User talk:Richard8081

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WP:BOLD

Please see WP:BOLD. Just go ahead and fix whatever yoou think should be fixed in any articles per WP:RS and WP:NPOV. There is a chance that someone will correct or revert your edit, but at least it will be clear what exactly you suggest. Otherwise, it will be one unproductive discussion. Happy editing, My very best wishes (talk) 19:53, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

References

Remember that when adding medical content please only use high-quality reliable sources as references. We typically use review articles, major textbooks and position statements of national or international organizations. WP:MEDHOW walks you through editing step by step. A list of resources to help edit health content can be found here. The edit box has a build in citation tool to easily format references based on the PMID or ISBN. We also provide style advice about the structure and content of medicine-related encyclopedia articles. The welcome page is another good place to learn about editing the encyclopedia. If you have any questions, please feel free to drop me a note. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 01:33, 16 August 2015 (UTC)

Please read WP:MEDRS. We require review articles or other high quality secondary sources. Best Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 13:05, 16 August 2015 (UTC)

Conflict of interest in Wikipedia

Hi Richard8081 - I work on conflict of interest issues here in Wikipedia as well as articles about health. Based on this edit and your follow up with Doc James here, it appears that you have a conflict of interest. I'm giving you notice of our Conflict of Interest guideline and Terms of Use, and will have some comments and questions for you below.

Hello, Richard8081. We welcome your contributions to Wikipedia, but if you have an external relationship with some of the people, places or things you have written about on Wikipedia, you may have a conflict of interest or close connection to the subject.

All editors are required to comply with Wikipedia's neutral point of view content policy. People who are very close to a subject often have a distorted view of it, which may cause them to inadvertently edit in ways that make the article either too flattering or too disparaging. People with a close connection to a subject are not absolutely prohibited from editing about that subject, but they need to be especially careful about ensuring their edits are verified by reliable sources and writing with as little bias as possible.

If you are very close to a subject, here are some ways you can reduce the risk of problems:

• Avoid or exercise great caution when editing or creating articles related to you, your organization, or its competitors, as well as projects and products they are involved with.
• Avoid linking to the Wikipedia article or website of your organization in other articles (see Wikipedia:Spam).
• Exercise great caution so that you do not accidentally breach Wikipedia's content policies.

Please familiarize yourself with relevant content policies and guidelines, especially those pertaining to neutral point of view, verifiability of information, and autobiographies. Note that Wikipedia's terms of use require disclosure of your employer, client, and affiliation with respect to any contribution for which you receive, or expect to receive, compensation.

For information on how to contribute to Wikipedia when you have a conflict of interest, please see our frequently asked questions for organizations. Thank you.

Comments and question

Wikipedia is a widely-used reference work and managing conflict of interest is essential for ensuring the integrity of Wikipedia and retaining the public's trust in it. As in academia, COI is managed here in two steps - disclosure and a form of peer review. Please note that there is no bar to being part of the Wikipedia community if you have a conflict of interest; there are just some things we ask you to do (and if you are paid, some things you need to do).

Disclosure is the most important, and first, step. While I am not asking you to disclose your identity (anonymity is strictly protecting by out WP:OUTING policy) would you please disclose if you have some connection with the patent you cite, the SuperMannan product, or the companies that might make or sell it? You can answer how ever you wish (giving personally identifying information or not), but if there is a connection, with please disclose it. After you respond (and you can just reply below), perhaps we can talk a bit about editing Wikipedia, to give you some more orientation to how this place works. Thanks!

You can reply here - I am watching this page. Once you do, we can take it from there. Thanks in advance for talking! Jytdog (talk) 14:39, 16 August 2015 (UTC)

No problem. Here's the disclosure(s):

Biochemist Richard Katz = richard8081 is the sole patentholder on US Patent Number 8,063,026. Richard Katz, Clair Brown, and Michael McCulloch are the three shareholders in Belvedere Environmentals LLC, a California corporation whose sole product is SuperMannan(TM).

END disclosure

(unless we need more disclosure, of course.)

Commentary by richard8081 --

Wikipedia is mostly dedicated to -- one way or the other -- telling the truth in an encyclopedia-like way. Hence the rules. Obviously I could write more about bladder infections/urinary tract infections/UTI but as you and Doc James and Cullen too are all too well aware, EVERYTHING one says on the subject is subject to endless debate; note the protective padlock (semiprotected, I believe); hence I'm totally into the brevity thing. Just keep it simple: The fact that the USPTO granted a certain patent; and that that patent has been reduced to practice; and that that practice has been the subject of a peer reviewed article in a reputable journal that documents the efficacy of that practice. (I'm a bit puzzled by the Message I got via WP that "case series are not proof of efficacy"; I'm not a physician, I'm just a simple biochemist, but that pronouncement is, well, just not the case :-).)

Let me finish up here by saying one or two things about me: I've been logged in for quite a few years here as richard8081 (always wondered who could possibly be richard808, like, surely I'm the first richard808; How could this BE? okay, I'll be richard8081) and have contributed so far all these years only on Talk pages. I don't know how many Talk pages I've edited, but enough so that one time recently I was reading the Contributions on a talk page about the Krebs Cycle -- the article is Citric Acid Cycle -- and I was thinking, "My my, that fellow really is quite amusing, and really knows his stuff" and was ever so pleasantly surprised to see that the Contributor was ... richard8081! (saying that a fellow driving a Buick is definitely an organism, and definitely not conservative of energy; it was synecdochic.) In all these years I've never had the occasion to start a new article or Edit a section of an extant article, simply because the occasion didn't arise where I knew more about it than the Contributors. That figures; you go on Wikipedia to learn and in a sense observe, so if most everything is in apple pie order and according to Hoyle, well, just enjoy and take it all in. (and yes, I suffered like everybody else through the early days; vandalism all over the place. I thought we were goners there for a bit.) The one lesson -- one guideline; incontrovertible rule -- I picked up was when we all agreed on OR. I learned everything from that: In my research, I had a virtual sign up in front of me all the time, something like "What would Wikipedia say?" OR is always suspect; verified research, well, it's been verified. Nothing's perfect but at least nothing's OR. Nature decides what's true (in the natural sciences, eg biology; hence biochemistry, and physiology. Medicine too.) (I think Max Planck said that, Nature decides what's true.) Hence the peer reviewed UroToday article reviewed by a group of urologists. The USPTO isn't exactly in the peer review department; but trust me, one's stuff has not been properly raked over the coals until it's been examined by the reviewers -- the Examiner -- at the Patent Office. The rarity of patent citations on WP attests mostly to how hard they are to get; ie how rare it is to come up with something that is useful, or interesting, enough to be on WP; and was the subject of a patent Grant; floating about in the vast sea of very interesting facts and observations that constitute our public domain. Richard8081 (talk) 17:09, 16 August 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for your note, I have replies on two levels. First, the conflict of interest level. Management of COI in Wikipedia has two steps - disclosure and a form of peer review. You are clearly a published scientist so you know the drill on academic publishing and disclosure of COI when you present or submit a manuscript. In Wikipedia, that disclosure should go on the relevant article Talk page (which I already did for you), and on your user page (which is here: User:Richard8081). Would you please take care of that?

The peer review" piece may seem a bit strange to you at first, but if you think about it, it will make sense. In Wikipedia, editors can immediately publish their work, with no intervening publisher or standard peer review -- you can just create an article, click save, and viola there is a new article, and you can go into any article, make changes, click save, and done. No intermediary. What we ask editors who have a COI to do, is a) if you create an article, submit it through the WP:AFC process so it can be reviewed before it publishes. b) And if you want to change content in an existing article on a topic where you have a COI, we ask you to propose content on the Talk page for others to review and implement before it goes live, instead of doing it directly yourself. You can do make the edit request easily - and provide notice to the community of your request - by using the "edit request" function as described in the conflict of interest guideline. I made that easy for you by adding a section to the beige box at the top of the Talk page at Talk:Urinary tract infection - there is a link at "click here" in that section -- if you click that, the Wikipedia software will automatically format a section in which you can make your request.

Will you please make the COI disclosure on your user page, and agree to follow the peer review processes? Thanks!

The second level has to do with sourcing of health content in Wikipedia, I will deal with in a new section, so this one remains focused on the COI stuff. Jytdog (talk) 22:02, 16 August 2015 (UTC)

Your recent edits

Hello and welcome to Wikipedia. When you add content to talk pages and Wikipedia pages that have open discussion (but never when editing articles), please be sure to sign your posts. There are two ways to do this. Either:

1. Add four tildes ( ~~~~ ) at the end of your comment; or
2. With the cursor positioned at the end of your comment, click on the signature button ( or ) located above the edit window.

This will automatically insert a signature with your username or IP address and the time you posted the comment. This information is necessary to allow other editors to easily see who wrote what and when.

Thank you. --SineBot (talk) 16:27, 16 August 2015 (UTC)

References

So this is the promised second level. As you seem to be aware, WP has policies and guidelines that govern content and behavior that help the community work together to create neutral content that communicates "accepted knowledge" -- that is the mission! The key policies/guidelines are:

• WP:NOT (what WP is, and is not -- this is where you'll find the "accepted knowledge" thing)
• WP:OR - no original research is allowed here, instead
• WP:VERIFY - everything has to be cited to a reliable source (so everything in WP comes down, to the sources you bring!)
• WP:RS is the guideline defining what a "reliable source" is for general content; and
• WP:MEDRS defines what reliable sourcing is for content about health
• WP:NPOV and the content that gets written, needs to be "neutral" (as we define that here, which doesn't mean what you think -- it means that the language has to be neutral, and that topics in a given article are given appropriate "weight" (space and emphasis). An article about a drug that was 90% about side effects, would give what we call "undue weight" to the side effects. We determine weight by seeing what the reliable sources say - we follow them in this too. So again, you can see how everything comes down to references.

Here is our standard notice, about MEDRS sources....

Remember that when adding medical content please only use high-quality reliable sources as references. We typically use review articles, major textbooks and position statements of national or international organizations. WP:MEDHOW walks you through editing step by step. A list of resources to help edit health content can be found here. The edit box has a build in citation tool to easily format references based on the PMID or ISBN. We also provide style advice about the structure and content of medicine-related encyclopedia articles. The welcome page is another good place to learn about editing the encyclopedia. If you have any questions, please feel free to drop me a note. Jytdog (talk) 22:04, 16 August 2015 (UTC)

Good standard notice.

I went ahead and read every word of the Jytdog Essay on MEDRS. I meant to scan it, get the gist of it, move on -- but it holds one's interest. Biology IS complex, no doubt about it --- and it's complex in the way your overall connotation indicates. In retrospect -- in a lecture in Biochemistry 101, say, by a Professor who is lecturing about a pathway that's been solidly elucidated since the Fifties, say -- it's pretty darn solid; and a Pro,fessor who has taught the class once or twice before will make it sound almost LOGICAL. When I was a kid I would sit in on the lectures given by Professor Horace A Barker to his non-major undergraduates; it was like attending, well, church; very reassuring, very certain and calm. Nowadays I've been known to go over to Berkeley and attend Prof Jasper Rine's lectures in Cell and Molecular Biology, just to get that calibration you need to relate the known with all of those Unknowns out there; something like the relationship of a zoo to a Nature Preserve/Wilderness. Those Unknowns, they are the subject, I do believe, of the Essay. Richard8081 (talk) 05:51, 17 August 2015 (UTC)

:) don't know how you found your way to it, but I am glad you found it interesting. it just was moved to main space which was kind of strange (it had just been in my user space before yesterday). Feel free to improve it if you like - it belongs to everybody now. Jytdog (talk) 13:40, 17 August 2015 (UTC)

No, it's A+ , defined by Professor Turner of the Univ of Pennsylvania English faculty as "could not be improved in any way." Several of your colleagues have in fact commented inline about it with exactly the wrong kind of additions/corrections: not to fix a particular error (we all make mistakes) but to question the "voice". The voice is what doesn't survive an editing process, usually, and in a collective enterprise the voice is going to erode with time ESPECIALLY in fastmoving STEM. In an essay, though -- even in an essay that's part of a collective enterprise -- the voice is surprisingly integral to the subtext. Put it this way -- use of the figure of speech Repetitio is subtle; like tmesis, it looks like a mistake, some kind of malapropism or maybe the guy is just a hayseed; but a quick look at the semiotics of it show a pattern and that is just what constitutes a voice -- no matter how arcane the subject matter underlying. Richard8081 (talk) 15:46, 17 August 2015 (UTC)

whew some close reading there! i do like to play with rhetoric and switching between formal/casual registers; the voice "rings" with some and not with others. nothing is ever perfect, is it - especially not here. but thanks again! Jytdog (talk) 16:39, 17 August 2015 (UTC)

Sometimes the defaults'll fool ya

I've been logged in to Wikipedia since 2007; it's now 2015; and I JUST realized / noticed that the default for email notifications of messages etc in one's Preferences is "unchecked" = off = no, don't. Or maybe for some reason back in 2007 I turned them off, like unchecked them. Richard8081 (talk) 12:35, 17 August 2015 (UTC)

Notes

Richard your COI is really clear and you are too new here to know this, but what you are doing is both typical of editors with a COI and... not pretty. Please read WP:PROMO (policy) and WP:NOTHERE ( a widely cited essay). You may want to have a look at this recent article in The Atlantic- the "Doc James" you are talking with at the UTI talk page is the same guy discussed in that article, who dealt with employees of Medtronic who were trying to do the same thing you are doing. (You are being way more open about it, which is great, but your goal is the same as the Medtronic people's goal)

If you were WP:HERE to build an encyclopedia and not just trying to promote your invention, you would be asking questions and actually trying to learn - this is a scholarly project and there are policies, guidelines, and norms that govern content and behavior. Please read WP:MEDRS and try to follow it - it applies evenly across the board to all content about health, which includes dietary supplements, drugs, and management of illnesses.

Responding to what you wrote here, patents are considered to be self-published sources in Wikipedia and are not reliable for claims about reality. You will not find mention of them as reliable sources for content about health in MEDRS.Jytdog (talk) 13:14, 22 August 2015 (UTC)

(by the way when people in Wikipedia include links while replying to you, as I did above, they are citing Wikipedia policies/guidelines/essays - the point of bothering to format and include the intra-wikipedia link (a "wikilink") is to provide you with information - we count on people to click those links and go read what is there. Doing that, is how you learn how this place works. We look for people who continue discussions to have clicked on and read links already provided and to take that into account in the ongoing discussion.... Jytdog (talk) 13:22, 22 August 2015 (UTC))

Very sad. All I wish to do is inform people that there's a supplement/intervention out there; and the gatekeepers jump to conclusions that I'm some kind of scammer --- a snake oil salesmen. I'll see dried dead autolyzed yeast mentioned as a palliative for cystitis in a review article and post that citation in the Talk page of Urinary Tract Infections. Richard8081 (talk) 22:57, 22 August 2015 (UTC)

I hear you on your disappointment. I am sorry about that. As I wrote above. the consistent application of MEDRS is what keeps our health content reliable. There are many, many promising treatments out there but we cannot include content about them unless there is really good evidence, presented in at least one independent review article. I love entrepreneurs and deeply respect their creativity and hard work, and I wish you all the best with your invention and your product! I really do. We just cannot include content about it in WP at this time. Jytdog (talk) 00:50, 23 August 2015 (UTC)

quote"...unless there is really good evidence, presented in at least one independent review article."/quote The evidence is already in a urology article. You just want to see that evidence referenced in a review article, right? Richard8081 (talk) 01:32, 23 August 2015 (UTC)

1) independent. (meaning not written by you or the company, but by other scientists who find the work compelling enough to talk about); 2) yes, review article, not an original research article. You haven't read MEDRS itself? (I'm so flattered that you read my essay and liked it, but you should read what I was commenting on!) Jytdog (talk) 01:46, 23 August 2015 (UTC)

I read WP:MEDRS before I read the Essay; it's not as interesting, but one has to plow through it and take notes if it's the initial foray into this particular mode of contribution/Editing. Thats' how I got my intended Contribution/Edit whittled down to two sentences. My question here is more specific; I'm requesting proactively a clarification: A review article sometimes just makes comments on a paper; reviews it. Other times --- not exactly infrequently --- the reviewer gets permission to reprint a particular graph or table so as to comment on some facet of it; some bump in the curve or anomaly / interesting point in the table. I'm asking for guidance here on whether the review article that in the future will be cited in WP has to have the data reprinted, or just summarized. (Let me guess though: Mentioned and summarized would be necessary and sufficient.) The part about the review article being independent -- yeah, got it, I know all about that, but I must admit -- really, I admit it --- before reading the Atlantic article you linked to, I had no idea what WP is up against. And I subscribe to The Atlantic! I had skipped that article in the hard copy; like, nothin' to do with me, man. I even noticed back then that it particularly maligned Medtronic, and I have my brother's brother-in-law Sonny Yamasaki being an engineer there, and I still wasn't interested. They're sleazy but that's so common in business, I guess I missed the dog bites man part.

OK so another key policy we have is WP:NPOV and a big part of that, is how much space/emphasis (or in Wikipedia speak, "weight") we give to a topic. We look at review articles to tell us that. From time to people right reviews on things like "management of chronic UTIs" where they discuss current and new treatments. We would look for an article like that to to discuss mannan oligosaccharides; we would look at several reviews to see what kind of weight experts in the field are giving it, and assign weight in our article accordingly. Our goal is to present the public with "accepted knowledge" that reflects consensus opinion in the field. Wikipedia follows - it doesn't lead. Jytdog (talk) 07:45, 23 August 2015 (UTC)

to quote Doc_James : quote "If it has not been combined into a secondary or tertiary source we do not consider it notable enough for inclusion into Wikipedia. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 17:00, 22 August 2015 (UTC)"/quote I'm going to take him at his word :quote " ... A secondary or tertiary source..." /quote Richard8081 (talk) 14:25, 23 August 2015 (UTC)

To clarify it needs to be a high quality secondary or tertiary source. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 20:17, 25 August 2015 (UTC)

"a" = 1 70.36.206.183 (talk) 20:36, 25 August 2015 (UTC)70.36.206.183 (talk) 20:38, 25 August 2015 (UTC) Richard8081 (talk) 23:35, 26 August 2015 (UTC)