User talk:Njmcdaniel

Welcome

Hello Njmcdaniel and welcome to Wikipedia! I am Ukexpat and I would like to thank you for your contributions.

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ukexpat (talk) 19:04, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

Reverse T3

In response to the message you left on my talk page −

I see that you have been making edits to the WIkipedia sandbox. As that is a public sandbox, frequently used by editors for experimenting, nothing you put there will survive for long. You may prefer to do your test editing in a subpage of your user page, where it is unlikely that anyone else will change it without your consent. To see how to do this, see Wikipedia:User_pages. Or, if you prefer, I could create such a subpage for you.

I will do what I can to help you. I have been editing Wikipedia for several years, but I am a long way from being an expert. I have a science degree, but no medical training; and have done some work on tandem mass spec. So I hope to be able to understand at least some of what you write. Maproom (talk) 10:20, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

As a follow-on, your own personal sandbox is here: User:Njmcdaniel/sandbox. That's a red link at the moment (as I post this), which means the page does not (yet exist). You (or any editor, for that matter) can create the page by clicking on that link, doing an edit (putting some text in the edit box), and saving the page. Then the link will be blue.

Regarding your question on my user talk page, I don't have any experience converting a Word document to Wikipedia format. So one option is to post your question (and what you've tried so far) at a page which technical editors tend to read: WP:VPT.

Personally, if I were in your shoes, I'd do this (a) In Word, do a file/save as, and save the file as html (.htm extension); (b) open the file from a browser (typically File/Open File); (c) view the page source (in Firefox, this is Tools/Web Developer/Page Source, but this does vary by browser; sometimes you just go View/Page Source); (d) copy the page source, (e) use one of the options listed at http://www.appropedia.org/Appropedia:Porting_formatted_content_to_MediaWiki to convert the html to MediaWiki format; (f) copy the output of that conversion, and paste it to your sandbox page - link is above. I realize that mean seem like a lot of steps, but each is very straightforward.

If you really, really can't figure out how to convert the file, you can email it to me, and I'll do it for you. However, you'll first need to enable email, for your useraccount. To do this, go to Preferences (look in the upper right of your screen). Then, from my user talk page, you can click (left side of page) "Email this user". (You won't see that option if you don't have email enabled on your account.) -- John Broughton (♫♫) 19:00, 12 June 2013 (UTC)

Impressive. I've added the infobox (copy/paste) and deleted the "Appreciation" section. With regards to the latter, if you want to post something to that effect on the article talk page, after your version (as modified by others) is posted, that would be fine. But Wikipedia articles never have information about those who contributed to them. I've also deleted "Figure 2" and "Figure 3" from captions.

Next steps:

• You should change some language to avoid WP:NOR concerns. Among the problematical wordings are these:

• "This appraisal must be revised";
• "Does rT3 have any embryonic genomic effects? Unfortunately, publications on the effects of T3 on thyroid receptors often have assumed rT3 has no function, so data is incomplete." [Delete first sentence; keep second sentence only if you have a citation for it.]
• "A short time ago, this section was brief." [Just delete]
• "The question “what significant value does an rT3 assay convey” invokes an important principle: Due to the complexity of thyroid signaling, the clinical application of any single test of thyroid function is imprecise. Generally – and certainly for complex patients – several tests are required to define the interactions of HP-T axis control and peripheral deiodination. The assay for rT3 should be included. [Delete entirely; per WP:NOT, Wikipedia does not offer advice, particularly medical and legal advice.
• The clinical worth of the total T3 to rT3 ratio having been proven, the range of normal values should be determined. We have no recent study of this ratio in carefully-vetted people, yet there are several lines of evidence and useful older work. [Very problematical, is are following paragraphs in this section - this is laying out a clinical approach. It's okay to say "In healthy people", or "X test is useful". But it strikes me that this section is among the most problematic in the article, including such sentences as "Regrettably, the tT3/rT3 ratio has been noted in none of the reports comparing T4, T3 or combinations of both for the treatment of hypothyroidism". (You could keep that if you deleted "Regrettably" and if you could find a cite supporting that conclusion; otherwise it has to go.)
• "Does a low T3/rT3 balance conversely support the proliferation of undifferentiated cells, including cancers?" [You cannot ask questions of the reader in a Wikipedia article.
• "leading the authors to suggest" [As mentioned, Wikipedia articles do not mention "authors", or anything resembling the first person point of view.]
• "These facts receive little attention in the recent medical literature but their consequences may be seen daily in medical offices and clinics, where they puzzle practitioners." [Again, acceptable only if you can find a cite from another source. And the remainder of the paragraph (bulleted items) and paragraph thereafter are similarly problematical. It's possible, I think, to reword much of this, but wherever you're breaking new ground, you cannot put that into Wikipedia.]
• "If this is indeed valid, the implications are great for physicians in many specialties. Poorly-explained or treatment-resistant conditions in particular may be involved, such as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, once described as “an endocrine disorder off limits for endocrinologists”;[291] infertility; refractory depression; Attention Deficit and other childhood cognitive disorders and more." [Probably needs to be deleted in its entirety to avoid WP:NOR objections.]
• "of course" [Conversational wording needs to go. An article doesn't have to be pompous, but it cannot be chatty.]

• You should post at Talk:Reverse triiodothyronine and at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Medicine, asking for comments.
• You should be prepared for some very significant suggested modifications, even if you fix 100% of the problems listed above. I suspect that the main tenor (other than WP:NOR, possibly) will be (a) far too much detail, and/or (b) not written in a layman-friendly way [though I admit, in skimming, that individual paragraphs made sense to me, except that I didn't grasp most of the implications]. It may well be that if you get a lot of opposition to the article as is, the best way forward is to see if another Wikipedia editor will take your material and do a revised page (elsewhere), so that you can see what others think a good article in this area would read like.
• Finally, please keep in mind that if even a quarter of what you've written ends up in Wikipedia, you've done a great service to future readers, by helping improve the encyclopedia. So let me thank you in advance for all the time you've spent, so far, getting the article up on Wikipedia, and being so willing to get feedback on what it will take to get it into official "article" status. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 21:07, 17 June 2013 (UTC)

I agree that your contribution is impressive. Nevertheless it will need some cleaning up. I have taken liberty to make the following changes in your sandbox:

• The lead is meant to be both an introduction and summary of the entire article. Consequently Wikipedia articles normally do not have overview and summary sections since this is the function of the lead. I have converted your overview section into a function section and have taken your summary section and added it to the lead. I hope this is OK. The lead will probably require additional edits so that it provides a good summary of the entire article.
• I urge to carefully read WP:MEDRS. Medical related articles should mainly use secondary sources while most of sources in the current draft appear to be primary.
• The way the current authors are formatted is inconsistent (periods after the first authors initials, no periods after remaining authors). There are also other minor problems in the citations (PMC links in URLs when there is a separate pmc parameter for this purpose, access dates which are not needed for journal articles, redundant URLs where DOIs are available). To fix these problems, I have reformatted some of the citations using User:Diberri's Wikipedia template filling tool (instructions). Given a PubMed ID, one can quickly produce a full citation that can be copied and pasted into a Wikipedia article. Depending on how you are currently creating these citations, this tool can save you a lot of work and ensure that the citations are displayed in a consistent manner. Boghog (talk) 06:19, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

Microsoft Word

Hi Alan,

You wrote

In following the suggestions you and John sent, I've tried to download the file given at Help:WordToWiki but it isn't working.

My computer-savvy nephew wrote: "I'm having a Word 2007 issue. I've corrected the "normal.dot" to "normal.dotm" but it still won't debug to upload. Also tried the normal1.dotm and that didn't work, either."

Have you any suggestions?

I use Word as little as I can manage. I am aware that it had a feature to export a document as html. When I last used this, it was so bad that I had to remove all the tags from its output, converting it to plain text, and then reformat it in proper html. I am not surprised that WordToWiki does not work either.

I would suggest that you get Word to export your document as text, put it in a subpage of your user page, then add Wiki markup piecemeal. I can even help you with that, if you like. Maproom (talk) 19:15, 12 June 2013 (UTC)

Reverse triiodothyronine

Hi, Njmcdaniel. Would you consider copying the article from your sandbox into the encyclopedia article "Reverse triiodothyronine"? This would allow readers to read the article that you have written. It would also allow other editors to edit (and hopefully improve) the article. Thanks. Axl ¤ [Talk] 21:15, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

Significant reservations about this draft have been raised here. It appears that this draft will require substantial cleanup before it is moved to article space. Boghog (talk) 22:04, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

Boghog, thank you for pointing out that discussion. The main criticisms are the use of peacock terms, non-neutral style and synthesis/original research. While these certainly need to be corrected, they are less serious than, say, copyright violations or WP:BLP violations. I see that you and Maproom have been editing the sandbox to improve the article. This implies that you believe that the text can be made into a worthy article more easily than by re-writing the article from scratch. Maproom stated that the article is well-written.

Its presence in user space means that few editors will read it. Those who do read it will be reluctant to edit it. (I won't edit an article in someone's user space without an explicit invitation to do so, despite GFDL.)

Overall, there are ongoing problems with the article, but I believe that readers would benefit from the opportunity to read it and the article would improve more quickly if it is moved to article space. Axl ¤ [Talk] 09:53, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

I agree that peacock terms and non-neutral style can easily be fixed. What cannot be so easily fixed is the original research. Based on User:Novangelis analysis, most of this draft appears to be OR and hence requires a major rewrite. What really concerns me about this topic is that there are relatively few recent review articles (see reverse triiodothyronine PubMed search) and no recent reviews that cover reverse triiodothyronine as the primary topic. Hence it would be difficult to find adequate WP:MEDRS compliant sources to base the rewrite on. Finally reverse T₃ is a minor metabolite of T₄ with relatively minor biological effects and limited diagnostic utility. Hence this subject probably does not warrant such a detailed article. My suggestion is that we go through the draft and see what can be salvaged. Rewriting the entire draft IMHO is not worth the effort. Boghog (talk) 11:06, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Okay. Good luck with the article. Axl ¤ [Talk] 13:16, 22 July 2013 (UTC)