IU/day, but that should not be a concern to us as we're not in the business of giving medical advice. What you are doing is blocking any indirect mention of the research results just because one could distill from the information that 4000 IU/day is recommended by these sources, and that is where you are violating Synth (you combine this information what the now 4 year old IoM report is saying and you then conclude that the newer review article must be wrong, therefore we must not include that information). What is known about vitamin D toxicity is that healthy persons need at least 40,000 IU/day over several weeks to get vitamin D toxicity (and even toxicity at 40,000 IU/day in healthy people ahs never been observed, the lowest dose proven to have caused toxicity is 77,000 IU/day, the 40,000 IU/day is calculated from the known data as a theoretical lower limit for toxicity in healthy persons). Anything else is unproven speculation, but the IoM does have to take any vague hints about that serious, therefore they stuck to the 4000 IU/day (which was actually motivated by an earlier result by this and other research groups proving that 4000 IU/day is safe, therefore you could chose the UL at that level, and that for ten year olds and older people). So, all this hysteria about vitamin D supplementation at the expense of writing a good article is misplaced. Count Iblis (talk) 16:25, 13 August 2014 (UTC)

Human gonad move discussion

Opinions are needed on the following matter: Talk:Human gonad#Requested move 13 August 2014. A WP:Permalink is here. Flyer22 (talk) 17:15, 13 August 2014 (UTC)

Skeletal deformities is a redlink. Does anyone have a suggestion? I'm copyediting Four Big Pollution Diseases of Japan. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:27, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

We have bone disease Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 02:34, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

Use of the wording "commit suicide"

Opinions are needed on the following matter: Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#Wording on articles about suicide in line with recommended best practice based on research. A WP:Permalink for the discussion is here. Flyer22 (talk) 03:38, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

Well, judging by the discussion there, more opinions probably are not needed. But opinions from WP:Med editors can perhaps add a different perspective to the discussion. Flyer22 (talk) 03:47, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

Obesophobia

nominated for deletion at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Obesophobia Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 12:21, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

Copy and paste detection pilot

The tool is up and running in beta form for only medical articles. The results are here Wikipedia:MED/Copyright. Will likely need a bit of adjusting. I will look at things in detail in a week or two when I make it home. If you are interested please take a look and provide feedback on the talk page / fix copyright issues found. It is still in a rough stage so I imagine there will be a lot of false positive. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 16:24, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

Fluoroquinolone Research Foundation

This is an advocacy group, which has apparently been causing problems with fluoroquinolone antibiotic articles, according to departed editor User:Alfred Bertheim.[7]

There are several links to their website still present in articles.[8] It would be great if a medical author could check these out.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 04:09, 13 August 2014 (UTC).

oy thanks for pointing that out! This is exactly the kind of thing that Formerly 98 has been trying to clean up and has been posting here about.Jytdog (talk) 09:17, 13 August 2014 (UTC)
I removed the fqresearch references from the articles but on the flumequine I got reverted by a big scary administrator! :-O I believe that Formerly 98 and User:Alfred Bertheim are the same person, I could be wrong. That fluoroquinolone group no longer exists so retaining any URLs is pointless and thus I don't think that I should have been reverted. The editor (who I remember due to me trying to do some unofficial mentoring to improve his editing) from that fluoroquinolone research group left Wikipedia and closed his website years ago. I have seen it wrongly claimed that the editor's site was about suing the drug companies, it was a pressure group whose main aim was to get the FDA to give suitable warning in patient leaflets regarding certain long-term side effects such as tendinitis, peripheral neuropathy, CNS toxicity etc. I remember the editor in question, and hoped with coaxing and time his editing could be improved. Undoubtedly some of his editing was biased and caused problems but I believe that he was well meaning. I believe that most of the issues have now been resolved or am I wrong?--WholeNewJourney (talk) 16:23, 14 August 2014 (UTC)
Yes, I used to edit under the name Alfred Bertheim, its a long story. I went to the article you pointed out and deleted the entire "History of the Black Box Warnings" section. Flumequine was never approved for human use in the United States. Use in animals would not have been covered by the Black Box warnings, and the FDA has no authority outside the US. So the entire section was irrelevant to the drug that is the subject of the article. Formerly 98 (talk) 16:52, 14 August 2014 (UTC)
Hi formerly 98, thanks for your feedback. Your edit makes sense.--WholeNewJourney (talk) 17:04, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

Call for health information in Swahili

There is a call here for health information in Swahili. -- Daniel Mietchen (talk) 21:07, 13 August 2014 (UTC)

That site produces content under a CC BY SA NC license or it is completely copyrighted thus not compatible with Wikipedia. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 02:29, 14 August 2014 (UTC)
DMOZ - Health has a link (under "This category in other languages:") to DMOZ - World: Kiswahili: Afya.
—Wavelength (talk) 18:05, 14 August 2014 (UTC)
Google Swahili Search has search results for afya at https://www.google.com/?hl=sw&gws_rd=ssl#hl=sw&q=afya. See also Afya Foundation.
—Wavelength (talk) 19:06, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

Wiki Education Foundation hiring an experienced science editor

Wiki Education Foundation is hiring two experienced Wikipedia editors for part-time (20 hours/week) positions: Wikipedia Content Expert, Sciences and Wikipedia Content Expert, Humanities. The focus of these positions is to help student editors do better work, through everything from advice and cleanup on individual articles, to helping instructors find appropriate topics for the students to work on, to tracking the overall quality of work from student editors and finding ways to improve it. We're looking for clueful, friendly editors who like to focus on article content, but also have a strong working knowledge of policies and guidelines, and who have experience with DYK, GAN, and other quality processes. (Experience with medical topics is a definite plus!)--Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:24, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

Stinky cheese

Please could someone take a look at the uncited, allergy-related claim made in Penicillium camemberti? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 13:50, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

Well, the best I could find was this case report. The paper does mention cross-reactivity, but this is only a primary source and a case report at that. Axl ¤ [Talk] 09:15, 16 August 2014 (UTC)

Stub prediction

Hi everyone,

A pair of wonderful editors, Nettrom and Aaron Halfaker, have done us a favor and analyzed all 9,000+ plus of our stubs to see which ones probably need to be re-assessed. The list has been posted at m:Research:Ideas/Screening WikiProject Medicine articles for quality/Prediction table. About 750 of them are, according to their formula, probably not stubs.

I tried doing this manually a couple of years ago, and getting this narrowed down to a list of only 750 articles is an enormous improvement. Obviously, we need to do some re-assessing. The first in the list is B-class, not a stub. I think what would be helpful here is to re-assess everything, but if you run across something (especially with a high percentage) that is still a stub, please flag it either here or on the list's talk page.

Finally, if you want to do more than just a couple, then I suggest installing User:Kephir/gadgets/rater. It lets you rate an article without first clicking through to the talk page.

Thanks, WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:57, 7 August 2014 (UTC)

Could it be a typo? As Polysome is a stub I'd completely misread what you've actually written. Apologies. Little pob (talk) 21:13, 7 August 2014 (UTC)
Polysomy was marked as a stub-class article until I fixed it a few hours ago. It's now marked as B-class. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:22, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

Great resource. Do they plan on periodically updating it? --WS (talk) 20:34, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

I think it depends on whether we actually re-assess the pages on the list. Just having the list isn't much good, but if we use it, we have a good case for requesting regular updates. (I've also wondered whether they could do the same for non-stub-rated articles that are probably incorrectly rated.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:29, 12 August 2014 (UTC)
From listening to CFCF, I'd have thought spotting further B-class articles mightbe useful for the Translation project. 86.157.144.73 (talk) 09:39, 16 August 2014 (UTC)

The area postrema & chemoreceptor trigger zone (CTZ) - identical structures?

I'm having a tough time determining if these structures are currently defined as different substructures within the medulla oblongata. There appears to be contradictory information on both of these pages (e.g., on chemoreceptor trigger zone, this ref on the area postrema - PMID 11749934 - is used to state that the CTZ is adjacent to the nucleus tractus solitarius; the ref says the area postrema is adjacent). I've read several refs that indicate that these structures are the same thing (e.g., PMID 7895890) while I've seen other refs which indicate they're different (all of these are out of WP:MEDDATE). This current ref makes no mention of the CTZ in vomiting: PMID 23886386.

All that said, can anyone find a current reference or diagram which clearly indicates that these two structures are not the same thing? If not, I'm just going to merge these two articles. Seppi333 (Insert 2¢ | Maintained) 23:20, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

This is relevant to medicine since the D2 receptors on this (these?) structures are the biomolecular targets of antiemetic drugs like domperidone and metoclopramide. Seppi333 (Insert 2¢ | Maintained) 23:28, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

No, they are different from each other. The chemoreceptor trigger zone is a group of neurons located within the area postrema. (Sources: 1, 2) -A1candidate (talk) 23:36, 15 August 2014 (UTC)
Ah. If I could get my hands on a neuroscience source that covers this, I can cite it and address this ambiguity in these articles; although, if the CTZ is just a subregion of the AP, it might be best to just merge that article into area postrema. Our articles suggest they're disjoint structures.Seppi333 (Insert 2¢ | Maintained) 00:46, 16 August 2014 (UTC)
If you want a neuroscience source that specifically says this, see Essentials of Neurosurgical Anesthesia & Critical Care. There is an exact description of the CTZ's location in the area postrema here, which I recommend we use for our articles. Strongly oppose merge. -A1candidate (talk) 10:04, 16 August 2014 (UTC)
That's a fairly current source, so I agree it's worth using. I'll copyedit the article over the next day. As long as there's a consistent definition across both articles on their location/relation, I don't really care if they're merged or not. Seppi333 (Insert 2¢ | Maintained) 10:17, 16 August 2014 (UTC)
 Fixed chemoreceptor trigger zone using the sources you provided, though that was a pain in the ass to copyedit. Area postrema is already consistent. Seppi333 (Insert 2¢ | Maintained) 22:55, 16 August 2014 (UTC)

AfC submission

Medical experts, is Draft:Can-Fite BioPharma Ltd. notable? --Cerebellum (talk) 18:54, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

article already exists Can-Fite_BioPharma_Ltd. - that one should be rejected. I note that the existing article is up for speedy deletion (it shouldn't be) but the AfC should be rejected. Jytdog (talk) 19:08, 15 August 2014 (UTC)
I would probably put a lower limit on market capitalization of $300 million or so for company articles if publicly traded unless there is something very unusual going on. Formerly 98 (talk) 19:28, 15 August 2014 (UTC)
There's no size criterion mentioned at WP:LISTED etc, and we must have hundreds if not thousands of articles on companuies worth less than that. Johnbod (talk) 12:00, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

Please provide your opinion in a content dispute a regarding our Medcan Clinic article

There exists a clinic in Toronto, Canada, named the Medcan Clinic. Please provide your opinion in a content dispute regarding our "Medcan Clinic" article. There is a short summary of the dispute at Talk:Medcan_Clinic § Discussion, part 3. Please do not reply here. Instead, please reply only on that talk page. Thank you. —Unforgettableid (talk) 08:00, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

Parkinson's disease and Robin Williams

It's been in the news recently that Robin Williams was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease before his suicide, although he wasn't showing easily recognizeable symptoms. As might be expected, a number of editors have rushed to add that information to the Parkinson's disease article. That violates our longstanding rule that only celebrities who have played a major role in supporting PD research or public understanding belong there. I have, after explaining why on the talk page, removed the new material. I expect that somebody will shortly come along and re-add it, though. Since I have a personal policy against multi-reverting, I probably won't do anything more, so I am bringing the matter up here in case anybody else is interested in keeping an eye on it. Looie496 (talk) 12:42, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

I agree that it is best kept to a minimum at least although difficulty is that he was such a loved celebrity that human emotion is at play here.Docsim (talk) 05:21, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

Norweigan wood

File:Adnexa illustration.jpg
added to Adnexa of uterus, nb website name

As I have a COI with what is in some sense a "competitor" I thought I'd better bring here my comment on his talk to User:Mapnah, whose edit history since 2012 shows only edits related to www.oncolex.org, a cancer site related to the University of Oslo hospital. See the post - this is one of the images he is adding. Wiki CRUK John (talk) 16:21, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

Issues 1) is copyright as it is not clear these have been release 2) is the link in the images 3) these need to be put in better places. If these can be addressed all is well. If not ping me. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 02:06, 20 August 2014 (UTC)

Vitiligo

There is a disagreement as to the relevance and MEDRS compatibility of a source. this source is being held up as a MEDRS compliant source and is being discussed in a "Theoretical causes" section. I tried moving it to a "Society and culture" section as more of a religious text than medical but was reverted. Comments welcome. Yobol (talk) 21:57, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

Doesn't look like a medical textbook. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 02:37, 14 August 2014 (UTC)
We've not been able to settle this over at the article, and now have the following as a Level 2 heading in the article:
Parallels to the biblical Tzaraath
Medical discourse in the late 19th century analyzed commonalities between vitiligo and the ancient biblical term Tzaraath and proposed that the characteristics of vitiligo are strikingly similar to the biblical description of Tzaraath, as well as to the early Septuagint translation styles of the Hebrew masoretic biblical text.[26] Similar observations have been made in early 20th century rabbinic literature.[27]
It has been suggested by medieval rabbinic figures[citation needed] that factors involving the dietary and sexual habits of parents prior and during conception of the vitiligo patient may be a precursor to vitiligo development in later stages of the lifecycle of the offspring.[28]
Similar issues with the Leukoderma article (same editor)including quotes in what looks like Hebrew and a statement suggesting suffers are "impure". Could an admin take a look at this? The editor seems peacefully oblivious to the concepts of MEDRS and consensus. Thanks Formerly 98 (talk) 10:10, 17 August 2014 (UTC)
Have moved content to talk page as better refs needed Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 02:33, 20 August 2014 (UTC)
Thank you! Formerly 98 (talk) 03:29, 20 August 2014 (UTC)

Pageviews, reader traffic, health information on Wikipedia

One might make the argument that if significant numbers of people are seeking health information on Wikipedia then Wikipedia would be a good place to put health information for people to find. It is my opinion that this is an idea that some WikiProject Medicine members have, but that few people outside the Wikimedia community consider.

I am writing to give news about an opportunity to get a little more information from the Wikimedia Foundation analytics team about readership numbers for health articles on Wikipedia. In summary, I do not think that members of WikiProject Medicine should do anything differently now even if they use readership statistics, but it would be good to be aware of options for the future. Blue Rasberry (talk) 20:38, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

Background of past WikiProject Medicine discussion of reader statistics

It is not easy to describe the size of the audience seeking health information on Wikipedia. Some background information may be at Health information on the Internet and at Health information on Wikipedia. Members of WikiProject Medicine may use WP:MED500 to see some stats formatted for Wikipedian use. Right now, this page is configured to record monthly reports which is based on tags of the "WikiProject Medicine" template on article talk pages. The tool which provides this information is at WMF Labs. I understand that Mr.Z-man made this tool, and that this user is a volunteer who was very gracious to design and continue to develop the tool. It is my opinion that the data provided by this tool is good enough to establish that Wikipedia is a popular source of health information, as I believe that the number of pageviews is indicative of a large number of unique visitors who want specific health information.

Here are the previous discussions I could find about traffic to health information on Wikipedia in WikiProject Medicine forums.

I am sharing this information to give background on what already exists. I was not planning to start a conversation about this, but if someone has more background information then share if you like. Blue Rasberry (talk) 20:38, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

Introducing the WMF Analytics team

The Wikimedia Foundation employees some statisticians whose job it is to support the community with statistics and analysis. If we expressed a need for readership statistics and there were a reasonable way for this team to provide them, then they might provide data and interpretation. Here is some information about this group.

I am sharing this information to give background on what already exists. I was not planning to start a conversation about this, but if someone has more background information then share if you like. Blue Rasberry (talk) 20:38, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

New opportunity with WMF Analytics team

WikiProject Medicine could request some kind of report about readership to health articles from the Wikimedia Foundation analytics team. This might be generated monthly. It is not certain to me if this would be better than our existing report, but it could be made in a different way. In my opinion, the opportunity here is more flexible than the current WikiProject-based reader tracking system being used, but it also would include more articles which should not be included.

The idea is that the WMF analytics team get from us some list of articles, then in response they generate a monthly report of traffic to those articles. Here is an example of how this could work:

  1. WikiProject Medicine provides some list of articles, perhaps by providing a list of categories containing the articles to be counted. Here is a test list based on Category:Medicine, and excluding the major subcategories likely to have a lot of noise.
  2. Here is the returned output. Notice that there is a lot of noise here, because Category:Medicine includes things like movies with health themes and celebrities with diseases.

For July 2014, this report generated by the analytics team has identified 96,623 "medicine articles" which have combined pageviews of 265,651,646. The system used based on WikiProject Medicine tagging found 27,132 articles with combined pageviews of 151,744,982. It is my opinion that most people currently spending time at WikiProject Medicine are interested in articles which are governed by WP:MEDRS and WP:MEDMOS, and this project is less concerned with social or humanities-based discussion of medicine. Consequently, I would expect people here to be more interested in pageview statistics which are for health articles, and not for concepts in the humanities. Is my expectation that the WikiProject Medicine tagging contains a higher percentage of articles which are about medicine and not humanities, but that the category measurement includes articles which are missed by WikiProject Medicine's tagging system.

I am not sure how to get the best measurement of the readership of health information on Wikipedia, but I think it would not be unreasonable to say that the pageviews for this content are somewhere between the values reported by these two statistics systems.

If anyone has any ideas for requesting a more nuanced report from the WMF Analytics team, then they would run the report for us based on any list of articles we provided to them. What I mean to say is that there are about 96k possible "medicine" articles, and WikiProject Medicine already has a sort of curated list which is 27k of those 96, but probably more of the 96k could be included, and some of the 27k probably ought not be included. In the end and after a few years, probably we will need to develop some plan to tag all kinds of articles in Wikidata and request multiple reports for all kinds of medicine concepts. When we have curated lists we would be able to remix them in different ways, such as by language and medical specialty, which is something difficult to do now.

At Wikimania in London earlier this month I talked a bit with Erik in analytics about what they can provide, and he made the above report for WikiProject Medicine and said that if we have ideas for other reports, then those are possible. Ultimately I want these reports to be able to answer questions about Wikipedia's audience, because I make the argument that Wikipedia matters because of its audience size. If anyone can think of any clever ways to ask questions of the analytics team, then please share.

My initial thought is that the information we have is already very good, and that perhaps it would not be worthwhile to spend too much time trying to work out a new system with the analytics team, however, if our need grows and we want more nuanced information then we might need to move from the WikiProject system and into the category system of measurement because our subcategorization with the WikiProject task force system probably is not used often enough to be sufficiently accurate for any needs and would not at all work for languages other than English without WikiProject software development. Blue Rasberry (talk) 20:38, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

The individual article views are good, though I have recently found a much quicker tool, which also gives a period of over 5 years - highly recommended. I've lost track of the tools over their migration - where do we now go for article views by category? What I'm becoming very interested in is the time spent on particular pages, which ties in with the research we are planning at CRUK. AFAIK, except at the total Wikipedia level, WMF do not record this at all, and I've never seen WMF figures for it used in research. But surely they could. Times for a small group of pages, over a relatively short period, would be very useful to me. If it can be shown that our articles with a very techical lead have consistently shorter view times (and very rapid "bouncing") than more accessible ones, then that is important evidence supporting what most regulars on this page have being saying. Thanks for this very useful summary of where we are. Wiki CRUK John (talk) 16:58, 19 August 2014 (UTC)
I believe that there are no actual numbers for time spent on a page. Apparently it requires fairly invasive tracking (which the WMF won't do). Also, when I've asked around about this, it appears that when you find such numbers on the web about what kinds of pages people spend the most time at, they are pretty close to fairy tales (either being almost completely made up, or being based on invalid assumptions like 'nobody ever opens more than one web page at a time'). WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:20, 19 August 2014 (UTC)
User:Tobias1984 is interested in this sort of thing, and mw:Talk:Analytics#Question now has some ideas about how to do something similar ourselves, complete with suggested code for any technically minded folks. (User:MastCell, this might be within your skill range, if you're familiar with that language.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:47, 19 August 2014 (UTC)
Ah well! Thanks. The CRUK research will break new ground then - we plan to video and fully track a small number of research subjects. Wiki CRUK John/Johnbod (talk) 10:26, 20 August 2014 (UTC)
We have more detailed data here Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Stats Also supposedly our data for pageviews does not contain mobile which is at nearly 25% Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 02:15, 20 August 2014 (UTC)
I'd never looked at Is what people care about similar by language before. Do we have an explanation for why English seems so out of step with the other languages, while Spanish seems to have the highest figures? Is it to do with the larger number of articles? Also brief explanations of how the figures were calculated for this and the two pages below it would be useful some time. Johnbod (talk) 10:26, 20 August 2014 (UTC)
No idea yet. There will be something published soon I hope. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 15:07, 20 August 2014 (UTC)

Change to some of our disease related article headings

We discussed this at CRUK. Have started discussion here.[9] It could affect up to 8000 articles. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 19:37, 20 August 2014 (UTC)

Attempts to add primary research

A research would like to add their unpublished opinion about wood ash to the articles on Ebola. Further comments here User_talk:Jmh649#Ebola_virus_disease appreciated. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 21:40, 20 August 2014 (UTC)

Dentistry X-Rays

Just got a few dental X-Rays donated by my dentist to Wikimedia Commons. If we have any dentists in this project that wouldn't mind helping me find a few articles to be homes for some of them, I'd appreciate it. :D You can find the list here. Among them is two photos of a partially completed root canal, which I think might be unique on Commons so far.

Some highlights:

  • Partially completed root canal
    Partially completed root canal
  • Partially completed root canal
    Partially completed root canal
  • Sideways wisdom tooth
    Sideways wisdom tooth
  • Excessive decay (or so I've been told)
    Excessive decay (or so I've been told)

Zell Faze (talk) 13:22, 20 August 2014 (UTC)

I put a picture at Endodontic_therapy#Treatment_procedure. Thanks for sharing. Blue Rasberry (talk) 13:31, 20 August 2014 (UTC)

The 4th one (ZELLFAZE MN01 MP16 005.JPG) is a good example of the kind of decay impacted wisdom teeth can potentially cause if left in situ. 94.196.105.113 (talk) 17:46, 20 August 2014 (UTC)

And Ian Furse has had impacted wisdom teeth at GAN since March - but it seems really well-illustrated already to me. Wiki CRUK John (talk) 10:51, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

GAN for Pudendal nerve

Since LT910001 is on a wikibreak and there's a backlog of GAN's (Wikipedia:Good article nominations#Biology and medicine), I figured I'd ask here if anyone feels comfortable taking on the nominator role in LT's place. I'll take on the review if someone steps up; otherwise, I'll likely just remove the nomination within a week.

Regards, Seppi333 (Insert 2¢ | Maintained) 03:46, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

I will try to take it on if you think it is managable. Currently rather busy, but if no major rewrites are required I will respond to the comments. -- CFCF 🍌 (email) 10:52, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

Need help here

User:Mmersenne need to have their edits reviewed. Paraphrasing appears to be too close. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 21:17, 20 August 2014 (UTC)

Contributions here. A pity, as palliative care does need expanding in most cancer articles I've seen. I will see if I can come up with a better-refed short bit to fit most articles, to which specific stuff can be added. Wiki CRUK John/Johnbod (talk) 01:16, 21 August 2014 (UTC)
See also this diff - says is with Mt Sinai Palliative Care centre. Wiki CRUK John (talk) 14:00, 21 August 2014 (UTC)
I get very anxious when I see reference numbers at the end of a sentence like this, concerning for possible copyvio or plagiarism. Yobol (talk) 16:05, 21 August 2014 (UTC)
They are poorly responsive on their talk page. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 23:06, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

RIGVIR – a prescription drug for the treatment of cancer

This came up before and was taken to AfD by Biosthmors who withdrew the nomination after stubbing the article into WP:MEDRS compliance; it has since re-expanded but the sourcing is no stronger than it was originally. This is an odd drug limited it seems to Latvia and used to promote tourism. Alexbrn talk|contribs|COI 15:39, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

PubMed lists three sources. All are primary sources, published in the journal Voprosy Onkologii, and authored by the same group (Glinkina, Bruvere, Muceniece). Chumakov's paper seems to be the only secondary source that supports notability. Axl ¤ [Talk] 18:53, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

Eyes on some IP edits in Cryptococcosis

I'm no expert about the condition, but I spotted a case-fatality rate that didn't jibe with a review I had found, and was unsourced, by an IP ... can someone look over Cryptococcosis, in particular the edits I linked to in the last section ("Survival rate...") at Talk:Cryptococcosis? Thanks. Wnt (talk) 19:39, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Wikipedians with articles

Someone might wish to add James Heilman (User:Jmh649) to Wikipedia:Wikipedians with articles.
—Wavelength (talk) 17:00, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

Okay, I have added him. Axl ¤ [Talk] 18:56, 22 August 2014 (UTC)
Thank you.—Wavelength (talk) 19:47, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Dr. Stefan Fajans

Dear medical experts: Is this old AfC submission about a notable medical researcher? Should the page be kept and improved? —Anne Delong (talk) 01:38, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

Prima facie, I'd say yes. Wiki CRUK John (talk) 10:23, 22 August 2014 (UTC)
Very sorry, I just realized that it is a copyright violation of this page. —Anne Delong (talk) 21:04, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

Project coordinators

A suggestion has been put for us to consider project coordinators at WPMED similar to military history.

This would be a group of active respected medical editors who people who are having issues could turn to for guidance. They would be elected by those of us here. Peoples thoughts? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 18:15, 20 August 2014 (UTC)

MILHIST currently have 16, which if copied unfortunately would pretty much mean "all shall have prizes" for the regulars here! But I've no objection. Now, who could we nominate .....? Wiki CRUK John/Johnbod (talk) 19:14, 20 August 2014 (UTC)
This is not so much for the regulars. This is more for new editors so they know who to reach out to. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 19:27, 20 August 2014 (UTC)
Yes, if conducted appropriately I could see this being a way of facilitating budding medical editors through the inevitable learning curve of our weird and wonderful wpmed ways... I've often felt that one of the pieces missing from the Wikipedia jigsaw is genuine mentoring without any of the remedial associations the word has accrued here. (For example, although I don't generally edit military history topics I'm always grateful to have the opinion of HJ Mitchell, one of the project coordinators.) At the same time I do think it would be important to avoid creating ingroups and outgroups. 86.157.144.73 (talk) 20:30, 20 August 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for contacting me about this, James. For transparency, this was something I proposed informally a couple of months ago, and I hope that the community gives this idea some thought. I think having coordinators is useful, because they act as a central contact point for new users, users who want to become more involved and want to know what's going on, cross-project, cross-wiki and professional collaborations, and media/signpost enquiries. I think it also recognizes the efforts of some of the long-term users here, and perhaps will empower them to think about the project more generally. It's also useful to have some people as contact points who are aware of the full extend of WPMED's activities, and most likely have external contacts they are liasing with. I think that having coordinators listed more-or-less recognises the existing situation anyway. @Johnbod, if we had as many as 16 long-term, active and regular users to become coordinators, I think that'd be wonderful. As per the MILHIST example, a coordinator doesn't actually have any authority, and my ideal approach (this is just an idea) would be that a few coordinators would be elected yearly by affirmative vote (ie most 'yesses', representing someone who has the respect and approval of the local community). I wish you all well and can confirm I'll be returning at some point. Kind regards, --Tom (LT) (talk) 11:16, 23 August 2014 (UTC)

LT910001 I am glad to see you around.
The Wikipedia Education Program has discussed having a vetting and confirmation program. Their need is that they encourage Wikipedians and professors to meet to do classroom Wikipedia stuff, but since people on the outside tend to trust anyone on Wikipedia who says that they are a community representative, there is danger that in outreach some troublemaker impersonating a Wikipedian could tell the professor anything. There is also a vetting system for WP:OTRS, in which people who answer email going to "Wikipedia" get confirmed by the community.
An election process could be one model for "project coordinators", but mere community confirmation and certification could work too. We could press the Wiki Ed Foundation to step up their certification process then adapt and adopt whatever they make, because they actually have funding to address these kinds of problems. Blue Rasberry (talk) 12:56, 23 August 2014 (UTC)

Gluten

Some changes recently have been made in the "Adverse reactions" section, and I think some subject-matter experts need to review the article. Coretheapple (talk) 17:20, 24 August 2014 (UTC)

Figured I'd just throw this out there and hope someone takes pity on me...

Now 8 months and counting: Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Amphetamine/archive4
Need reviewers! Seppi333 (Insert 2¢ | Maintained) 22:18, 16 August 2014 (UTC)

Still need more input. Seppi333 (Insert 2¢ | Maintained) 23:21, 20 August 2014 (UTC)
Images such as this Template:Psychostimulant_addiction are a little too large for my screen. Would decrease from 600 to 400 px Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 01:06, 21 August 2014 (UTC)
I can probably do 500px, but smaller than that will make them hard to view on larger screens. I haven't seen a notable problems mentioned on talkpages or when viewed on mobile devices though. Seppi333 (Insert 2¢ | Maintained) 02:49, 21 August 2014 (UTC)
I wish that we could specify image sizes more helpfully for the desktop site, like "80% of screen width" or "up to 50%, maximum 800px".
You don't need to worry about image sizes on Mobile; they normally re-size automagically to whatever the screen size is on small devices.
Finally, for all of you who aren't subscribing to m:Tech/News, the default image size is scheduled to increase to 300px this coming Monday. Any logged-in user can re-set the size in Special:Preferences. Usually, this sort of change produces a few surprised complaints for a few days, and about two weeks later, most people don't really care any longer. (This is generally true for all websites, not just the Wikipedias.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:00, 21 August 2014 (UTC)
This change to image sizes has been postponed (current best guess: October, and in conjunction with some other changes to image presentation). Anyone who would like a different size now can go to Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering and pick whatever you like from the list. The non-default setting is 220px, and the most popular non-default setting is 300px (which is what they are changing the default to). WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:02, 23 August 2014 (UTC)
Thanks for that. Do you happen to know if they will now increase the manual options in Preferences with some larger sizes? Otherwise, since the default has now caught up with the maximum option (unchanged for what, 8 years?) you can only opt to size down, not up. Which would be a bit odd. Is there a page for this? Johnbod (talk) 23:08, 23 August 2014 (UTC)
I've suggested 360px, which is already available at sv.wp. It's been requested repeatedly by people with limited vision and/or high-resolution screens. I don't know if it will happen. The last discussion I saw was on wikitech-l, and it was not very encouraging. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:04, 24 August 2014 (UTC)
Cross-posted on WT:MED, WT:PHARM, WT:MCB, and WT:NEURO

I nominated two technical diagrams (the signaling cascade involved in psychostimulant addiction and amphetamine pharmacodynamics in dopamine neurons) for featured picture.
I spent about 30 hours making the ΔFosB diagram alone, so I'd really appreciate it if anyone is willing to contribute an image review! These are both used in the amphetamine article.

Regards, Seppi333 (Insert 2¢ | Maintained) 21:31, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

Transcranial direct-current stimulation needs trimming

Read [10] and thought - "this is the type of thing to have a poorly sourced Wikipedia article". Couldn't believe how right I was.

It's 11:30 and I have work tomorrow, so throwing this out there if anyone wants to do some trimming - otherwise this is only a note for me to remember to do it. -- CFCF 🍌 (email) 21:26, 24 August 2014 (UTC)

Have done some more work on an example of this on the heart failure article. Wondering what people think for punctuation? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 22:50, 23 August 2014 (UTC)

Anyway proposed here Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#Adding_a_link_to_.22authors.22_in_Wikipedia.27s_by-line Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 23:30, 23 August 2014 (UTC)
I kinda like it. At first I was opposed but compact and as a byline is makes sense and doesn't clutter the article. - - MrBill3 (talk) 04:41, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

Hormone in pretty sad shape

the Hormone article could use some TLC from experts before people get misinformation. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 00:23, 23 August 2014 (UTC)

Could you clarify what sort of misinformation you see there? Looie496 (talk) 17:46, 23 August 2014 (UTC)
I don't know about any blatant errors, but the article is poorly organized and lack sources. User:TylerDurden8823, User:CFCF, and myself have made some recent edits and I think the article is moving in the right direction. There is a lot more work remaining however. Boghog (talk) 18:07, 23 August 2014 (UTC)
Well I added two {{dubious}} claim tags in the lede.
  1. All receptors do not elicit a response - see scavenger receptors
  2. All responses are not transcription related
...so that is missinformation in the lede. (I will give you that these points are also slightly pedantic) -- CFCF 🍌 (email) 18:15, 23 August 2014 (UTC)
Agreed that all responses are not transcription related. I included a quick fix (change "cause" to "may cause"). Boghog (talk) 18:37, 23 August 2014 (UTC) Now added "rapid non-genomic effects". Boghog (talk) 19:00, 23 August 2014 (UTC)

The statements that you tagged as "dubious":-

  • "Cells respond to a hormone when they express a receptor for that hormone."
  • " When a hormone binds to the receptor, it results in the activation of a signal transduction mechanism. This ultimately leads to cell type-specific genomic responses that cause the hormone to activate genes that regulate protein synthesis (e.g., up-regulation: synthesis of a receptor for that hormone)."

The first statement seems to be poorly worded rather than "dubious". The intended implication is that cells that express a hormone's receptor will respond to that hormone.

I believe that the second statement is correct (although the example chosen might be odd). Scavenger receptors are not activated by hormones, and they certainly do undergo a response. Axl ¤ [Talk] 19:38, 23 August 2014 (UTC)

Oh, I think there has been some form of miscommunication - we seem to be on different terminologies. I did not mean scavenger receptor as in the article I linked to, but rather as; for example IGF-IIR, which upon binding to IGF will internalize and metabolize both receptor and hormone - not what I feel is the type of response implied in the lede. Referred to as scavenger receptors in this paper. (Don't know if this is widely used.)
As for the second sentence - while not necessarily wrong I feel the inclusion of genomic implies that responses are only tied to gene regulation, something that often is too slow for many of the immediate responses of certain hormones, e.g. many releasing hormones. -- CFCF 🍌 (email) 16:31, 24 August 2014 (UTC)
Okay, Boghog's edits leave this discussion moot anyway. Axl ¤ [Talk] 23:06, 24 August 2014 (UTC)
Such misunderstandings are always good, now I know Scavenger receptor (endocrinology) & Scavenger receptor (immunology) need to be created. -- CFCF 🍌 (email) 05:24, 25 August 2014 (UTC)
Perhaps you mean that the correction of misunderstandings is always good? :-) Axl ¤ [Talk] 09:10, 25 August 2014 (UTC)
Or that the exposure of them is always good. --Hordaland (talk) 09:43, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

A massive step forwards in copyright!

Example of a disputed image

While it is still in draft form this document has dramatically improved my day. The copyright office has stated on page 300 "the Office will not register works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author" this includes "Medical imaging produced by x-rays, ultrasounds, magnetic resonance imaging, or other diagnostic equipment."[11] This means that if this passes we can gather X-rays to our hearts content. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 18:55, 20 August 2014 (UTC)

So that presumably means goodbye to the monkey in the room? 86.157.144.73 (talk) 21:03, 20 August 2014 (UTC)
Selfies by Monkeys shall be allowed as well as pictures painted by elephants. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 21:19, 20 August 2014 (UTC)
This is certainly good news, but it shouldn't be over-interpreted. According to US law, copyright is automatic and doesn't require explicit registration. The fact that the copyright office won't register things is good, but it doesn't alter the law and doesn't prevent people from claiming that something is copyrighted. Looie496 (talk) 12:42, 21 August 2014 (UTC)
Looie, I believe that registration is a necessary prerequisite for enforcing your rights as the copyright holder.
I wish that this section mentioned video footage from surveillance cameras. That sounds like works that are automatically produced with even less human intervention than a diagnostic image to me, and it would be convenient to have the status on that clarified, too. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:49, 21 August 2014 (UTC)
I think Looie has it right. Not being able to register a copyright might be some sort of an indication as to whether you have one, but it doesn't mean you don't and it doesn't prevent you from enforcing it. It isn't any sort of pre-requisite. It might normally be considered good enough for WP, but I have no idea.
Seems not unlikely to me that this decision would indeed cover, for example, CCTV and webcam footage, in most cases. Formerip (talk) 17:47, 24 August 2014 (UTC)
The rules may be different in the UK, but, in the US, registration is an absolute prerequisite for making a claim of infringement. (See this lawsuit, for example.) You can file after you discover that your work has been infringed, and you can send letters requesting cooperation without registering (and you do actually own the copyright), but you cannot enforce it in court unless and until you've filed for registration. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:36, 24 August 2014 (UTC)
That's not quite how it is. Think about it. Why do we not consider anything unregistered to be fair game.
In fact, yes, it's true that you do need to file a registration before suing for infringement (which is not what matters for our purposes), although not in order to hold a copyright (which is). You can still sue if you file after the alleged infringement has occurred and (something the statute is explicit about) if your application is rejected. Formerip (talk) 22:27, 24 August 2014 (UTC)
Presumably "imaging" includes move moving and still images? (Interesting to see that other "uncopyrightable" items include: "Bridges, canals, dams, tents, mobile homes, and other uncopyrightable structures (Section 923.2)." and "Useful articles (Section 924)". So useless articles will be still be copyrighted, I guess!) Martinevans123 (talk) 17:27, 24 August 2014 (UTC)
"Useless articles" are usually called "fine art" in copyright-land.  ;-) WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:36, 24 August 2014 (UTC)
Why thanks! Yes, I should know, with the useless articles I've written. Martinevans123 (talk) 21:39, 24 August 2014 (UTC)
Fwiw there is no register of copyrights under English or Scottish law. Johnbod (talk) 13:59, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:Autism cure movement

Template:Autism cure movement has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Frietjes (talk) 22:43, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

Post Acute Withdrawal Syndrome

I just came across Post Acute Withdrawal Syndrome, and it could use some attention. Thanks. --Tryptofish (talk) 14:57, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata project to associate drugs with interactions

To have conversations about Wikidata, learn this diagram!

A new Wikipedian, Alepfu, is a researcher who would like to make a database connecting information about drug interactions to Wikidata items for drugs. This would mean that for Wikidata items like (RS)-warfarin (Q407431), there would be a Wikidata property, drug action altered by, which makes a claim that some other drug interacts with Warfarin. This user also has a collection of sources to back those claims. For those who do not know, on Wikidata, (Item + Property Value = Claim), and (Claim + Source = Statement), which I think is a lot like English Wikipedia's policy of backing statements with sources. This process itself is interesting, and this user is seeking community feedback on their proposal to run a bot which will make these kinds of statements.

Also interesting is that when backing a claim with a source, it could be that this process creates a Wikidata item for every source, then uses that Wikidata item for the citation rather than having a freeform citation as has always been used before. High-priority drug–drug interactions for use in electronic health records (Q17505343) is one such source. Wikidata only has a few hundred academic papers stored in this way, but potentially, all academic papers cited in a Wikimedia project could be stored here and called from Wikidata as a central source. This citation project is not necessarily tied to the drug interaction project, but the original project could be a place to explore options for automating the import of citations and immediately using them in a practical way.

For those of you who have not met this person, I would like to introduce Tobias1984. He is the most active participant of WikiProject Medicine on Wikidata, which anyone can visit at d:Wikidata:WikiProject Medicine. Anyone who would like to get pings for medical information assistance on Wikidata should put their name at d:Wikidata:WikiProject_Medicine/Participants, and then when someone seeks comment you would get notice.

Alepfu's project is still running test edits, but comments would be welcome now on the concept at d:Wikidata:Requests for permissions/Bot/AlepfuBot. Blue Rasberry (talk) 17:57, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

Seems like an interesting concept. will look into it.Docsim (talk) 06:20, 27 August 2014 (UTC)


I was actually under the impression that medical content on En-Wiki was still Wikidata-free at the time I talked to @Bluerasberry:. But I just found this addition to the infobox: Template_talk:Infobox_disease#Add_NCI_id_to_the_template. The addition will automatically generate a link in infobox-disease when the property is set on Wikidata (See: d:Property_talk:P1395). That means that data-centralization is not an abstract thing-of-the-future, but slowly being deployed. This will at least in the beginning (i.e. years) cause some problems. The link is not visible within the code (e.g. Kidney cancer) and the VisualEditor doesn't allow it to be edited either. A "edit-on-Wikidata" button is currently being tested on Ru-Wiki, but I don't know when it will be dispatched to En-Wiki. I think this will be a time where we all have to ask a lot of questions and do a lot of explaining in order to make the transmission as smoothly as possible, especially for casual editors that have not come into contact with Wikidata yet. -Tobias1984 (talk) 16:07, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
Yes, editors here need to be able to decide what links to include/remove (without busting a gut elsewhere...). Also, exact correspondences between individual pages and MeSH terms / ICD codes are not always by any means obvious, and sometimes need rapid fixing or tweaking. 86.134.200.29 (talk) 16:39, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
Ah, I see, this change calls the Wikidata information into the template. This has been discussed previously and for years, even before Wikidata.
Here is the resolution to the issue:
Here are previous discussions.
In my opinion, this is a case in which Wikidata seems like a great solution for addressing a longstanding problem. Blue Rasberry (talk) 16:43, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

Students 4 Best Evidence September editing campaign

Hi every one,

Letting everyone know of the plans for an editing campaign targeting Wikipedia medical articles that Students 4 Best Evidence is planning in September. Wikipedia:Students 4 Best Evidence September 2014 editing campaign is the initial page on site but we will shortly be transitioning to an Education Program course page for managing the campaign.

We hope to begin registering students at the end of next week, so they can create their user accounts and do some practice edits prior to the Edit-a-thon. Ammar (the main contact at Students 4 Best Evidence) has created several blogs promoting the event, and is creating more that offers guidance to the students. The main event currently scheduled in an edit-a-thon on Sept. 16 that will be hosted at Cochrane's UK Center with the assistance of some folks from the Wikimedia UK Chapter. There is plans to have a simultaneous google hang out event. Additionally, other groups have expressed an interest in joining from other locations.

As always, the event will be much more successful with the support of more experienced Wikipedia editors. So it will be great if some regulars at Wikiproject Medicine can help out. Sydney Poore/FloNight♥♥♥♥ 20:43, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

One doctor's fight to correct errors in WP

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation did a story on James-- it can be found here (Wikipedia's medical errors and one doctor's fight to correct them). It is always good to get the word out that physician-Wikipedians are welcome. Beyond that, I think it is important to explain the process-- I am amazed again and again how few people know that all the changes to an article are tracked and any version can be compared to any other version. Personally, I think this is one of the key elements of what makes WP work. In any case, great stuff James! Nephron  T|C 04:46, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

He isn't very photogenic though, is he? -Roxy the dog™ (resonate) 07:23, 22 August 2014 (UTC)
Yup thankfully I do not make a living on my looks. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 07:31, 22 August 2014 (UTC)
How nicely you respond to a hurtful statement, Jmh! I'd have deleted it. From WP:NPA "Insulting or disparaging an editor is a personal attack regardless of the manner in which it is done." (Emphasis in the original.) --Hordaland (talk) 20:19, 22 August 2014 (UTC)
James looks fine in the photograph, certainly better looking than many men out there. I don't know if Roxy the dog™ was expecting a model or what. Flyer22 (talk) 04:01, 23 August 2014 (UTC)
Unbelievable ! -Roxy the dog™ (resonate) 06:32, 23 August 2014 (UTC)
Yes, Roxy the dog™, we've established that your original comment in this section was unbelievable...and not in a good way. Flyer22 (talk) 11:00, 23 August 2014 (UTC)
Loosen up for godsake, try some AGF. -Roxy the dog™ (resonate) 12:49, 23 August 2014 (UTC)
Regarding your question, yes, I'm serious. That you can't see how your "isn't very photogenic though, is he?" comment can be hurtful and is therefore inappropriate is something that you need reanalyze, whether you meant harm by it or not. It's common sense that if someone looks at a person's photograph and comments that the person is not photogenic, especially in the way you did, the commentator is acknowledging that he or she does not find the other person's looks appealing. James even stated above, "Yup thankfully I do not make a living on my looks." And comments on James's looks are not needed on Wikipedia. It would be different if it's clear that you think James looks better in person or on video and was simply making an "Oh, you look so much better in person or on video" type of comment, but that was/is not clear. Flyer22 (talk) 13:35, 23 August 2014 (UTC)
Roxy.., to paraphrase Dr. Martin Luther King, "I look forward to the day when [our editors] are judged by the character [of their edits]", not by their outward appearance. How about a retraction, for starters. --Ancheta Wis   (talk | contribs) 14:53, 23 August 2014 (UTC)
Meh -Roxy the dog™ (resonate) 17:34, 23 August 2014 (UTC)
Flyer22, I read Roxy's comment as tongue-in-cheek, playfully inviting someone to disagree. I'll play along, Roxy! I thought James looked sort of bookishly handsome in the CBC photo. IMO, it was much nicer than the one accompanying the CILIP blog post[12] earlier this month. —Shelley V. Adams ‹blame
credit› 23:12, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
I have added the reference to his bio. Axl ¤ [Talk] 10:58, 22 August 2014 (UTC)
The translation work mentioned in the article is very commendable, but I am not completely convinced by this statement: "We're creating some of the first medical content to ever exist in some languages." What are those languages?
—Wavelength (talk) 16:58, 22 August 2014 (UTC)
K'iche would be one. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 20:36, 22 August 2014 (UTC)
I suppose that would be K'iche' language. Axl ¤ [Talk] 22:49, 22 August 2014 (UTC)
Yup. 2.3 million speakers maybe. Not much medical content in their language. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 22:59, 22 August 2014 (UTC)
The Quiche text at http://wol.jw.org/quc/wol/d/r156/lp-qc/1102008086 is equivalent to the English text at http://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/1102008086, but it might not meet your criteria for being medical content. I found it quickly, but my longer search for Quiche medical text outside that website has been unsuccessful.
—Wavelength (talk) 03:52, 23 August 2014 (UTC)
[More accurately, "has been unsuccessful" should be "has not been successful".
—Wavelength (talk) 19:17, 26 August 2014 (UTC)]

The statement is "some of the first medical content to ever exist in some languages" It is not controversial that their is little medical content in many languages. The content you give is religious content not medical and yes religious content exists in every language as lots of people work on that. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 04:06, 23 August 2014 (UTC)

Apropos of nothing really, I was a resident on a cardiothoracic team once and we had patients from the Solomon Islands at our hospital, and hearing a cardiothoracic surgical procedure translated into Pidgin English was interesting indeed. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 04:22, 23 August 2014 (UTC)
@Cas Liber, I'm curious, how was a subjunctive mood statement translated? Were there any such statements? No worries, were none occurred (I provide a sample clause for those who don't speak in subjunctive). --Ancheta Wis   (talk | contribs) 16:32, 23 August 2014 (UTC)
No idea, the interpreter was pretty quick and it was hard to follow - the bit that most caught my attention was describing the cutting of the sternum as "snip snip snip 'um" Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 20:43, 23 August 2014 (UTC)
Thank you for emphasizing the word "some". I should have been more attentive.
—Wavelength (talk) 15:40, 23 August 2014 (UTC)

Linking to reviewed versions of our articles

Soon, a version of the featured article, Dengue fever will be published in the Canadian journal, Open Medicine. When that's done, James will be putting a link to the Open Medicine version at the top of Dengue fever. James, can you please link me to the version of Dengue fever that Open Medicine will be publishing? --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 07:51, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

If only we could get all our articles to such a high standard, which I doubt is going to happen anytime soon.-A1candidate (talk) 08:04, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
I think the link to the published version shouldn't be too prominent. Perhaps worth considering to integrate it into the infobox. Or perhaps a separate box the same way we indicate that spoken versions exist. JFW | T@lk 20:47, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
Yes I was thinking to do it like spoken Wikipedia. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 05:44, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

User:IiKkEe

Appears to be refusing to use references or follow WP:MEDMOS. Article in question is Zinc deficiency. Peoples thoughts? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 08:14, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

Pharma/Wikipedia web story

"Citation needed: pharma needs to make the most of Wikipedia. The online encyclopedia is an increasingly important source of knowledge for patients and information [which must be kept accurate and up to date"]. Nothing too exciting. I'll cross-post to Pharma project. Wiki CRUK John (talk) 09:49, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

Merging of Heart & Human heart

So, this has been a peeve of mine for a while now, and I've finally decided to do something about it. Instead of simply complain and get someone else to do the merge I've written up a massive expansion, primarily sourced from a quality CC-BY source. After having it almost eclipse other work I've been doing it is at a level where I can show it to others who might be interested in helping out. Basically the article is at around 160kb, and if it wasn't for the reliance on a single source I would push for it to reach FA within short.

What needs doing is the following:

  • Wikilinking the content on Physiology onwards.
  • Fixing image #s as has been done in the structure section
  • Merging the content from the 3 sources on Embryology (the first section is all from CNX and refernced, if merged please only merge with other referenced content.
  • Copyediting for language which speaks directly to the reader (same as the points about, should be done on the Structure section).

So, if anyone is interested the article can be found here: User:CFCF/draft/Heart

-- -- CFCF 🍌 (email) 16:48, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

P.S. Ping! Iztwoz - Mikael Häggström? -- CFCF 🍌 (email) 18:13, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
I'm currently focused on other articles right now, but I believe this is one of the core medical articles that needs to be of at least decent quality so I'll drop by to make improvements every now and then, but I cannot guarantee any commitments to the article. -A1candidate (talk) 18:10, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
Upon a quick review of the draft, I think it looks fine. I support the merge of Heart and Human heart, since the amount of text in Heart that is not applicable to humans is almost non-existent. For some strange reason, only three sentences in the section "Invertebrate heart" actually deal with that subject, the rest of the text there is about "the fully divided heart" that is found in humans and not in invertebrates.Mikael Häggström (talk) 18:57, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

Heart article needs an infobox, "see also" should be merged into the text if notable and deleted if not. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 05:49, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

The article is now live at Heart! -- CFCF 🍌 (email) 11:13, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

Simpleshow Videos

Contraception – How to Prevent Unwanted Pregnancy

We have recently had a video donated to Wikipedia. Am also in discussions with the Khan academy about their releasing their content under a license we can use. Wondering what peoples though are on the placement of these sorts of videos? This one is a little "how to" in nature. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 12:29, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

This group posted a lot of videos to YouTube which someone brought to Wikipedia. In a lot of ways they seem to know what they are doing but in some others I wonder about their understanding of CC licensing. I wrote to them and asked for a chat because I want to confirm that every part of this video is CC licensed. If copyright is in order then I would like these videos everywhere and perhaps translated to other languages also.
Old news about Khan Academy is that in Wikipedia:GLAM/smarthistory a lot of their videos are presented by having external links in the body of Wikipedia articles to their videos. I would hate to press Khan Academy, but as best as I can tell, no one there has ever made a public statement about why they only use non-free licensing when so much of their branding suggests that they want to make content freely available. I have sometimes wondered if perhaps the people making decisions there really have not thought about the issue, because I expected that if they did, they are big enough to issue some kind of statement on this striking choice of theirs. Blue Rasberry (talk) 14:20, 28 August 2014 (UTC)
Yes am currently pressing these issues. The Khan academy is starting to work on medicine. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 03:31, 29 August 2014 (UTC)
We are thinking about CRUK videos too, but the existing model release terms are an issue. At the least we may change the standard forms to allow videos shot in future to be on fully open licenses. Ones like this - a nice animated 1:09 on "having an endoscopy" should be easier. Wiki CRUK John (talk) 14:48, 28 August 2014 (UTC)
Wow. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 16:26, 28 August 2014 (UTC)
I like the idea of videos, and think their placement should be based upon content. A general video, or a well sourced one could go in the article, similar to images. I really like the CRUK animation, but when it comes to the how to video, I have to admit it is very US-centric. Gynecologists in much of the world aren't involved in informing people about contraceptives, instead this is done by nurses. I would suggest we try to stick to content that is applicable internationally if we are to link it in our articles. -- CFCF 🍌 (email) 18:38, 28 August 2014 (UTC)
Agree CFCF, the difficult with video is that they are hard to edit collaboratively. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 03:33, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

New attempt at RFC on medical articles disclaimer

An earlier RFC on medical disclaimer failed, but I and a couple of others believe we have a strategy to start a new one that would help prevent a repeat of the same problems. That discussion is here: User talk:SandyGeorgia#Any new developments in the medical disclaimer initiative? The main proposals are summarized at the bottom of that discussion. We would welcome anyone in the Medicine WikiProject to weigh in before we start the drafting process. --Holdek (talk) 16:58, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

This was proposed not that long ago. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 00:52, 26 August 2014 (UTC)
About eight months ago. --Holdek (talk) 12:19, 26 August 2014 (UTC)
I think it's time for another, more focussed RFC, based on what we learned from the last one. James (chair of m:Wiki Project Med Foundation) and Jacob (founder of this en.Wikipedia medicine project), you were strongly opposed to most of the suggestions in the last RFC. Would you support something more modest at the top of each medical article, such as

Wikipedia cannot guarantee the validity of the information in this article. It may recently have been changed, vandalized or altered by someone whose opinion does not correspond with the state of knowledge in the relevant fields.

(That's a paraphrase from our general disclaimer.) --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 08:04, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
I am supportive of adding a tag for authors / contributors as being discussed [13] (which would increase transparency to our readers)
I would also be supportive of a trial of one line box that said

Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, including you!

This basically says the same thing as your above quote except it also invites people to contribute. (ie if anyone can contribute it may be wrong / there may be vandalism, we do not need to spell it out more). Also my version would have a better chance of increase editor numbers and thus maybe fixing issues. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 08:15, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
While I agree a prominent invitation to edit is a good thing, your wording doesn't say the same as my wording. Some readers may get the implicit corollary that "therefore it may recently have been changed, vandalized or altered by someone whose opinion does not correspond with the state of knowledge in the relevant fields." Many won't. Perhaps

Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, including you, without any prior fact-checking or verification that what you contribute reflects the current academic consensus

--Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 09:35, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
Another possibility would be to have the one line box like Doc James suggests, combined with moving and enlarging the disclaimer links from the bottom to the top of the article, which may accomplish both goals? Holdek (talk) 15:25, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
That would definitely be an improvement on the present situation and of course I'd support it. What do you think, James? --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 20:39, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

(←) I think moving stuff to the top is not a good solution. I am willing to support a small disclaimer about medical articles, and I was wondering if {{Infobox disease}} would be a good place. It would need to be specific about health information and issues on reliability, because reminding people that Wikipedia can be edited by anyone can be done in lots of other places. JFW | T@lk 21:02, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

Wouldn't it be better for disclaimers to be seen before a person begins reading the article, rather than after, if at all? --Holdek (talk) 21:43, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
That Wikipedia can be edited by anyone is the reliability issue. There is no more accurate way of expressing the nature of the site's reliability than telling the reader anyone can live edit what they're reading. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 16:01, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

Before this discussion gets out of hand again, I very strongly suggest that an RfC is held about whether a disclaimer should be more prominent in general. After the results of the RfC, then a more specific proposal can be put forward. I am neither for nor against the proposal, but one of the main reasons the previous RfC failed was because it got lost in technicalities and multiple proposals. I very strongly suggest first a general RfC is held, and then some specific proposals are discussed and tailored to the comments received in the initial RfC. Otherwise we will spend months meandering through tends to hundreds of suggested disclaimers without first clarifying if this is what the community wants; and when presented to the community, the community will be giving an opinion not on whether a disclaimer is needed, but on the wording of the specific disclaimer which is provided, neither of which would be desired. --129.94.102.201 (talk) 00:34, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

That said, a small notice on the infobox may be the most easily implementable and least intrusive. --129.94.102.201 (talk) 00:34, 28 August 2014 (UTC)
Somebody's been reading my mind!
I don't have energy to read through all past discussions, and really only can give a reader's opinion. As a sexegenarian (and hypochondriac) I do end up at these articles a lot, usually after looking at much higher quality sources). As an 8 year editor I should know better than to take them as anything more than a snapshot, and check references before believing much of any thing. But I don't always do so, so I'd like to see a reminder or disclaimer prominently placed. And others who don't understand the way of the wiki need one even more so... My suggestion:
I see there is a long Wikipedia:List_of_infoboxes/Health_and_fitness with lots of info boxes listed. I'm sure many articles have no info box at all. I don't know if I missed a "part of wikiproject medicine" box. In any case every article needs some sort of info box (including in alternative medicine). And on the top of any medicine-related info box should be something like: Reminder (or "disclaimer"): This article is for informational purposes and may contain outdated or inaccurate information. That's really true of all but (or even?) the highest quality peer reviewed articles. So it is the responsible thing to do. And if it's at or near the top of an info box, it won't be quite as alarming. Carolmooredc (Talkie-Talkie) 00:43, 28 August 2014 (UTC)
I think 129.94.102.201 is right in his or her first post. Let's just ask should our medical articles have a clear and prominent warning about their unreliability. Thank you, 129.94.102.201. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 16:11, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

I am no for "warning about unreliability" and am yes for "explaining that anyone can edit". IMO they are more or less the same but the later has potentially greater positive benefits. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 05:27, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

Screenshot with the small proposed change to the page circled in magenta to make it easier to find.

It appears that getting consensus for making this change to Wikipedia generally will be difficult.[14] It appears that most within WPMED are supportive. A suggestive has been put forth that we should only add this to medical articles. While a little more complicated technically would be happy with this.

Once more an example of what this could look like is on the article on heart failure. If there is support for this proposal the word "authors" or "contributor" and link to the list of authors would go after the text "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia".

When a person clicks on the word author it takes you to X! tool here [15]. Preferably the heading "top editors" would be changed to "authors" and that section would be moved up to below "general statistics". I am not sure what punctuation should be used and am open to suggestions / variations. What are peoples thoughts to just do it for medical articles? A lack of transparency regarding who writes Wikipedia's medical content is a concern I frequently hear. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 23:15, 23 August 2014 (UTC)

Support
  • Support Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 07:53, 28 August 2014 (UTC)
  • Support -- CFCF 🍌 (email) 08:48, 28 August 2014 (UTC)
  • Support – Boghog (talk) 08:58, 28 August 2014 (UTC)
  • Support -- Looie496 (talk) 14:09, 28 August 2014 (UTC)
  • Support There are other proposals about cosmetic ways to do this. I might favor changing "From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia" to "From contributors to Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia" because we already have a problem with people providing attribution to either Wikipedia or Creative Commons rather that people who applied CC licenses to content they shared on Wikipedia. Xaosflux said things in the above cited discussion which made me think this way. The way this is proposed is good also. Blue Rasberry (talk) 14:10, 28 August 2014 (UTC)
  • Support for all articles, actually, not only medical space.--cyclopiaspeak! 15:21, 28 August 2014 (UTC)
  • Support Makes what is already available in two clicks (Page information -> Contributors) available in one click instead, and makes that link more visible. As this information is already available and all this proposal is doing is making the access to it easier, I don't understand the arguments that this will somehow be dangerous or encourage glory-hounds, at least not any more than what the normal page presentation already does. Would be very happy to see this deployed in a trial run on selected WP:MED articles, for example, and see what the feedback is, or see whether the contributor profile of those articles changes (RCT anyone)? Zad68 18:47, 28 August 2014 (UTC)
  • Support, although I would prefer it next to the "History" tab at the top (which would require MediaWiki intervention). JFW | T@lk 19:31, 28 August 2014 (UTC)
  • Support per the discussion at village pump. Transparency to readers, credit to major contributors, a tool for seeing how an article was developed that provides a snapshot not available by using the history tab. - - MrBill3 (talk) 02:32, 29 August 2014 (UTC)
  • Support but weakly, as the information is already available, and actually pretty difficult for novices to interpret sensibily. Plus there are normally no declarations of any COI, as well as the other issues raised here and at the pump. Wiki CRUK John (talk) 14:08, 29 August 2014 (UTC)
I think it would be good for all of us to have COI declarations on our talk pages. I have one sort of already but will clarify it. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 20:25, 29 August 2014 (UTC)
Oppose
Discussion
It's an interesting proposal. Regarding terminology, a broader term like "contributors" or "editors" would probably better capture the sense of the information than "authors". (For instance, someone reverting vandalism is making a useful and worthwhile contribution, but I wouldn't think of them as an author.)
On placement of the link, while I appreciate the appeal of adding a specially-placed 'byline', I am inclined to suggest that it is better placed next to the 'History' tab—the same location where someone gets the rest of their information about the way the article has been edited.
On the concept itself, I am of two minds. Seeing the major contributors is potentially interesting and potentially useful, though the vast majority of our editors are working pseudonymously—I am reluctant to believe that a reader who discovers that most of an article's edits come from "Boghog" or "TenOfAllTrades" or "Xaosflux" is necessarily going to find it more credible, or that the authorship is more transparent. (Not that I have anything against Boghog or Xaosflux.)
As well, the issue of ordering the list of contributors by number of (non-minor?) edits is kind of clunky. It's probably the best automated compromise we can use, but it has some problematic aspects. (Yes, one can sort the table on the other columns, but few people are likely to do so.) If I have an article on my watchlist and regularly revert vandalism, it's entirely possible that I will be the top 'author' without having made a single contribution to an article's content. A pair of edit warriors could be the top contributors without ever actually getting either one's content to stick. Editors will be rewarded for the practice of breaking edits up into lots of tiny chunks, and for failing to use the 'minor edit' flag.
In the fringier areas of medicine, we still come across articles that have been lovingly crafted by true believers over the course of many months or years, only to be brutally cut down to a reality-based stub when finally discovered. Most of the edits and most of the additions will be credited to the fringe editor, but most of the current content will be the work of a small number of recent authors. We actually look worse in such situations, because a naive reading of the 'contributors' list will put the fringe wackjob's name first.
Honestly, I suspect that this type of information isn't going to have a big effect on the perception of Wikipedia articles by people from outside Wikipedia. The sort of people who edit this talk page are experienced editors, who know about article histories and vandalism reverts and content policies...and who likely recognize dozens of usernames and know which of them have their heads on straight. To us, the list of usernames and edit numbers makes some sense because we have the necessary context and experience. It can be useful to us because we know the environment and can recognize green lights and red flags. For individuals looking in from the outside...I am more skeptical. Just some thoughts. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 14:49, 28 August 2014 (UTC)
I must admit I have doubts about the wisdom of this proposal too. For the reasons TenOfAllTrades has laid out above, any ranking of contributors by number of edits may be misleading, and I suspect might even be exploited by the small section of contributors who seem to consider their personal edit-count as some sort of 'score'. I'd be very wary of changing current practice in a manner that might encourage 'game-playing' edits in subject matter where we have a particular responsibility to ensure the best possible content - and experience has shown that such game-playing has disrupted Wikipedia content on other subjects, as with the problems we had with Wikipedia:Getting to Philosophy being used as an excuse to edit-war over the lede of multiple articles. Further, as TenOfAllTrades also notes, Wikipedia user names are unlikely to mean much to the average reader anyway, and a ranked listing may give a false impression of our collaborative article creation process - where discussions in the background (on talk pages, project pages etc) may sometimes be as significant as the actual editing of individual articles.For those that need this information, it is already available via history tools. AndyTheGrump (talk) 16:15, 28 August 2014 (UTC)
Which is why the metric for text added is also displayed. This isn't about needing the information, it is about making it visible for those who don't know how to find it. -- CFCF 🍌 (email) 18:43, 28 August 2014 (UTC)
There is a fair number of us here who have our real life entities on our user pages. Having surveyed our editors we also know that many of those who make up the core community of medical editors have a fairly significant medical background.
We already have a link to "contributors" under the history tab. If people were going to "game" this they could already. I am not convinced that moving it to the by-line will make much difference. If we do a trial this is definitely something we will keep an eye on. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 22:43, 28 August 2014 (UTC)
I'll just add that it would be nice if there were some ability to recognize contributions other than adding text. Sometimes the articles desperately need copyediting or just flat out removal of inappropriate material. Having spent hundreds of hours on the quinolone articles myself, I'm noted as being responsible for 2- 5% of the added text. A former user who added many tens of thousands of bytes of case reports, animal studies, in vitro studies, and primary research reports (which my time was mostly spent cutting out) is listed as responsible for slightly over 50% of the added text, though he would likely not recognize the articles in their current form, and they contain almost none of the text he added. If something could be done here that does not make the software too complicated it would be nice. Formerly 98 (talk) 04:19, 29 August 2014 (UTC)
LG is listed as first and you as third [16]. You however or the most recent of the major contributors. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 05:19, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

Cheilodynie

Does anyone know what Cheilodynie is? It redirects to Disease, and I'm guessing that's wrong. (I've been cleaning out inappropriate redirects by redirecting from "Disease" to more relevant pages; there are only a few more to go.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:51, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

Seems to be a term that isn't internationally used - something to do with a disease of the lip? http://www.gloggnitzer.com/icd-10/K00-K14.html, and cheilo = lip, dynia = pain - lip pain? -- CFCF 🍌 (email) 07:12, 29 August 2014 (UTC)
ICD 10 code is K13.0 [17] which is the same as cheilitis Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 07:51, 29 August 2014 (UTC)
It's probably a misspelling or a non-English word. Axl ¤ [Talk] 09:47, 29 August 2014 (UTC)
"Dynie" sounds like it might refer to pain. So pain in the lips perhaps. Never heard the term before though. 92.40.94.197 (talk) 18:45, 29 August 2014 (UTC)
Indeed, as CFCF suggested. Axl ¤ [Talk] 20:37, 29 August 2014 (UTC)
A word for some sort of pain in German, it seems. Whatever it is, these are what you take to relieve it. Johnbod (talk) 23:24, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

Anybody reviewing Medgirl131's edits?

Cross-posting Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Pharmacology#Anybody_reviewing_Medgirl131.27s_edits.3F FYA. Thanks. Samsara (FA • FP) 10:27, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

Need help of a German-speaking altmed editor

A BLP of a fringe altmed practitioner at Ryke Geerd Hamer crosses several boundaries. Much of the sourcing is in German. The article contains many unpleasant statements about the subject person that are not as well cited as they should be to have a place on wp. Can someone please pitch in?LeadSongDog come howl! 03:15, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

Are there any specific souces and claims that you want to verify? -A1candidate (talk) 03:40, 30 August 2014 (UTC)
Any statements that could be construed as a BLP violation. Do we have RS for the assertions that he's said and done these vile things, or is this just an attack piece?
After taking a brief look at the article, I've noticed that:
  • Many of the links are dead
  • Bild is a tabloid that shouldn't be used for a BLP
  • The assertion that the German Medical Association disagrees with Hamer is unsourced
  • The fact that Hamer promotes anti-semitic views and is responsible for the deaths of several people is supported by an article published on the website of the German Cancer Society
  • The BLP is generally accurate for the most part, but it should be reduced it size to summarize important points only.
  • It should also be noted that some of his supporters view him as a "genius" and a role model. There have been public demonstrations in support of Hamer and he seems to be a popular lecturer too.
-A1candidate (talk) 01:40, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
Thank you. I'm sure it is unpleasant work to do, but it is clearly necessary. LeadSongDog come howl! 04:05, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

WP:Redirect for discussion concerning the Gender identity disorder article

Opinions are needed on the following matter: Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2014 August 31#Gender dysphoria. WP:Med has been involved with the gender identity disorder vs. gender dysphoria issue before, and this WP:Redirect for discussion is the next phase of this matter. A WP:Permalink is here. The two WikiProjects that have been alerted to this discussion are this one (WP:Med) and WP:LGBT, as seen here. The gender identity disorder topic is a sensitive topic, and sometimes the Gender identity disorder article can be subject to WP:Activism, so more eyes on that article from neutral editors can also help this issue. Flyer22 (talk) 04:59, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

Plagiarism?

From were do you think? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 04:11, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
I see no reason to think it is plagiarism. The only question might be whether it is appropriate, since the editor who added it has the same user name as one of the authors of the paper that is cited. Looie496 (talk) 19:50, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

Frontotemporal dementia and Frontotemporal lobar degeneration

Do we want to keep these as separate articles? I'd like to hear other opinions about this because these two articles appear to have a rather significant amount of overlap and I'm of the mind that we could merge these two articles. Thoughts? TylerDurden8823 (talk) 05:23, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

They are the same thing similar enough and need merging. Would merge to Frontotemporal lobar degeneration Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 05:29, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
They are not the same. FTLD refers to a group of neurodegenerative disorders that includes FD. Other forms of FTLD are semantic dementia and primary progressive nonfluent aphasia. Please do not confuse the terms. -A1candidate (talk) 17:30, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
I'm not disputing that A1, the FTD article mentions there are subtypes including the semantic and primary progressive confluent aphasia as you say. My point is that the frontotemporal lobar degeneration article doesn't really say much that's different from the FTD article. So, that's why I'm questioning the need for separate articles here. If they need to be separate, then it's important that the FTLD article is developed and has content in it that differs from the FTD article. Don't you think? No sense in having two articles say practically the same thing. TylerDurden8823 (talk) 18:05, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
Give me some time to improve on the articles. We can't merge two articles just because we do a poor job of writing them. That's not the path that WP Medicine should take and I hope you understand. -A1candidate (talk) 18:20, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
I did say in my last comment "if they need to be separate, then it's important that the FTLD article is developed and has content in it that differs from the FTD article." It's fine if you need time to improve the article, but I was raising the issue here because it just came to my attention. I'm not pushing for a merge this second. If you want to take it on as a project and develop the FTLD article so that it differs enough from the FTD article to merit being its own page, then by all means do it. TylerDurden8823 (talk) 19:47, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
Yes there are three types of FTLD per [19]. I would merge all three.
Per the ref FTLD is the broad category. We seem to have FTD playing that role. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 21:49, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
FTLD should be written from a pathological viewpoint with focus on histology, genetics, and disease mechanisms. FTD should cover signs, symptoms, diagnosis and treatment -A1candidate (talk) 22:02, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
Disagree. Frontotemporal lobar degeneration is the overriding term it appears and all 4 can be discussed on the same page until such time that they need to be split off. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 22:19, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
As long as FTLD doesn't get merged, I won't object to that -A1candidate (talk) 22:37, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

Diet and cancer

The article Diet and cancer starts with, "Almost all cancers (80–90%) are caused by environmental factors,[1] and of these, 30–40% of cancers are directly linked to the diet.[2] By far, the most significant dietary cause of cancer is overnutrition (eating too much).[3]" Ref 1 is 14 years old. Ref 2 is 5 years old and is to a general page not a specific source supporting the content. I am not sure this information is really correct or that such overarching statements are supported by current medical consensus. As there are a number of editors here with extensive knowledge I thought someone might take a look. - - MrBill3 (talk) 11:37, 24 August 2014 (UTC)

Here is a 2008 review [20] that supports. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 11:47, 24 August 2014 (UTC)
The most recent UK data has [attributable to lifestyle and environmental factors] "an estimated 43% of all new cases of cancer in the UK (approximately 134 000 new cases in 2010), and about 50% of all cancer deaths." "The fraction of cancer attributable to lifestyle and environmental factors in the UK in 2010". Click Table of contents on the left for the whole thing, which is free access. You can't just say "100% minus (heritable) genetic = environmentally caused", there's a sizeable "don't know/just happened" as well. The CRUK pages, on a quick look, say "diet" "nearly one in ten UK cancer cases are caused by unhealthy diets.", "obesity" "more than one in 20 cancers in the UK are linked to being overweight or obese." and alchohol "causes 4% of cancers in the UK", see menu at here. Another one for the list. And 80% isn't "almost all" anyway. The detail of the article is poor too - no sections on red/processed meats or salt, for example. Wiki CRUK John/Johnbod (talk) 12:35, 24 August 2014 (UTC)
Yes different sources give different estimates. In such a situation it is best to use a range like 40 to 80%. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 13:12, 24 August 2014 (UTC)

2014 World Cancer Report has a section on diet. It states that excess weight is responsible for 4.2% of cancer in men and 14.3% of cancer in women in the USA. Among non smokers this is an even greater proportion. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 13:19, 24 August 2014 (UTC)

  • Reference 2 goes to the main page of the huge section at the AIRC/WCRF site, dated 2009. This seems the current equivalent, with figures about 50% of those quoted. For now I'll just remove these first two sentences, which clearly are not "supported by current medical consensus". Johnbod (talk) 16:50, 24 August 2014 (UTC)
We go through this every year or two. You can 'just say "100% minus (heritable) genetic = environmentally caused"', because that's exactly how the specialists define it: in this worldview, the only options are genotype and phenotype, and if it's not the one, then it is (by definition) the other.
The description of the Nature paper is incorrect. It does not describe "The most recent UK data has [attributable to lifestyle and environmental factors]". It describes "The most recent UK data has [attributable to lifestyle and environmental factors] mostly choosing only things that that we, the researchers, have decided are both within the control of UK residents and not culturally inappropriate, and only as applies to 18 out of a couple hundred types of cancer." That's seriously different: They have excluded certain causes, like the number of breast cancer deaths that could be prevented if women chose to have more children, because it would not be socially "acceptable", not because choosing to have zero children is not a scientifically accepted cause of breast and ovarian cancer.
They did not look at all environmental causes, and therefore their numbers are automatically an under-representation. They claim to have looked at exactly 14:
  1. tobacco,
  2. alcohol,
  3. consumption of meat,
  4. consumption of fruit and vegetables,
  5. consumption of fibre
  6. consumption of salt
  7. being overweight or obese,
  8. lack of physical exercise,
  9. occupation,
  10. infections (hardly any in the UK, but about a quarter of cancer deaths worldwide),
  11. ionizing radiation from (only) medical sources and two natural (radon and cosmic background) sources
  12. UV exposure (which they calculate against people born in 1903, some of whom also got UV-induced melanoma),
  13. use of "female" hormones (only as it affects "female" cancers), and
  14. breast feeding.
At a glance, these controllable things appear to have been ignored: pesticides, smog and other forms of air pollution (except tobacco smoke and what you inhale at work), water pollution, number of children, age at which a first child is born, and your choice to take (or not) some drugs to reduce cancer risk. I'm sure there are more. They also omit non-controllable factors, like age at menarche (which at least gets mentioned) and menopause.
They also looked at only 18 of the most common cancers in the UK, and they only looked at specific factors for some of these cancers. This is mostly sensible, since we want them to be working with respectable data, but it systematically underestimates effects. For example, obesity increases the risk for many cancers, but they only looked at its effect on seven, so the cancers caused by obesity in another dozen cases (or more?) are omitted.
In other words, this paper does nothing to change the fact that worldwide nearly all causes of cancer are non-hereditary. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:53, 24 August 2014 (UTC)
So this ref says 20-30% are preventable [21] which is close to 30-40%. Agree it needs updating. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 22:59, 24 August 2014 (UTC)
"You can 'just say "100% minus (heritable) genetic = environmentally caused"', because that's exactly how the specialists define it: in this worldview, the only options are genotype and phenotype, and if it's not the one, then it is (by definition) the other." – This isn't quite my field, but I'd have thought it should actually go something like risk of getting cancer = genetic contribution + environmental contribution + interaction of genetic and environmental contributions. The final term is needed because genetic and environmental contributions to cancer susceptibility are not strictly additive. For example, particular genotypes might be more or less susceptible to particular environmental influences. Some genotypes might even be advantageous in one environment but disadvantageous in another – think skin pigmentation, UV levels, skin cancer risk, and vitamin D production. What I'm trying to say is, I wouldn't be comfortable with simply subtracting genetically caused cancers from 100% to get environmentally caused cancers. Adrian J. Hunter(talk•contribs) 02:18, 25 August 2014 (UTC)
This is how the sources operate. The one that John notes above, for example, explicitly refuses to count UV exposure on the job as an occupational cause of cancer. In this area, every cancer gets assigned exactly one cause. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:14, 25 August 2014 (UTC)
First thanks for devoting some attention to this article. While I agree (to some extent) with WhatamIdoing's analysis it runs up against OR and V. I think it is an important analysis of the quality of sources which is entirely appropriate. I'd like to see some sources that make the same sort of evaluation and address cancer epidemiology. Unfortunately (or fortunately in most cases) on WP we are bound to represent "how the specialist's define it" and the mainstream academic consensus per WP:DUE. I'd think there are significant viewpoints that raise the issues presented by WhatamIdoing and if identified they might be evaluated for due weight. I do think some of the major reliable sources do not calculate environmental level of cause by 100% - hereditary = environmental some I have read clearly identify an area of we don't know. - - MrBill3 (talk) 04:37, 25 August 2014 (UTC)
I wouldn't want to see my comments in an article. However, I also wouldn't want to see "50% of all cancer deaths are caused by environmental factors" in an article when what the source actually says is that 50% of all cancer deaths in the UK and for only 18 types of cancer are caused by fourteen selected environmental (including lifestyle) factors.
There are a lot of cancers for which the cause is unknown. However, there are almost none for which the hereditary vs not issue is unknown. For example, with breast cancer, there is a sizable fraction of "unknown", but it is known (using US stats) it's about 10% hereditary and 90% environmental. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:59, 25 August 2014 (UTC)
No one has suggested putting a 50% figure in. Instead a first sentence that was not sourced to MEDRS standards, was by no means necessary for the topic, and actually meant something a very long way from what the average reader was likely to think it meant, was removed. It should not be replaced with any alternative figure at all. There are too many such over-simple unexplained statements that are likely to mislead (even if up to date) in medical articles. The 2nd sentence has now been replaced, although its reference seems now unverifiable. Johnbod (talk) 20:35, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

The fact that a lot and maybe most cancer is "enviromental" (not inherited from one's parents) is excellent as that means that it can potentially be prevented. This means not smoking, improving chimneys, immunization against certain infections, improving ventilation in underground living spaces, covering ones skin from the sun, etc. All measure that are well in the means of most people globally.

If most cancer was "not environmental" (in other words inherited from one's parents) than gene therapy / after the fact treatment would be the only option. Something which is very expensive and out of the possible range of most people globally. The War Against Cancer concentrated mostly on treatment rather than prevention unfortunately for whatever reasons. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 01:02, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

The article is "Diet and cancer" and there is no need to widen beyond that topic in the first sentence, especially in a severely under-explained fashion. Johnbod (talk) 01:17, 26 August 2014 (UTC)
Not to be flippant, but two issues that I think are worth making explicit:
  • The most important cause of cancer is not dying of something else. The risk doubles wtih every decade of life, and as recently as 50 years ago the number living into the highest risk decades was quite small.
  • By this reasoning, statins inevitably "cause" cancer as do antibiotics. When the rate of cardiovascular deaths fall, the rate of other causes of death must go up, because everyone dies of something.
Also, while I don't have the references at hand, I don't think cancer has to be either "genetic" or "environmental" unless you consider your own body part of the environment. Any good molecular bio text will tell you than every cell replication is accompanied by transcrption errors, and normal metabolism produces a plethora of electrophiles such as formaldehyde and unsaturated ketones that are able to alkylate DNA. If "chemical" exposure where responsible for a large percentage of cancers, we should have seen a precipitous drop since the bad old days of the 1950s and 1960s when a large percentage of the population had occupational exposure in manufacturing jobs that where performed in the near complete absence of any sort of chemical hygiene measures. It hasn't really happened. Formerly 98 (talk) 19:51, 26 August 2014 (UTC)
With regard to disease causation, "environmental" just means "not genetic". It's a tremendously broad term that includes everything from diet to infections and even somatic mutation, whether caused by external mutagens, ordinary metabolites, or replication errors. Adrian J. Hunter(talk•contribs) 10:18, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
Yes, and conveying this highly technical usage of the word "environment" to our general readership isn't straightforward. Environmental factors isn't really a helpful link imo; Environmental epidemiology may perhaps be more helpful, if suitably piped.

Leaving aside for a moment the broader considerations raised by WAID and others above, I feel this query illustrates the difficulties we almost inevitably come up against in communicating highly technical considerations effectively to our broad general readership. A somewhat analogous case is under discussion at Talk:Obesity#Genetics. The fact is that we endeavour to address a plethora of sensitive editorial tasks with a limited number of dedicated volunteers. We desperately need to multiply our human resources... But how? My own feeling is that we need more direct contributions from organizations whose aims overlap with our own (Cancer Research UK and Cochrane being just two prominent examples). For this sort of involvement to happen I think awareness needs to be raised across the scientific community (and general public) of the real-world role of Wikipedia's health-related content. 86.134.200.29 (talk) 15:09, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

I have formatted up the references and in doing so added links to free full text versions of quite a few of them. This may be useful in improving the article. I also added a possible ref I don't have access to on the talk page. I also added some material from 3 Cochrane reviews. I have Cochrane access if further information from those refs is desired. Thanks for the help and attention to this article. I think there are several sources already in the article that could be used to address some of the issues raised above. - - MrBill3 (talk) 11:28, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

Thanks - it would be nice to see improvement throughout - putting factors that reduce and increase risk in different sections would seem one way. The present mixture reads rather confusingly. Wiki CRUK John (talk) 16:08, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Copy and paste detection bot

The bot is up and running and returning helpful results. There is still a relatively high rate of false positives that we are working to reduce. These fixes should be fairly easy. False positives to true positives is about 1 to 3. It is definitely worthwhile as I have been able to provide feedback to a number of users. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 07:33, 23 August 2014 (UTC)

  • I think this is a fabulous idea. There's been a number of recent high-profile users whose edit count was largely based on difficult-to-detect plagiarism. JFW | T@lk 13:48, 26 August 2014 (UTC)
Still requires work but it is a start. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 14:24, 26 August 2014 (UTC)
  • I like running this bot to detect copy and paste. I looked through the list and it seems that the results (both true and false positive) are doable to manage. Sydney Poore/FloNight♥♥♥♥ 16:08, 26 August 2014 (UTC)
  • It's clearly a useful step forward, James. The false/true positive ratio is not bad for such early results - and there is little harm done when a false positive is reported, other than the time taken to check it out. Keep it going! --RexxS (talk) 17:34, 26 August 2014 (UTC)
  • Fully support trying it out. It's so very annoying how many sites copy Wikipedia content to try to drive search results their direction, resulting in false positives! Zad68 20:01, 26 August 2014 (UTC)
  • A step in the right direction, but we need to consider in a systematic fashion how WP should respond when we find our content mirrored, or even reverse copyvio'd in low-quality journals or even republished, as by Books, Inc. and its ilk. It's become far too common an occurence that threatens to undermine wp:V. There are a number of existing tools that should be made to play together better. The subpages of Wikipedia:Mirrors and forks and talkpage transclusions of Template:reverse copyvio could be part of the picture, but we really need a database tool that can track such instances with little or no human intervention, and an easy way to respond. WP:REUSE for free purposes is one thing, but this is something else, being exploited by AOL, Google, and other major corporations to the detriment of WP's quality and reputation. In some (or possible even most) cases what is going on amounts verges on clickfraud, with a reader driven to a google advert-laden page that only slightly resembles the WP page it was based on. In many cases the fraudsters hijack all the wikilinks except those for images, leaving the bandwidth burden on WP. LeadSongDog come howl! 21:47, 26 August 2014 (UTC)
Great idea using Wikipedia:Mirrors and forks. We will need to speak to Turnitin about this. User:Ocaasi? With respect to others copying from use, agree that is an issue but one this effort does not yet address. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 21:51, 26 August 2014 (UTC)
Hey folks. Great work James taking this project through to an actual working product!! I spent many days compiling a list of over 3000 mirrors and forks that we could 'whitelist' as non-infringing. There were two issues with this approach. One, the list of mirrors is ever-growing and changing. Two, Turnitin did not have a way for us to mass-add the sites on the whitelist. They would have to be entered literally one by one. It would take them a development cycle to prioritize this and it wasn't a high priority for them as it distracted their core developers. With Andrew and Madman, we pretty much decided that we should be doing the screening for mirrors. Turnitin gives us a list of 'positives' and then we remove any from our known whitelist during bot post-processing. That is something which we can certainly discuss with Eran or other coders involved. Turnitin, btw, whom I spoke with this afternoon, is very excited to see their software out in the wild on Wikipedia. Thanks again for the sustained effort and focus to make it happen :) Ocaasi t | c 22:14, 26 August 2014 (UTC)
  • Good work. We need more bots to help out. I support the bot reviewing on medical content. QuackGuru (talk) 02:26, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
  • Support the end result I have only used the bot's work twice but the output it gave was so good and saved so much time that I was able to do tasks that I wished to do, but would not have otherwise had time to do. I am really pleased with the assistance that the bot provides.
I regret that the bot has to operate using the commercial Turnitin database. Turnitin is a commercial product, and while I am grateful for their giving us access to an API which permits us to check for plagiarism, I feel that also Wikimedia projects are acting as a kingmaker in this instance and the usage that we are giving to Turnitin has a value which will earn a large amount of money for their commercial products which they will not get otherwise. Although this seems like a free trade on its face, I also feel that we the Wikimedia community are positioning Turnitin to corner their market and perpetually make many millions of dollars which they would not be able to make with such certainty were it not for this relationship with Wikipedia.
I wish that it would be possible to raise a million dollars for this community to develop its own comparable in house non-profit project, so that this educational resource could be freely available to everyone in the world. I have tremendous respect for Turnitin and their commercial model, but also I fear the implications of a small segment of the Wikimedia community leveraging our community resources to empower and develop a particular commercial product. Undoubtedly the Wikimedia community benefits from this partnership, and undoubtedly what we are providing to Turnitin is of no value to this community, but a relationship with Wikipedia means something and can have a lot of value. I feel like in partnering with Turnitin, we are shaping the marketplace of the future to disallow any room for nonprofit checks on plagiarism and ensuring that this space will only be occupied by commercial services. Blue Rasberry (talk) 14:53, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
Hi @Bluerasberry: Turnitin is a commercial service, just like our Wikipedia Zero partners, and our Wikipedia Library Partners, and our t-shirt manufacturers, and our server hosts. There is simply not an optimal non-commercial solution to all of our needs. Turnitin, in my evaluation is the best available plagiarism-detection program that exists. Most importantly, our use of their services comes with no advertising and no agreement which prevents us from using other tools (paid or free) at any time for any reason. This is as lightweight as a donation gets. So, while I see your concerns, I have to admit that Turnitin has already cornered this market (at least in Education), and I don't see how we best serve our mission of sharing knowledge by refusing the donation with no strings attached. Best, Jake Ocaasi t | c 20:47, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
This case is fundamentally different. The Wikimedia Zero and Wikimedia Library offers go to everyone; this is a much more exclusive arrangement. The merchandise and hosting are just services bought in the open market and do not obviously favor any one seller. Yes, I agree that Turnitin already has already captured this market, and perhaps they would keep it without Wikimedia community support. With support of the largest testbase in the world they are definitely in a better position now, though. The string they have attached to this is they want our usage data, and they are definitely getting the best usage data the world has to offer.
I confirm that Turnitin is the best available plagiarism-detection program that exists and that there is no better service available to meet this very pressing and urgent Wikimedia community need. I can only praise the value of the service we are getting. I only disagree that this is a lightweight donation - I am not aware of the Wikimedia community having such intimate exclusive ties with a commercial entity in any other context. I still support this project.
I think I feel this would be more in line with Wikimedia community values if I thought that the data we were giving to Turnitin were somehow made publicly available, so that conceivably other entities could develop competing products using the same data we are providing to Turnitin in exchange for access to their service. Blue Rasberry (talk) 21:04, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
I am completely grateful for Turnitin's help. I feel guilty for criticizing this gift. It is wholly beneficial to editors and provides a lot of benefit. Blue Rasberry (talk) 21:22, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
What more data are we giving them that they do not already have? They have all of Wikipedia and likely every edit that has occurred to Wikipedia in their database. We at Wikipedia already provide this to everyone including Turnitin. Not sure how this bot that uses their API changes things? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 05:54, 28 August 2014 (UTC)
I could be wrong, but yes, I was suggesting that this relationship gives Turnitin an inside track to information which is not available to others. If I am mistaken then that would relieve a lot of my worry.
I think I could ask the question like this:
Assume that there is some public bot which calls the Turnitin API, and the Wikimedia community promotes this bot.
  • Where is the public log of every request that this bot delivers to Turnitin?
  • Where is the public log of every response which Turnitin returns to the bot, even if it returns a null response?
My concern would be to make the actions and operations of the Wikimedia bot public to everyone. I know this is an unusual thing to ask because in almost any other case, no one would want the logs of these things because I expect they are 99.99% useless, but because I think Turnitin as a software company is in a unique position to improve its reputation with this relationship, I would like for all information managed on the Wikimedia side to be logged and available. I make no request for any information from the Turnitin side.
I have a lesser but still significant concern about Wikimedia projects being dependent on a third-party commercial partner, but in this case because the need is so great and the benefit so complete, I would want to find a way to make this work. Blue Rasberry (talk) 14:03, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

You just want everything the bot sends to Turnitin and everything returned from Turnitin to the bot published? Much of it is here [22] I am not sure if there is more but I am sure Eran can provide everything if you want. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 05:32, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

I expect that the bot's operator has this information. What I do not see is the null results, which would be when someone asks about plagiarism and Turnitin says that there is none. A monthly or quarterly file listing all of that information would satisfy this. Blue Rasberry (talk) 13:30, 29 August 2014 (UTC)
User:Eran or User:Ladsgroup could we produce this automatically for User:Bluerasberry? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 04:58, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

MEDSCAPE story on CRUK/Wikipedia

It's on their main page today. Subscription only, but if you google the title "Cancer Research UK Working to Improve Info on Wikipedia" you should be able to access it. Wiki CRUK John (talk) 13:21, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

How new editors can help?

Hi everyone! I am new to whole wikipedia medical editing experience. However, I am really excited to get involved. Any ideas for a relatively simply page that I can help to work on? I'm sorry if this exists elsewhere, a point in the right direction would be much appreciated. Pishoygouda (talk) 16:57, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Well, we add new sections to the bottom, so moved! There are really thousands of articles on medical conditions where the language needs to be simplified, and the WP:LEAD expanded to summarize the main points of the whole article. If you know anything at all about surgery, I find articles in this area especially in need of this, and often really unclearly expressed. Many epidemiology stats can be updated from the current version of the page already referenced - for example the US ones at Childhood cancer. Wiki CRUK John (talk) 17:41, 1 September 2014 (UTC)
I saw a number of editors had posted on your talk page and I suggest you go through the material they linked to, be it the MEDHOW–Medical How to guide, the MEDMOS–MEDical Manual of Style or the MEDRS–MEDdical Reliable Source guideline.
Once you've done that there are a large number of high-importance subjects that are in great need of improvement. A good start would be to tell us a little about your focus area/specialty or areas of interest. Finding something to improve in any area will likely be easy. -- CFCF 🍌 (email) 19:50, 1 September 2014 (UTC)
Welcome! Is there anything that you're interested in? I mean, if you're interested in anatomy, then I don't want to suggest a disease article, or if you're interested in heart disease, then I'd rather not suggest an article about cancer. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:34, 1 September 2014 (UTC)
Well I am a final year medical student from Ireland, so my interests are pretty broad. However, cardiology and medical education are my research interests! I'll give the WP:MEDRS a look! Pishoygouda (talk) 21:27, 1 September 2014 (UTC)
Welcome this is definitely the place you want to ask any questions medical. This page lists our articles by readership Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Popular_pages and is often useful to help pick something you want to work on. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 04:54, 2 September 2014 (UTC)
Hi Pishoygouda,
Most of our cardiology content is struggling (surgery, too). If you'd like to write an article pretty much from scratch, then you might look at Vascular tissue neoplasm. This is very short and could be easily expanded. It could even become a WP:Did you know item on the front page, if you did all the work within a couple of days (not counting anything you did in a sandbox or test page). Look at WP:MEDMOS#Sections for ideas of what to add. I found this article by looking at the table at Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Cardiology task force#Cardiology article assessment. It is "stub" class (very incomplete) but marked "top" priority for improvements.
If writing your WP:FIRST article seems too daunting a starting point, then perhaps you'd consider looking at cardiovascular-related anatomy articles, and adding a ==Clinical significance== section. Vein#Clinical significance has an especially large section, but most of them should have only a sentence or two (if anything). For example, Superior thoracic aperture should probably have a section on ==Clinical significance== that describes thoracic outlet syndrome.
Finally, since you're in Ireland, do you happen to speak Gaelic well (or any other language, for that matter)? We have a translation program to get good information into other language editions of Wikipedia. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:34, 2 September 2014 (UTC)
Thanks WhatamIdoing
I think i am going to try to work on Vascular tissue neoplasm. Have a look in a few days and let me know what you think! Thanks Pishoygouda (talk) 21:35, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

Readership

The change in page views for medical articles on English Wikipedia from mid 2009 to 2014 adjusted for mobile.

I have been following the readership of our articles for a long time. Data here shows a recent decline in views. This data however does not reflect the rise in mobile ( which has gone from less than 1% of overall Wikipedia readership to more than 30% of readership). I have done a correction of our data basically assuming that the fraction of readers by mobile for English Wikipedia as a whole is the same as the fraction of readers for medical content. Readership is down slightly but not a great deal. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 05:03, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

To me this looks like a steady rising trend, interrupted in 2013 by a sharp drop - probably a combination of the introduction of Google's "infobox" things, hitting all content areas, plus what seems to have been an alteration to the Google algorithm (affecting medicine more than most areas?) costing us a place or 3 on google rankings. After that the steady increase resumes. Wiki CRUK John (talk) 12:47, 2 September 2014 (UTC)
Yes my bet aswell. People might simply be leaving google less often with google's infobox.Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 14:01, 2 September 2014 (UTC)
Sounds plausible... 86.134.200.29 (talk) 09:26, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

Seeing as the lede of articles is often copied onto the google infobox you'd think working on the ledes would become more important than ever? -- CFCF 🍌 (email) 10:52, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

Google uses the NIH for their medical content in infoboxes. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 10:54, 3 September 2014 (UTC)
I'm not sure they do internationally. I don't get any infoboxes when searching for most medical content, but when I search for anatomy I get Wikipedia. (Don't know what to make of it?) -- CFCF 🍌 (email) 12:44, 3 September 2014 (UTC)
The source they use doesn't much matter in terms of the reduction in the number of people who click on - because they only wanted some very basic info. Wiki CRUK John (talk) 12:50, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

Comparison between Wikis

Hi. I recently created a table with the number of FA and GA articles found on different Wikipedia medical projects and gathered under a TOP 20. It helped me to have a global view regarding the development of the projects. As far as I'm concerned, some of the results were surprising in a negative way, like the fr.wikipedia with a total of only 31 reliable pages. You can check the full list here, if you're interested. The AC and AB are the equivalent of FA and GA. Regards, Wintereu (talk) 21:28, 1 September 2014 (UTC) P.S. Lists, templates and images were not included.

Interesting data. Many thanks. It is a little hard to compare across languages as the criteria for GA/FA are not equivalent between them. The data however do indicate which languages have active communities and yes this is sobering. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 04:45, 2 September 2014 (UTC)
Have added this to our stats data here Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Stats/Number_of_GAs/FAs_by_language Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 04:52, 2 September 2014 (UTC)
Yes, very interestring. Thanks for this. Wiki CRUK John (talk) 12:42, 2 September 2014 (UTC)
Good to see you find it useful. Regards, Wintereu (talk) 15:49, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

Mesoamerican nephropathy

Just came across this article. Interesting topic, but article is full of primary, etc and needs ProjectMedicine love. [Mesoamerican nephropathy]]. Jytdog (talk) 19:26, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

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