Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Medicine/Archive 165

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Heat-related morbidity and mortality

Hi, is anyone available to help a bit with the topic of "heat-related morbidity and mortality"? In the context of climate change, particularly in cities, I see this as rising in importance and pop up in several places (it was also at heat wave but I have moved it from there now and used an excerpt instead). In the absence of a dedicated article on this topic, the main one seems to have become this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_climate_change_on_human_health#Higher_global_temperatures_and_heat_waves_(direct_risk). I don't think all the refs fit WP:MEDRS though. A closely related article is heat illness I guess, which is in rather poor shape - being an overview of various illnesses which makes it difficult, I guess (but potentially useful). Should we eventually have an article on heat-related morbidity and mortality? Or is this content already covered well in a place where I haven't discovered it yet? EMsmile (talk) 11:44, 16 March 2023 (UTC)

Some years back, I tried to do something about Heat intolerance (which has since been created by others), but I found that it was difficult to find sources, and that almost all of the sources I could find were specific to multiple sclerosis. I assume that the heat illness group will be easier to find sources for, though they may trend towards first aid lessons than general overviews.
Are you more interested in the "people get sick and die during heat waves" aspect or in the "numbers are going up over time" aspect? WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:33, 16 March 2023 (UTC)
I found some review sources: [1], [2]. Also I found some minor studies, they may have some background information: [3], [4]. It is hard to find information about this topic. D6194c-1cc (talk) 18:42, 16 March 2023 (UTC)
And a little from CDC: [5]. D6194c-1cc (talk) 18:44, 16 March 2023 (UTC)
Also, some systematic reviews: [6], [7], [8], [9]. And borderline source: [10]. D6194c-1cc (talk) 21:05, 16 March 2023 (UTC)
And some more sources: [11], [12], [13], [14],[15].
I hope those sources would be enough to write an article. This topic is very important since humanity changes the climate. D6194c-1cc (talk) 06:33, 17 March 2023 (UTC)
Thank you for responding to my cry for help. @WhatamIdoing: I think my interest is in both aspects but more on the medical side: I want to ensure that the medical/health content is correct and up to date. There is a tendency on the climate change articles to over hype the health risks or to report them inaccurately (hence the need for WP:MEDRES).
Thanks, @User:D6194c-1cc for those additional references, are they all conforming with WP:MEDRES? I can use them to try and build up the content. But what about the existing content at effects of climate change on human health, does any of it need to be removed?
Secondly, should this important content really primary be located at a small-ish sub-sub article (effects of climate change on human health) rather than in a medical article, such as heat illness (or another one?)? The heat illness article has lower pageviews than the Effects of climate change on human health, although check out its very pronounced seasonal pattern!:here. If we decided to move the content to heat illness, I would then bring it back to Effects of climate change on human health by using the excerpt template.
As climate change will give us more heatwaves in future, I think it's important to get this right. EMsmile (talk) 09:03, 17 March 2023 (UTC)
Systematic reviews can be used. Borderline sources can be used, but with caution. Primary researches might be useful for background information, but review articles are more appropriate sources in such cases. What and from which sources can be used depends on the information you try to use. D6194c-1cc (talk) 09:27, 17 March 2023 (UTC)
Although MEDRS doesn't cover scoping review (I gave one such a source), it uses systematic approach to search the literature but doesn't answer specific questions. It's better that narrative literature reviews but can't be used as an evidence-based source to answer specific questions about treatment. D6194c-1cc (talk) 09:33, 17 March 2023 (UTC)
If you want to write an article, you should probably read MEDRS yourself to be able to distinguish what you can use from sources. D6194c-1cc (talk) 09:51, 17 March 2023 (UTC)
What about my question in which existing article this type of content about heat-related morbidity (which will likely grow over time) should ideally be placed? EMsmile (talk) 12:49, 17 March 2023 (UTC)
You asked for the "heat-related morbidity and mortality" topic, so I found the source that suitable for that topic. I can't advice you with exact name of the possible article. D6194c-1cc (talk) 14:33, 17 March 2023 (UTC)
Cleaning up Heat illness sounds like a good place to start.
For the core clinical aspects (symptoms/diagnosis/treatment), a medical textbook might be more useful than review articles. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:05, 17 March 2023 (UTC)
As per "heat-related morbidity and mortality" it can become main article for the epidemiology section of the Heat-related illness. D6194c-1cc (talk) 18:25, 17 March 2023 (UTC)
Hi WhatamIdoing my problem is that I don't have access to any medical textbooks. :-( So is the conclusion now that content about "heat-related morbidity and mortality" would in principle fit well at the Heat illness article? (I think there is no need at this stage to create a new article called heat-related morbidity and mortality). EMsmile (talk) 07:22, 28 March 2023 (UTC)
@EMsmile, I think that's the best place to start. If, at some future stage, we decide that we need to WP:SPLIT the articles, then we can do that. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:17, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

Draft: Open Forum Infectious Diseases

I have submitted a draft page for Open Forum Infectious Diseases to accompany the pages for other infectious diseases journals The Journal of Infectious Diseases and Clinical Infectious Diseases. I always appreciate that the articles are both high quality and open access. One problem is it's difficult to find independent coverage of academic journals. I welcome comments and productive edits. ScienceFlyer (talk) 05:39, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

@ScienceFlyer, you might ask for help at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Academic Journals. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:18, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

Infectious Diseases Society of America

There are persistent disruptive edits on the page of a medical society by a WP:SPA attempting to legitimize pseudoscience and conspiracy theories with respect to the long-discredited chronic Lyme disease. I laid out why the sources were unreliable on the talk page. ScienceFlyer (talk) 00:48, 23 March 2023 (UTC)

This page has been restricted to autoconfirmed editors (4 days+10 edits) for the next month.
More generally, we are going to see disputes about CLD until there is an established cause(s) and reliable treatments. People don't reach for implausible explanations and non-standard treatments when their problems are being addressed. (Ditto for ME/CFS, long Covid, MCS, etc.) IMO this problem is largely the creation of the US medical system, in which the providers' responsibility does not include solving whatever problem is there. The intended process for a complex patients is to see Dr. Alice, who will runs some tests and say that she's rule out everything within her scope, so here's a referral to Dr. Bob, and when they get to Dr. Bob, he says he's rule out everything within his scope, so go back to Dr. Alice. About one in a million Americans each year can get into the Undiagnosed Diseases Network, and everyone else is left to their own devices. It's hardly surprising that some percentage of them will become desperate enough to try pseudoscientific or non-scientific treatments, or that some of them would fall under the sway of conspiracy theories. I don't know what it will take to solve this problem, but "Nope, you had three weeks of amoxicillin, so you're cured now!" obviously isn't it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:35, 24 March 2023 (UTC)
Thanks Waid, I can say from personal experience that chronic Lyme disease (or whatever you want to call it) is real. After years of gradual worsening of symptoms I am now wondering how much longer I will be able to lead any sort of satisfying life. When I went in for the first time I was told to quit reading stuff on the internet, though they did agree to test me. When the test came back positive they did not even notify me. I had to beg for tx and got 2 wks of doxycycline . To this day the physician does not believe I have a Lyme related problem. As best I can tell, in some people with a certain genetic code some diseases, including for example COVID, cause their immune system to react and they end up with a permanent autoimmune response. When I read the COVID patient's description of what they are experiencing I can relate to a lot of it. You can be sure that it is only because science is being presented with a large number of COVIDs all at once that they are being accepted as real. This is the way of the medical profession. It took them over a hundred years to accept that handwashing would help to prevent infections of their mothers that were giving birth in a hospital. Sectionworker (talk) 22:34, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
I think that long Covid is probably the best thing that could have happened to ME/CFS research. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:21, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
So good to hear someone else say this because I learned long ago to keep my Lyme symptoms to myself to avoid that gentle "yes" head shake which used to mean prattle on but we know better. You know Waid, another disease that should have caused us to assess what we thought we knew was Ebola. Ozzie and I worked on that article for many months right through the times when chronic Ebola began to appear. But in that case, it was mostly Africans and perhaps they were viewed as some sort of alien race with different bodies than our white ones and medical studies, while done, did not seem to go very far. BTW, I looked up childbed fever and it did not take a hundred years...but it did take 20. And, I learned something new that is a perfect tribute to Semmelweis Semmelweis reflex Sectionworker (talk) 03:16, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
That's the worst thing that happened to humans recently. Many people died. I've maintained Russian COVID-19 article through the pandemics, because I know attitude of doctors towards evidence-based medicine in my country. I myself am still alive probably thanks to my little knowledge of medicine (I don't know what could happened otherwise in some cases of bacterial infections and inappropriate treatments). And my child suffered from inadequate medicine, too.
As for viruses, they hit everyone, but bacteria can target individuals, who predisposed for them. The role of bacteria in out life can be underestimated. D6194c-1cc (talk) 09:39, 1 April 2023 (UTC)

Wikipedia entry for WikiProject Medicine

See WikiProject Medicine, which I've forked from WikiProject.

Improvements welcome! ---Another Believer (Talk) 16:29, 29 March 2023 (UTC)

cool...it could use a logo IMO (maybe infobox?)--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 18:13, 29 March 2023 (UTC)
Take a look into Russian version (via google translate) of this article. I've added your article to the Wikidata item. If you would like to translate some data into English, don't forget about attribution in edit summary of every edit with translation. D6194c-1cc (talk) 18:56, 29 March 2023 (UTC)
If Wikipedia worked, that would be considered a fluff piece and deleted because of the very obvious inaccuracies resulting from the very obvious COI of the "reviewer". Independent sourcing would be nice. Assessing articles higher than they should be, and then protecting them to keep them where they are wanted for a translation project, and then publishing a "review" touting these assessments ... well, that was all bad enough, but now creating a Wikipedia article to do the same is just over the top. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 12:18, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
Hint, you can never cite the "200 active editors"; most FAs and GAs aren't; and the only way to know what people are in real life is via survey responses, to which no one responds. And basic policy tells us that articles should be based on independent, third-party sources, which those "reviews" are not. They were written by the very people assessing the articles to begin with. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 12:22, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
Wikipedia:WikiProject Directory/Description/WikiProject Medicine is nine months out of date, but it says 58 editors made at least two edits to this page in a 90-day period last year, and ten times that many edited articles tagged by this group.
Also, I remember responding to one of those surveys, so it's not quite true that no one responds. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:02, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
I assume that the "200 active editors" claim was based on Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Participants, which was the predecessor to Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Members. The current version was maintained by a bot (so that only active editors could be listed) until last September. It includes more than 100 editors and does not include many long-time editors (e.g., Colin or SandyGeorgia). WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:06, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
As of dates are needed, my "no one responds" is (obvious) hyperbole (most people, concerned about confidentiality, don't, and I never have), but even more interesting is the claim about half being whatever, because that is half of those that responded. For all we known, most medical editors are dogs (on the internet, no one knows you're a dog). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:06, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
@Another Believer, WPMEDF was formed to support Wikipedia, not to support this group. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:01, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
If you're suggesting an article improvement, I'd invite you to update the entry directly. I just forked the page, I didn't draft the content. ---Another Believer (Talk) 04:33, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
I'd start by deleting any claims about the quality of medical content relative to assessment, as there is a rather enormous COI in that article relative to who did those assessments and for what reason. For the same reason, I'd remove mention of the dengue fever article (we don't accept self-sourcing in other articles). We wouldn't accept that kind of COI in any other mainspace article. And there are "as of" dates missing. This is Wikipedia editors, with a vested interest related to outside projects, writing about Wikipedia articles they themselves assessed and in one case wrote -- not the kind of sourcing we accept in any other content. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:05, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
It's one thing to have this kind of misinformation floating around WP:MED, but quite another to promote COI-based info in article space. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:08, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
I am not convinced that we should have an article on this subject. I wouldn't describe it as a COI situation (though all articles about Wikipedia itself feel like a certain amount of navel gazing is involved), but there are very few WP:Independent sources. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:26, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
I'd love to see it go away, but I should not be the one to initiate whatever it takes to make that happen. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:28, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
I think, it's a question of notability. You can check Russian version for the sources. As I think, the topic is notable, but it covers not only the project itself, but also articles related to the project in the context of the project. D6194c-1cc (talk) 17:31, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
Notability calls for independent sources (meaning, not sources written by the Wikipedians making the claims). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:22, 2 April 2023 (UTC)
I do not know all the Wikipedia editors, except for James M. Heilman. What about these sources: [16], [17]? Although in the [18], I do not see any declared conflict of interest about Wikipedia editors, and first author is not James M. Heilman. D6194c-1cc (talk) 05:05, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
I'm not answering that (to avoid OUTING) as I'm not aware of which Wikipedians have self-identified. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:08, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
I'm talking about whether whose sources independent. Many MDs might tried edit Wikipedia, this fact doesn't make their articles not independent. Articles by James M. Heilman are probably non-independent, so those articles cannot be used to demonstrate notability and shouldn't be used for estimations of the project, but I think they still can be used for general information, because published in reliable journals. D6194c-1cc (talk) 19:03, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
I would rephrase that to say it was formed more to support the translation project, which concerned itself with dumbing down leads, ignoring the rest of the article (so they fell into disrepair), and then semi-protecting preferred versions for translation even when they were outdated or wrong. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:26, 2 April 2023 (UTC)
I agree we shouldn't have an article on this or indeed any Wikiproject. I appreciate the content was forked rather than written afresh but much of what is on that page is wrong. The paragraph about COVID is particularly dreadful. As Wikipedians we just know that is nonsense and citing CBS News doesn't make it true. The idea that a dedicated team of project members write and review all the medical content on Wikipedia and strictly monitor it all is a very dangerous falsehood. And I think it is entirely dishonest to cite a "2016 review" for commentary on the project, when the review was written by project members themselves. -- Colin°Talk 09:23, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
We're probably stuck with it now. Until someone comes along and writes a real review that tells the full story, I don't see how to make the article go away. Maybe at least someone will update Dengue fever now. Oh wait, the encyclopedia anyone can't edit! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:14, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
I agree, and one editor being given special prominence was way out of order.[19] Graham Beards (talk) 14:31, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
I don't have access to the full text of:
  1. Trevena (an editorial)
  2. James.
Considering the writing problems in the first versions of this article, I'd be most grateful if someone took a close look at the content in those sources, and I'd be even more grateful if they showed up in my inbox. There's still a need to reduce the "fan" tone of the article, since we may be stuck with it unless we can prove the COI sourcing problems. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:08, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
Actually, a WP:BLAR back from whence it came (WikiProject) is viable; this content should not have been forked. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:25, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
You can try to ask at WP:RX. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 08:11, 5 April 2023 (UTC)

Merge proposal

See Talk:WikiProject Medicine#Merger discussion SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:38, 3 April 2023 (UTC)

Merger proposal discussion

EEG cap.

Formal request has been received to merge: Sleep Deprivation Therapy into Wake therapy dated: March 2023. Proposer's Rationale: This is the same subject worded differently. Hploter. Discuss >>>here<<<. Pleas join discussion as there may be some FRINGEY elements to these articles. Thanks, GenQuest "scribble" 15:56, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

thank you for post--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 16:52, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

Merging "Ear stapling" into "Auriculotherapy"

I am trying to merge Ear stapling into Auriculotherapy (see Talk:Auriculotherapy#Merge 'Ear stapling'), but have not found any secondary (or tertiary) reliable sources about the procedure. I would appreciate any guidance on how to handle this. Donald Albury 14:48, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

The general problem with this kind of article is that MEDRS is tuned towards "Does this drug work?", and anything that has The Wrong™ POV is going to be called "unreliable" by someone.
The general solution is: Your source needs to be reliable for the individual sentence you are writing, which means that unless you are writing a sentence specifically about efficacy, you don't need a source that proves efficacy. It's fine to cite some acupuncture textbook to say that this is a kind of acupuncture or that it involves placing a needle here or there. Think about a neutral audience, like the author seeking a plot twist for a novel , or someone who runs across the term in a celebrity news story. They primarily need to know what it is (e.g., that it doesn't involve a stapler); they don't need a lecture on scientific evidence levels. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:44, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
Thank you. Done. Donald Albury 11:01, 7 April 2023 (UTC)

Invite to Category for deletion discussion

Hello! Your input is requested at en:wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2023 April 6#Category:Women who experienced pregnancy loss jengod (talk) 15:08, 8 April 2023 (UTC)

As a result of this, I have discovered that the entire Category:Cancer survivors tree was deleted two years ago. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:10, 8 April 2023 (UTC)

Chemotherapy agents

Recent paper reviewing the quality of our pages on chemotherapy agents. doi:10.1152/advan.00212.2022 Project Osprey (talk) 16:19, 3 April 2023 (UTC)

interesting read(though I dont agree w/ all of it)--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 15:08, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

Schizophrenia

I just read about personality disorders and schizophrenia.

I am schizophrenic but one professional wondered if I had personality disorder. I don’t. And the Wikipedia page states quite negatively about recovery is minimal. It’s not. I have had long durations of recovery. Perhaps not to working menial full time work in one type of job.

But I use my disjointed speech to take an interest in subjects such as critical criminology which involve multiple subjects, so tangent subjects, in a homeostasis way, volunteer and work at times, sometimes all three at once. So I’m schizophrenic because of cptsd. So my diagnosis flairs up with triggers. About life changing events. For the worse. Like rape, because of the nature of that crime, sexism and misogyny. As it was gender motivated. And whitnessing a rapid decline in loved ones help. And mental health hospitals, due to the traumatic backstreet forensic lab I was immediately took to after violent assault and rape. The hardest trigger to avoid the latter. Because of institutional practice. But recovery is not impossible. Super negative vibes and a leaning on Wikipedia to lead to malpractice in favour of mid diagnosis for the new buzz of personality disorder, like it’s easier. If someone relies on medication at time, the choice of easier compared to mid diagnosis is not a wise one. Smarten up wiki med. because today the article and update happens to be far from the truth 212.250.30.11 (talk) 14:39, 9 April 2023 (UTC)

For good or ill, Wikipedia focuses on improving articles and talking about articles, following various sources of literature closely. If you want more "forum" based conversation where people can talk about their own understandings of the literature and their experiences you might be interested in Patient advocacy / peer-support groups which you may be able to find in person or online. Reddit is a space with a variety of forums on different topics, which may include this. Wikipedia can only really offer you a space to explore literature and share it with others through editing alone of collaboratively - this may be useful for your own understanding or you may find it limiting.
Regarding the factual content you talk to, my understanding is that psychosis can be episodic or occur just once. If this is not reflected in the page on Psychosis we might like to look into find sources addressing the issue.
I do remember reading that CPTSD can have some symptoms resembling psychosis. This does not seem to be addressed in either CPTSD or Psychosis so we might like to look into sources on this.
There is a lack of evidence on "psychogenic psychosis" given my reading. You have things like Brief psychotic disorder and I understand from self-report that people talk about "stress-mediated" symptoms. You might be interested in editing on these topics. Talpedia (talk) 17:28, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

Student editing

Here is an English level 101 course (first-year in a technical college) in which almost all of the students have opted to work on medical topics:

Helaine (Wiki Ed), Brianda (Wiki Ed) it would be very unusual for freshman English students to be successful at medical editing; have they been instructed in where to find and how to use the kinds of sources used to cite medical content? Should they be advised to tackle topics outside of the medical realm for a better chance at seeing their contributions stick?

Others: those articles will need to be watchlisted; there is, for example, very little chance of student editing being effective at Alzheimer's disease (student editing is why I given up on articles like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:50, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. The class does have the medical training assigned, but I agree that a beginner writing class should not be tackling medical subjects. I'm going to reach out to the instructor. Helaine (Wiki Ed) (talk) 15:23, 28 March 2023 (UTC)
Some of these subjects, such as Nursing home care in the United States, might be feasible for any student. They are only partly "medical", and the focus of the article is not on Wikipedia:Biomedical information. Others, such as Short bowel syndrome, might prove difficult. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:22, 28 March 2023 (UTC)
Thanks. This is what I advised the instructor . They're going to advise their students to avoid strictly medical subjects and focus on things like history of nursing. Helaine (Wiki Ed) (talk) 21:50, 28 March 2023 (UTC)
I am very disillusioned with student editing (in the field of climate change and sustainability issues at least). Most of the time, the additions are less than useful and the university academics have no time to "mop up" behind their students but leave it up to the community to do. Also, students seem to always add new text blocks rather than working with existing content. In this case, if it's an English course, they could e.g. work on readability improvements which would be relatively easy to do - rather than add new content. And yes, in general, guide the students to the smaller sub-sub articles. I find that the tool "who wrote that?" is super useful: often when I come to an article and I think "this paragraph is strange, maybe it should be deleted", I use the tool and find out that it was added by a student... Anyhow, what's the best place where pros and cons of student editing are discussed / collected, and learnings documented? EMsmile (talk) 08:58, 29 March 2023 (UTC)
This has been the status quo with student editing for over a decade. The mostly cons are scattered throughout discussions all over Wikipedia, extending to about 2009 or 2010, but nothing will be done, as it is does not suit the WMF to do anything about it ("recruiting" new editors-- which doesn't work, since they essentially never stick around -- via student editing is more important to the WMF than the negative effect on established editors). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:04, 29 March 2023 (UTC)
PS, let us remember how student editing took hold (I watched it from the ground up because of the negative effect it had at WP:FAC), via wide publicity of non-sustainable non-replicable successful projects furthered around 2008 by Awadewit and Jbmurray. Their successes were a) overseen by experienced, committed and established Wikipedian professors, and b) their work drained resources from other articles at FAC by encouraging most FAC resources/regulars to focus on the student projects. The success was achieved because most experienced FA writers got on board, for about a dozen articles. The articles produced remained at FA or GA status until those following inevitably fell away, and they turned to black goo on the internet. None of the students stayed around. Yet, via publicity, the idea of student editing took hold, profs who know zero about Wikipedia realized they gained unpaid volunteer tutors for their students (we end up teaching their students about sourcing, writing and plariarism, and in return, these students never stick around to return the favor), established Wikipedians feel abused, and the WMF will barely fund the WikiEd project so they can help in cleanup. The WMF sticks it to established Wikipedians over and oer and over ... which is why I've given up on those very high view medical articles that are constantly hit by student editing. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:11, 29 March 2023 (UTC)
As a programmer who write articles about medicine, I can conclude, that it is a very hard task for the first time. I had some background from school (once I read a book about common biology) and from popular science books like The Selfish Gene (Q212789) and Unraveling Dna: The Most Important Molecule Of Life (Q113157791), but in some areas of medicine my mind was blowing trying to understand all those specifics terms in foreign language. Also understanding of evidence-based medicine is very important to distinguish primary sources from secondary. D6194c-1cc (talk) 19:13, 29 March 2023 (UTC)

My 2 cents about the whole student editing issue. There are thousands upon thousands of articles written in broken English on topics that don't require any knowledge of the subject. If I had an army of English students, I would ask them to please please please have a go at sorting those out. That would be very useful, it would give them experience, and it wouldn't risk doing more damage than good. Dr. Vogel (talk) 14:57, 29 March 2023 (UTC)

I have absolutely nothing good to say about students editing medical articles or any other article as well. Apparently the instructors think that a student is totally capable of doing something that I, who have been here for well over 15 years, still finds difficult. I've complained more than once and have always been told the students have been prepared before they begin to edit. Well, you sure can't prove that by me. I have tried many times to leave notes on the talk page or a student's talk page and I have never had a response. I would just love to help a student. I can only think that the prof never taught the students that most of the work we do here is a collaboration of editors and never our work alone. Maybe I'm wrong but I have often got the feeling that as the semester is winding down the student gets desperate and jams a paragraph into their assigned article that pretty much repeats what's already there. If it's a case where other students are assigned to review his/her work they read only that small paragraph rather than the entire article, and post that it sounds pretty good! And of course, I have not seen one student stick around to become an editor. I know for sure that I would not have when I was in college. Sectionworker (talk) 22:59, 29 March 2023 (UTC)
Thank you, this is very good to know. Thanks for providing this long-term background, SandyGeorgia, and I agree with Dr. Vogel that editing for readability would be something the students should be able to help with - but then it probably doesn't fit with their curriculum aims of leaning how to cite, how to write literature reviews and so on. Very rarely (maybe one out of 20), I've seen student editing courses that were successful and useful. One was done at Brown University on climate change topics, adding content from the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report to several articles (see User:Baylorfk although not much info is provided on his profile page). And one was by Uppsala University students (see User:Olle Terenius (UU)) where students e.g. edited articles in the group of "climate change in country X" articles (he's also presented at the Wikimania 2019 about his work with students on Wikipedia). If WikiEdu (and WMF) wanted to learn, they should analyse these two projects and collate what made them successful. (Mind you, those students also didn't stick around afterwards, as far as I can tell, but so be it; at least they didn't require mop up of their work by the community, and they did add value to the articles that they worked on). EMsmile (talk) 11:57, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
They don't typically edit for readability as a) their writing skills are too poor, and b) they mostly plagiarize. Why the WMF won't fund WikiEd appropriately is a mystery, because at least those folks try to intervene. Time after time, we are reminded that the WMF's goals are not exactly in sync with collaborative editing efforts. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 12:13, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
Students are editing one of my pages, Breastfeeding, and I thought I'd check out the course page. In a very brief message there was a typo, though it has been up since last January. I also looked at the page it linked to and again in a very brief message found another typo. This is sloppy and does not set a very good example for the students. Sectionworker (talk) 20:33, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
The course with the red-linked prof, who is teaching Wikipedia editing without ever having done it? Fancy that. It's a great gig; they unleash students in to the very real world, where we get to be their teachers, and prof has to do next-to-nothing. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:51, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
Oh my, just look at this one [20] that just came up today on the tp of my Death of Elijah McClain article. It is just stunning and represents something far beyond what I might have even dreamed of. I will try to talk with the student and even the instructor if it seems appropriate. I had one good student once that made a lot of very good edits, and I told her how wonderful she was on her talk page. I also put a note on her instructor's page, but neither of them ever replied. Sectionworker (talk) 00:10, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
How nice to encounter good news! (My experience with trying to mentor, collaborate with and encourage students is the same as yours ... I encountered one good group once, worked like heck to help them with their topics and edits, barnstarred all of them, put in a good note to their prof about them, and never heard from a single one of them after the course ended). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 08:57, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
I wonder: what level of editor retention do you think would be desirable? Or realistic? We can't account for people who create a new account after their class is over, but same-account retention statistics is something that could be tracked. Wiki Ed wasn't very interested in this when I asked about it in the past (they've been more concerned with retaining instructors, as newbie instructor+newbie students is presumably more challenging than experience instructor+newbie students), but it isn't a super-complicated bit of research to do. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:22, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
For me, it's not about editor retention (it's understandable that forced labor may disincline them to want to stick around). What bothers me is that it takes SO much effort to work with them-- so much more than someone who wants to be here and is motivated-- and the effort just isn't worth it. They don't read, they don't care-- they only want their grade. Better to wait 'til they get their grade and leave, and revert the damage then. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:31, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
I thought this was a concern for you, because whenever the subject comes up, you express concern that student editors essentially never stick around. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:57, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
I suggest that when an instructor signs up to teach a class we give them a Q & A form where the students discuss their experience here and whether or not they plan to continue to edit. The form should be a requirement, but it should not be signed by the students. Sectionworker (talk) 15:30, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
A few thoughts given @Sectionworker mentioned my course.
There is a "reflection" assignment that is available within the WikiEdu dashboard. I don't know how many courses do that. Students' reflections are the most significant assignment in my course, but we are a course about online community.
I've been teaching this course since 2014 and I would agree that very few students continue on as active Wikipedians. However, I think that assumption/hope was given up on long ago. And even so, I believe in my case it is a positive experience for the students (they say so), and a net positive for Wikipedia (I hope so).
With respect to interactivity, I often lean on my students to get some interaction/collaboration (given it's an online communities course) but it's not easy to come by. Part of the issue is that Wikipedians work at a quick pace. Wikipedians are checking their mailbox and watchlist multiple times a day. That can be challenging for a "normal" person :wink:. Fortunately, WikiEdu Dashboard makes it easier for me to track students and related activity, and I routinely do a "go around" in class wherein I ask them about what's happening on Wikipedia -- so they have to check.
I do believe that instructors have to propose their courses for work with the WikiEdu -- which, unfortunately, has fewer resources than they did in years past. I don't know much about the vetting process, or how many they accept and reject, but I too would be concerned about an instructor with no experience. I know there are tutorials for instructors too, the Dashboard can be very handy and I greatly appreciate the help of the ambassadors. Reagle (talk) 03:10, 2 April 2023 (UTC)

work a quick pace

Interesting. One of the things I've observed is a sort of "weekly" cycle with a bunch of editing at weekends and then a dead perioid. I'd almost be concerned about wikipedia being quite "slow feedback". Talpedia (talk) 21:06, 2 April 2023 (UTC)
There are individual editors who are on wiki only on the weekends, and others only during the week, but if you are looking at overall trends, there is more activity during the work day. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:50, 2 April 2023 (UTC)
I have a guess that this is actually one of the reasons that we have fewer female editors. Many women work in service aeras and they most certainly are not editing Wikipedia during work hours. But professional women, such as teachers and nurses, sure as heck are not either. And as for the successful women in many other areas, they had to work twice as hard as men to attain their positions and are not finding time on the side to work on articles either. As for weekends, women are busy catching up with housework, or going to work at their second job just trying to earn enough to support their family, or taking classes to work for a degree, etc. Sectionworker (talk) 22:29, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
I can't unsee this post. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:29, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
I agree with most of the above, though I have seen a few good student efforts on art history. But these days, perhaps because of grumbling like that above, most of them barely actually edit the articles at all - I presume they spend their time doing off-wiki reviews. That the professors clearly have no experience editing is a big issue, and the Wiki-ed specialists have no subject knowledge and rarely intervene. Johnbod (talk) 15:56, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
PS: For example Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/Duke University/Art in Renaissance Italy (Spring 2017) did some really good work, greatly expanding stubs on minor painters. Btw, Parkinsons has been picked as an entry for this year's The Core Contest, which you can comment on before the start on 15 April, and after the finish on 31 May. Johnbod (talk) 16:04, 1 April 2023 (UTC)

Some thoughts: i. Is there any reason we couldn't direct people to Start or C-class articles. With FA there is a lot of things to get wrong many of which, while important from a quality assurance perspective, can feel a bit like "stuff that gets in the way of editing". If I find some decent sources for a section not covered in an article and add them then I've done something pretty useful. This gets far harder with FA - which will probably already have that sort of material and might be written in summary style with material covered elsewhere. ii. I think their can be "an investment in the future" in terms of students editing wikipedia. I'm personally quite short-termist (3 months in the future barely exists), but for those with different timescales you can imagine the undergrad who gets a taste for wiki then becomes an active grad student editing as part of their PhD, or they might "spread" their editing knowledge to others. Talpedia (talk) 21:06, 2 April 2023 (UTC)

WikiEd already directs students away from FAs, but not all courses register with WikiEd. (This, by the way, is one of the best reasons to get medical content to the FA level-- an insurance policy to shield it from crappy student editing-- and one of the main reasons many of our highest-pageview medical articles have fallen into disrepair since being defeautured-- one an article is no longer FA, keeping up with student edits becomes unpleasant). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:24, 2 April 2023 (UTC)
Hmm, a protective wall of WP:FETCH. I guess it protected Wikipedia from me for a couple of years, and my age of reddit preceding editing wikipedia might have made me a slightly better writer. Can't help but feel there could have been more mutually beneficial editing of wikipedia somewhere in the middle though. I guess that while I find detailed interaction with literture on topics I think important very valuable personally this is not the purpose of wikipedia - it may more be an indication of how lacking the rest of society is. Talpedia (talk) 21:35, 2 April 2023 (UTC)
I wonder if we might overestimate the effect that students have. Here are a few numbers:
  • Number of new (registered) accounts last year: almost 2,000,000
  • Number of newbies who made their first edit last year: about 500,000
  • Number of unique IP addresses who make an edit each month: about 250,000
  • Number of student editors (via WikiEd) last year: about 12,000
It looks like, if a newbie's first edit is to an article on your watchlist, the odds are at least 40 to 1 against it being a class project. Are these 40 non-student first edits, or the IP edits, noticeably better than the student edits? I wonder if the fundamental problem is that newbies represent a burden, and WikiEd students are all newbies. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:08, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
It doesn't help that WikiEd insist on plastering those big banners on every talk page - now four deep on some - even if the actual edits are nugatory. Perhaps they should go undercover more. Johnbod (talk) 04:17, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
Johnbod, archive 'em. WAID, it's what I keep trying to explain and you mix up with me wanting "editor retention". When the average "newbie" makes a bad edit, they stick around, they learn, they grow, they change, there's a chance they will become helpful and productive editors. That is never the case with students; our time spent is wasted, as the knowledge we try to transmit to them ends when the course ends. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 04:39, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
In my experience the IPs are easy. I know I'm not supposed to just delete them without commenting, but I do because their edits are just vandalism. For instance, the last one I remember was an IP deleting a large swath of Pregnancy and heading the next section with ASK Jesus. Ha ha, very funny to a 14-year-old, I guess. But it was funny to me as well, though for a different reason, and I don't really mind them. Then as for newbie editors, I really don't see very many of them. However in general they tend to show up on strongly personal articles such as the new abortion articles about the heartbeat bill, and they are not happy to see it treated in an unbiased manner. I believe that experienced editors handle them in a fair manner and they are not particularly bothersome. Students are different. Experienced editors can tell just which ones are lazy and only looking for a grade, and yet it's hard to just delete their entries and you can't work with them because once they make their edit they're all done...which one of us ever does that? We all expect other editors to tell us if they don't like our entry, etc. Sectionworker (talk) 01:01, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
When the average newbie makes an edit to a hot-topic article, it gets reverted and they never make a second edit.
I don't think most people understand how unusual high-volume editors are. There are 45,311,726 registered editors today (=since we switched from ModWIki to MediaWiki in 2002). Most of them never saved an edit, and nearly all of them are inactive now. 12,945,956 (28.6%) have ever saved one edit here. 8,282,687 (18.3% of the total; 64% of the ones who made a first edit) managed to make at least two edits (usually on the same day). Less than half of the people who have ever made an edit manage to make three edits. The reason semi-protection works is because more than 90% of registered editors never get to that point.
If we set 1,000 edits as "sticking around" at a level you'd notice, then only one in a thousand registered editors manages to do that, and you'd expect the student program to produce, at best, about 12 such people last year.
Except:
  • not all of last year's 12 will have achieved that threshold yet, because a thousand edits takes most people years and years to achieve,
  • not everyone wants to keep the account they used, so you can't assume that since the old account is inactive, that editor didn't stick around (the Wikipedia:Education noticeboard at the moment names a student who took a three-year break), and
  • even when people do stick around, we don't recognize or remember that.
It is that last one that irritates me the most. I happen to know an editor whose first edits were in a class. (It looks like he switched to a new account after the class.) I have seen one or two editors post on wiki that they started off in classes. But even though some students do stick around, we keep believing that it "never" happens. It is not true that it "never" happens. Since our retention rate is terrible to begin with, we shouldn't expect many of the students to stick around, and we should expect even fewer to stick around in their student account, but it does happen. The monthly retention rate for student editors is massively better than average, and the long-term retention rate might not be very different. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:19, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
There's a problem with your statistics in that you've taken "only one in a thousand registered editors stick around enough to reach 1,000 edits" and assumed that this statistic drawn from two decades and 45 million editor registrations can be assumed for the 12,000 student editors last year. The only thing student editors and random newbie registered users are guaranteed to have in common is that they both click the "Create account" link. Motivation is very different for a student assignment vs volunteer and the kinds of things they add or change are radically different to the kinds of things volunteer newbies add. Do you know what motivated people's first edits? Do we have surveys on that? Perhaps they read something they know is wrong. Or perhaps they know something that the article doesn't mention. Or perhaps they know how to write better English than the terrible prose they just read. In all these cases, they add something from themselves, they brought something to Wikipedia. With a student, they don't add something they know. They are told to go find out some factoid(s) and add to an article. They add something that someone else knows and wrote in a paper that they found on a google or pubmed search. The satisfaction from doing that must be quite different and lesser. I'm not quite sure why we'd think the two sets might turn out the same. -- Colin°Talk 16:28, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
Based on some older studies (2010-ish), a quarter of new editors created a new article as their first edit, and many new editors add new information to existing articles, so they're adding something that they perceive to be missing.
Long-term, high-volume editors seem to be motivated more by Cunningham's Law than a desire to have knowledge freely available. These people are gnomes or reverters, not future FA writers. Our version of https://xkcd.com/386/ may be correcting typos or by getting The Right™ POV into a high-traffic article, but it's not primarily about content creation. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:52, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
Again, it's not about (newbie) retention; it's about the opposite (the terrible effect student edits have on retention of established editors, who are sick of dealing with this crap and give up). Once we get the focus away from newbie retention, and on to retention of established editors, the problem comes into clearer focus. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:34, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
I think retention is still a valid consideration, because if students were vastly more likely to become productive long term editors + students are both young and above average intelligence, then you've got an outcome that might be worth a lot of pain (including the loss of some regulars here and there). Imagine if you could grow an army of young degree-educated editors who were 10 years away from getting kids. That would be brilliant if it worked.
Wrt the above stats, do we know how many edits a student typically makes during their assignment? I'm guessing more than 10. So what we likely want to compare, if we had the stats, is retention rates of newbies who've made 10 edits with students who've made 10 edits. And I know we have AGF but what is the proportion of newbie edits that are either vandalism or just tests vs something intended to be productive? -- Colin°Talk 16:54, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
In my experience students usually make only one or two edits on their assigned page. Considering that 70 to 80 percent of them are working as well as going to school, I doubt that they have time to be editing any other articles. I'm not against teaching students about Wikipedia, I just think we're going about it all wrong. The prof should choose one or two articles and go over them from all aspects that it takes to present a good article. Then make some needed edits. Sectionworker (talk) 20:14, 4 April 2023 (UTC) PS: Or maybe they could choose a few stubs. Of course, to do it this way the instructor would need to have some experience in editing here. After all, in what other course is the teacher not expected to know his/her subject, as has been happening here. Sectionworker (talk) 20:31, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
Colin, I think that last year the numbers for WikiEdu (which is US and Canada only) worked out as something like 12,000 students editing 13,000 articles, with the net result being the addition of 10 million words and 100,000 refs. https://dashboard.wikiedu.org/campaigns/spring_2022/users (large page) suggests that the median number of edits is 13. It looks like about 8% of them make 100 edits during the class (not counting edits before or after the class, whether as part of a course or independently; some students sign up for multiple courses, and some students sign up for classes that include Wikipedia because they are already editors). This is about an order of magnitude more likely to make 100 edits than the typical registered editor. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:24, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
Looking at Template:Registered editors by edit count and its talk page, I see that "registered editor" is not a particularly useful base. If half of all registered editors don't actually make any edits at all, and many appear to be auto-registration of other-wiki editors just reading here, or people registering just to get a watchlist.
In the link you give (for Spring 2022) there are 6,135 rows but there are duplicates where students were enrolled in two classes. Their edit count appears to be a total (i.e. the same value in each row). Eliminating duplicates gives 6,075 students.
  • 44 make 100+ edits, which is 0.72%
  • 3,104 make 12+ edits, which is 51% (median)
  • 3,460 make 10+ edits, which is 57%
  • 4,493 make 5+ edits, which is 74%
  • 227 make only two edits, which is 3.7%
  • 269 make only one edit, which is 4.4%
  • 663 make no edits at all, which is 11%
So the 100+ group is not 8% but only 0.72% which compares with that template's figure of being in the top 1% of all registered editors. The "no edits" group is wildly different (11% vs 50%) and likely reflects the anomalous dubious value in that metric. Some of the "no edits" group of students could be students who created an account and then forgot their password and created another. The 10+ group of 57% also diverges wildly from the 10+ top 5% of registered editors. So the curve is entirely different and perhaps the most we can say is that editors who make 100 edits or more are very rare.
I looked at the contribs of all 44 of the 100+ editor. One stood out (Jaireeodell, with 296 edits, second from the top) but they were already a Wikipedian since 2016 and are still firmly a Wikipedian and signed up to the Wikipedia Library and Signpost and are editing clearly as a hobby. Not one of the other top 44 student editors became a Wikipedian (with that account anyway). -- Colin°Talk 07:59, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
I wish that I had seen these links earlier...perhaps I've been forming an opinion while basing it on the elephant's tail. It seems that my student experiences are not at all the norm and I feel I need to strike a lot of what I said. Sectionworker (talk) 03:18, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
How is a student editor's contribution worse than the typical newbie's contributions?
Here are typical newbie contributions (most recent ten newbies in some of our high-traffic medical articles):
These don't discourage you, but student editing does? WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:33, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
Other than the few edits that were obvious vandalism/nonsense, what is wrong with the above? They seemed useful to me. Vandalism/nonsense is trivial to deal with. -- Colin°Talk 09:10, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
WAID, I can't tell if you're asking these questions to a) get us to better explain the issues so the WMF can be encouraged to better understand them (leading to better funding of WikiEd so they can be more helpful to us), or b) if you really don't see the problems. So, as often happens with me in these discussions, I give up, as I end up concluding the WMF doesn't care about the negative effects of student editing or the obvious ways they could help mitigate those effects. If you really don't understand the persistence of students who need to get a particularly bad and redundant and in the wrong article and with the wrong sourcing typical edit to stick, before the end of the terms so they can get a grade, and won't discuss, and then we can't just get them blocked as vandals because c) not their fault (it's the professor's fault almost always), and d) AGF, and e) why bother as they will be gone in a month anyway, I just don't know how else to explain it. Student editors do not behave like typical newbies; one poor edit from one non-student newbie is worth improving as there remains a chance that editor will improve and stick around to help out, while students don't. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:29, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
Has anyone ever proposed anything along the lines of needing x many thousand edits before you can touch a medical article? Dr. Vogel (talk) 14:44, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
I hope not; we have quite more than a handful of instances where established medical editors were wrong, and in very bad ways. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:47, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
I'm thinking, because of all the problems that you've been describing, that just like you need at least 10 edits before you're allowed to create or rename an article, perhaps a similar kind of (higher) threshold for medical articles. I agree that an established editor can say something dangerously wrong, but that sounds less likely than for a random new editor. And anyone can point out anything on the talk page. There's no perfect solution, but I can't help empathising with the very grinding problems that you describe. Dr. Vogel (talk) 14:55, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
SandyGeorgia, I figure that I'd have more influence over the Editing team than over the grants program (BTW, the rule for the last ~decade is that all Wikimedia affiliates in wealthy countries should plan to get less than 50% of their funding from the WMF/internal movement funds; WikiEd is not solely dependent on grants through the WMF), and Editing has a relevant project starting up (summary at WP:Edit check).
When I look over the discussion above, I see the following reasons given for disliking student editors, and I find that they don't hold up under scrutiny:
  • Students don't become long-term, high-volume editors – but the average student editor makes 4x as many edits than the average non-student editor, and they have longer retention than the average non-student editor. This is doubtless primarily because retention is so low among non-student editors, but it's still true that most students are editing a month after account creation, and most non-students aren't.
  • Students are no good – but their contributions are better than the typical non-student editor because they nearly always add citations and never add blatant vandalism.
  • Some students are determined to get their version into an article – but they are distinctly underrepresented in WP:ANEW, so non-student editors are worse.
This makes me think the real problem is:
  • It's a lot harder for experienced editors to discourage a student from editing an article.
As I said above, if you revert a non-student newbie, they normally stop editing entirely.  The students generally try to take the revert as some sort of (semi-)constructive feedback, and they try again.  As SandyGeorgia says, the problem is "the persistence of students".  This is one of our common complaints about paid editors: They persist in editing articles even after we tell them that we disagree. We want newbies who either agree with us, or who give up easily.
BTW, no students need to get their version kept; it's in the rules for all the classes run by WIkiEd for years now (though that wasn't the case in the early days).  The students don't even have to post their edits in the mainspace to get credit.  The students are trying to get their version kept for the same reasons that all of us do:  because they think it's an improvement.  We might disagree with them, but it's not about their grades. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:32, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
So I am guessing you are broadly supportive of student editing (or at least can't think of any ways we might get issues fixed). Students are no good – but their contributions are better than the typical non-student editor because they nearly always add citations and never add blatant vandalism, which just means it takes more work to make the useless edits go away. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:32, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
Waid, a few comments. You say students continue to edit a month after creating a name. That's because they most likely don't begin their first draft for a month. As for vandals, they should not have any place in this discussion when it comes to suggesting that newbies or students are better than them. That goes without saying. As for student edit warring, I've not seen any editor above mention it as a student problem, so why even bring it up? As for citations, true but hardly makes up for the frustration that their edits can cause. However, all this is in my experience which may not be that of most other editors. Sectionworker (talk) 21:32, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
I can think of several ways of addressing issues, but we are unlikely to be successful at addressing the issue of "It takes more work to make the useless edits go away" when the problem statement is presented as "student editors essentially never stick around after their class is over".
Problems that are easily visible (e.g., in wikitext) are pretty straightforward. The Editing team is starting a project that will notice if you add (in the visual editor) a new paragraph with no ref tags, and then suggest that adding citations might be a good idea. This is fairly easy for a computer to do, because (in the first version) it can just scan the changes to for line breaks and refs, both of which are computer-y things that are either definitely present or definitely not present. There are some mathematically tricky bits (e.g., splitting an existing paragraph into two), but it's computationally feasible. Similarly feasible ideas include warning people about spam sites or about certain kinds of likely incorrect links (e.g., [[2012|2021]]).
Some problems, like someone trusting a seemingly reputable health source, are not solvable in software.
Some other problems might be solvable in software, but I'm not sure that we should. Consider, e.g., whether we really want some AI/machine-learning system to be recommending the "correct" language. Friend Computer reminds editors that there is a consensus to address the princess as Her Serene Illustriousness. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:11, 6 April 2023 (UTC)
WAID, I don't think statements like "but the average student editor makes 4x as many edits than the average non-student editor" have any statistical foundation. If your "non-student editor" is "registered account" then we already know that half of those don't actually manage to edit, so they aren't really editors are they? And an unknown chunk of those en-wp registrations are automatic from people on German or Commons looking at an en-wp article. So they aren't really English WP editors are they? And an unknown number are not human in some way.
And why should we possibly include vandals when comparing the two groups? Surely we should be comparing good-faith newbie editors with students. Indeed a fair comparison would be to compare undergraduate students who get Wikipedia assignments with undergraduate students who didn't. Including 12-year-old Darren typing nonsense into his dad's PC is not fair. Vandalism is over-represented in newbie/ip edits because we block vandal accounts. And vandalism is easy to deal with. A piece of text that is wrong and has a citation, on the other hand, may well get retained. That's bad.
Being useful on Wikipedia does not require adding citations. So the requirement for students to add text with citations isn't necessarily the best thing they could do, or in any way a measure that their contribution is "better" than someone else's (let's please exclude vandals for reasons I explain above). An editor who copyedits, who removes nonsense or unsourced dubious claims, or changes an image to a better one, and so on, all these editors are helping the project and yet the student won't do that.
I suspect most non-vandal newbie edits are "minor improvement" things like that. Which is actually appropriate for a newbie because we are asking these newbie students to do something that is actually really hard. And typically they are being asked by a lecturer who hasn't done it and doesn't know how to do it either, which is what annoys me the most, as that isn't IMO what education is about.
Furthermore, there is more to Wikipedia than article text. As you well know. These students are not encouraged to involve themselves in the community. They rarely engage in talk. They don't post articles for deletion, or take part in the village pump. They don't vote for admins. They don't ask for help at WT:MED, because they are supposed to do their homework themselves. The come, they edit, and they go.
I don't think it is fair to consider retention as "made edits at a later date to opening an account or after first edit". The "retention" of students during their class is entirely compulsory. They need to keep editing to finish their assignment. As Sectionworker explains, their procrastination may actually make it appear they stick around longer, rather than creating an account and making their assignment in one evening. If we consider retention as "I continued to make voluntary edits to Wikipedia" then for students this must start once they've handed in their assignment. The above link to US/Canada Spring 2022 does not encourage me to think this happens at any higher rate than for their peers who didn't get a student assignment.
Are there any stats that show that students who are given Wikipedia assignments are more likely to become volunteer Wikipedians, more than their young educated peers. It might even put them off editing, in the same way that some people are put off reading because of a bad choice of novel at school, or put off painting and drawing because of how art was taught at school, or put off learning a foreign language because of how it was taught. -- Colin°Talk 09:22, 6 April 2023 (UTC)
Via https://quarry.wmcloud.org/ using this query on the enwiki_p database:
SELECT COUNT(*)
FROM `user`
WHERE user.user_editcount >= n
;
When you set n to 1 (=number of accounts that have successfully posted anything at all on any page on this wiki), you get a count of 12,950,319 editors.
When you set n to 3, you get a count of 6,077,561 editors.
When you set n to 4, you get a count of 4,840,989 editors.
Therefore, the median editor at the English Wikipedia (defined as person who has ever posted anything at all) has made three edits.
You concluded above that the median student account made 12 edits during a single semester. 12 student edits ÷ 3 edits = the median student editor makes 4x as many edits as the median non-student editor.
(If you want to know any other numbers, then just ask. I've got a query open at https://quarry.wmcloud.org/query/72778# that I can edit easily.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:55, 6 April 2023 (UTC)
I can't find the bit in this conversation where you changed from using "registered editors" (i.e. 45 million registered users at Special:Statistics) to using "editors who've made one edit here" which is a little shy of 13 million per the above query. And I'm confused that Template:Registered editors by edit count says if you made one edit you are in the "top 22,664,284 of all editors" which suggests there are 22 million such editors, and the top 50%. Where does that 22 million figure come from?
Ok. I had another look at the Spring 2022 dataset. I scroll down to halfway where the users have 13 edits. These are our median students that are making 4 times as many edits as <<insert random definition of editor here>> (;-)). Then I looked at their contribs:
Most of the talk page editing is wikiproject banner stuff, rather than specific edit proposals or actually collaborating with other editors on this collaborative editing project.
These students are overwhelmingly spending their time editing their user page, their user talk page, their course assignment pages, and creating sub pages in their user space for drafts that never see the light or peer-reviews of each others drafts that also never see the light.
If I take off the "article / associated" filter, most of these "13 edit" students have made 17 edits but some a lot more. I can't really figure out where 13 came from. So right now, I'm a bit annoyed with the course page. It is neither a count of student edits nor is it really a measure of their impact on the encyclopaedia. These students are essentially using Wikipedia as a place to get free web storage for some personal notes and drafts that happen to be written in wiki markup. The impact in article space of these "13 edit" students is typically a single edit. -- Colin°Talk 18:29, 6 April 2023 (UTC)
The 22M number in Template:Registered editors by edit count is calculated in the template based on the number of ever-growing number of registered accounts: {{formatnum:{{Rounddown|{{#expr:{{NUMBEROF|users|en}}*0.5}}|2=-4}}}} which produces 23,650,000.
The "0.5" bit is based on rounding the actual percentage of registered accounts who make at least one edit down to the nearest half. If we wanted the template to be less aesthetically satisfying and more precise, we would say that making one edit puts them in the top 28.57% of editors, or with a little more rounding, in the top 30%. With a little extra rounding in the formula used in the table, it would say that a single-edit editor is in the top 14,100,000 of editors, which is not very different from the more precise (but hourly changing) 12,950,319 result from the Quarry query. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:20, 6 April 2023 (UTC)
The impact in article space of these "13 edit" students is typically a single edit.
So, why do we (apparently) feel like it's so difficult to revert a single edit?
The reason that the students do so much outside the mainspace is because we've all (not just WPMED folks) yelled so much about how they don't know anything and can't do anything right that the instructors make them practice their edits outside the mainspace first, and then get several of their classmates to check their work before they're allowed to copy it over to the mainspace. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:23, 6 April 2023 (UTC)
The 22M number is just baloney. It isn't rounding down to the nearest half, it is taking the total number of user accounts and multiplying by 0.5 (or 50%) and then rounding to the nearest ten-thousand. Where this 50% came from, I do not know. The number of users who made one edit is 12,950,000 to that degree of precision. I've made some comments at Template talk:Registered editors by edit count#Misleading. Actually about one in 222 editors makes a thousand edits, not one in a thousand. To reach the one in a thousand level, you need to make eight thousand edits. But using these figures to try to work out how many edits a student who only register in 2022 might be expected to make is misleading, because we are comparing them with editors who have been here nearly two decades.
I don't think it is fair to say these students practice in a sandbox in user space because they have been "yelled" at by annoyed editors. We don't ask normal newbies to do the kind of things we expect these students to do. Instead we suggest they fix a few typos or find a citation for existing uncited text. What we are asking these students to do is very hard, and what has happened is the Wiki Ed folks have determined that a degree of peer review will help avoid the very worst. Many of remember the terrible Psychology 101 course where the prof assumed an army of medical Wikipedians would mark and fix their students homework.
These students editing behaviour is entirely unlike a newbie. In every possible way. -- Colin°Talk 14:51, 7 April 2023 (UTC)
Yes, it is. Take a look at this student's first (proposed) and what will likely be their only entry. [21] The entire, rather large, first paragraph does not even belong in the extended breastfeeding article. The second paragraph is not accurate per the source that is used, and then it finishes off with some OR. Considering that the instructor opens with typos in their introduction and then has no WP experience at all, and the students are instead constantly advised to not forget to ask the Wikipedia expert any questions!, what do you expect when their only teachers turn out to be each other in the form of reviews of each other's work. Sectionworker (talk) 13:33, 8 April 2023 (UTC)
I saw that "In a 1974 survey of 152 mothers...14.6% said that extended breastfeeding strengthened their abilities as a mother." (citing research published in 1987) and am wondering how it would be possible to make so many mistakes in one sentence. But that sort of thing is just typical. And I agree that the instructor being a redlink and having made just a handful of trivial article-space edits is concerning.
What I don't understand is the model where we think that in 2023, what Wikipedia needs most is young learners adding to articles random stuff they just found and don't appear to understand, whether those articles already have it or need it. I mean, who, just who, on reading extended breastfeeding would think "You know what this article needs? The surveyed opinions of North American mothers in 1974 (or 1987 perhaps)" -- Colin°Talk 18:32, 8 April 2023 (UTC) Maybe I misinterpreted what they were proposing vs what was already there. -- Colin°Talk 10:18, 9 April 2023 (UTC)
Actually that stats wording was in the article, and I deleted all of it. But would any newbie, and many students as well, know that, even students who had eight weeks of training? It jumps right out to you and me but perhaps a student sees a noted author wrote it, so it must be OK? I recently added info on the Breastfeeding article and then I improved this one when I recently was quite astounded to read that the second year of breastfeeding produces even more disease fighting substances than the first year. It reminds me of my excitement when I added the skin to skin information quite a few years ago, and now advised by all medical groups. Sectionworker (talk) 19:34, 8 April 2023 (UTC)
I seemed to have made a mistake interpreting what was proposed. I went to extended breastfeeding to before you deleted the text and used "Who wrote that?" to find out the author. It was WhatamIdoing!!! No, actually, WAID was extracting text from breastfeeding in Feb 2015. So I went back to that and found the text was added by Fultonm92. Looking that their user page and minimal contributions, I would bet that Fultonm92 was doing a student assignment back in the days when there wasn't an official on-wiki framework. No normal newbie would sit down of an evening and draft a fourteen-hundred-word low-quality academic article like that. First in user space and then a few minutes later into article space. And then make no more edits to Wikipedia ever. And it takes 13 years for someone to remove nearly all of it. -- Colin°Talk 10:19, 9 April 2023 (UTC)
I have been looking at the other editor's work and the next two I looked at were good. Then the third one began on the WP page a month early, on March 9, and has done a really outstanding job. See their edits on Dysfunctional families. Quite impressive. Sectionworker (talk) 01:41, 9 April 2023 (UTC)

First half of 2022 vs all time

In order to make editing stats a little fairer, I have take the "all time" figures I posted at Template talk:Registered editors by edit count#Misleading and supplemented them with looking only at editors who registered in the first half of 2022. The "Spring 2022" editors above registered themselves it seems any time from January to May 2022.

Editors by edit count
Edits made Number of editors all time % of all editors all time Number of editors H1 2022 % of all editors H1 2022 Students H1 2022 % students H1 2022
1 12,951,300 100% 255,607 100% 5,465 100%
2 8,286,137 64% 158,907 62% 5,191 95%
3 6,080,075 47% 114,716 45% 4,961 91%
4 4,841,383 37% 88,978 35% 4,750 87%
5 4,035,686 31% 72,437 28% 4,530 83%
10 2,293,272 18% 39,875 16% 3,490 64%
20 1,301,053 10% 21,199 8.3% 1,952 36%
50 590,949 4.6% 8,166 3.2% 387 7%
100 321,314 2.5% 3,872 1.5% 46 0.84%
200 183,247 1.4% 2,046 0.80% 5 0.09%
500 94,591 0.73% 866 0.34% 0 0%
1,000 58,418 0.45% 388 0.15% 0 0%
2,000 36,320 0.28% 171 0.067% 0 0%

You can see that new editors who make few edits, up to 10 edits say, are a broadly similar percentage in H1 2022 compared to all time. But after that things diverge and you are

  • only 80% as likely to make 20 edits
  • only 70% as likely to make 50 edits
  • only 60% as likely to make 100 edits
  • only 50% as likely to make 200 edits
  • only 33% as likely to make 1,000 edits
  • only 25% as likely to make 2,000 edits.

-- Colin°Talk 15:30, 7 April 2023 (UTC)

I've added the corresponding estimates for the student editors in the last two columns (as part of a single course; I did not attempt to find and merge edits from people simultaneously enrolled in multiple courses, or to account for edits outside pages being tracked for a specific course). These numbers indicate that students are only 2% of the new editors during that timeframe, and that they are:

  • more likely to make between 2 and 99 edits, and
  • less likely to make 100+ edits

when compared against all successful new editors during the same time frame.

WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:15, 8 April 2023 (UTC)

I assume you got these numbers from this page because 5465 is the number of students who don't have 0 edits according to the page. I don't trust the data on that page. Click on any of the "1" edit students and you'll find a handful of edits. Indeed, click on any of the "0" edit students and you'll find they made edits. I wouldn't make any assumptions about the students based on the data on that page. If you really want to see all the edits these students made, it would probably require writing a wee program to get the contribs for each.
But even assuming the data wasn't dubious garbage, I'd be interested in comparing article-space edits between the two groups. I bet most of the normal newbies dive straight into article-space and make minor edits. And I bet some interaction with other editors occurs more quickly. -- Colin°Talk 18:45, 8 April 2023 (UTC)
Depending on the configuration for the course, the program might track all edits, or only edits for certain pages. For example, https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/courses/Wikipedia/WikiProject_Medicine_reference_campaign_2023/students/overview (sign up!) tracks only edits to articles that are tagged with {{WPMED}}. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:14, 8 April 2023 (UTC)
I suspect they were tracking all edits but only for a certain date range. So students who edited late got a 0. Students with 17 edits only got 12. And so on. While we could get the actual edit count, looking at a sample course (Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/University of Oklahoma/Psychology of the Family (Spring 2023)) and a sample of student edits tells us what to expect. The students are told to put a banner in their user page and talk page and to tag the article talk pages and add their name to a list of students. So that's half a dozen edits just admin. Then they do some practice edits for citations and then create a draft page. They copy some existing text from the article and then add in bold text their addition to it, even if it repeats what we have elsewhere. Often they are asked to PR a fellow student's work. Then they copy to article space in one edit. One or two of them deviate from that pattern, perhaps directly editing the article.
But the thing is all these edits are compelled. None are inspired or self motivated. It is like looking at pedometer stats for prison inmates vs the general population. And saying things like "look, many in the population don't get off their backsides and spend even 10 minutes walking" (cause they are babies, or they are on their deathbeds, or in a wheelchair perhaps). That the inmates are required to get out of their cells to the food hall three times a day, and spend a period in the exercise yard, tells us only about the regime they are under, not about their motivation for exercise or abilities to walk. So it really isn't surprising to find these students generally make around a dozen edits, if that's the average number of edits needed to do this homework. It's a bit like observing that students asked to write four pages in 12 point text end up with 2000 word essays.
The student that Sectionworker admired at Dysfunctional family has done it all wrong ;-) They dived straight in to article space and now have a problem demonstrating what they did in the sandbox and getting that PR'd. They replaced a long list of short bullet point sentences with nine paragraphs of reasonable prose. The original text probably started out all sourced to the one source but since each bullet didn't get cited, people added and edited it over the years and the result was effectively unsourced random factoids. It certainly needed to be thrown out and rewritten. Maybe that should be the goal, rather than the current approach of "add some random stuff you just learned on the internet". To take a section that is just awful junk and improve it. -- Colin°Talk 11:13, 9 April 2023 (UTC)
Yes, except when the assignment is selected with no care taken to choose articles that need work and instead assign articles such as pregnancy or breastfeeding, both pretty complete and up to date, the student would be hard pressed to find anything to throw out and do over. However, in the case of Extended breastfeeding, I felt that new information required that I add a section at Breastfeeding with a link to the main article....which was so awful that I had to do it over without waiting to see what a student would do. I discussed this student's draft above and I wrote on the student's draft page that as written their edit would be deleted. Granted, IMO this student seems to be a slacker, but even still IMO it's a lot to ask of anyone making their first WP edit of any consequence. Another thing, by nature I am the trusting sort of person but if I feel that I'm being taken for a fool I can become very suspicious of motives. For example, why in the student's help sheet does it say to not add your draft all at once but rather do it in increments? Other than increase your edit count? Students should do it the way the Dysfunctional family student did their work. Get it all in and then work on proofreading and refs. They ended up with 25 edits, very reasonable. Sectionworker (talk) 17:54, 9 April 2023 (UTC)
Colin, another thing that has surprised and concerned me upon reading the information supplied to the students is that in their guideline and help page it says, "You may be anxious, but don't spend too much time editing in your sandbox. Being a part of Wikipedia means contributing and engaging with other Wikipedians while sharing knowledge with the world.Feel free to ask your instructor and Wikipedia Experts for help if you have questions." And yet the course says that not until the week before the final week are you expected to add your work to the article. Why, why, why add the edits at the very end of the semester when there really is next to no time for more experienced editors to take notice of it and respond? Colin, this is hard for me to understand. Here we have one of our very best editors, one that I have relied on for many years to help me present good edits to many different "woman's" articles, and here we have been met with nothing but defensiveness and accusations of "yelling" at the instructors forcing them to ask students to use sandboxes. Sectionworker (talk) 20:08, 9 April 2023 (UTC)
I can't speak for WAID but I think their approach here has been to try to provide a stats and whole-Wikipedia viewpoint rather than the personal "this is how it is hurting me" / "this is what I am seeing" viewpoints that you and Sandy have given. Both are useful. You can't measure frustration in a stat. You can't express how awful an edit is in a stat. But personal experience has limitations and prone to bias. I wish the stats WAID used were better, because it has meant some of the claims don't really stand up. And I don't think counting userspace/course-admin edits is useful. I've seen Quarry before but keep forgetting about it, so it has been useful to be reminded of this tool.
Wrt doing it in one go vs incremental, I think editors vary quite a bit naturally for that. There are probably plusses and minuses to each. Someone putting a very early draft into a well watched article might get it deleted before they have time to figure out citation templates and add those. But someone writing three paragraphs of well cited text might get an edit conflict and get so confused they lose their work. Drafting in user space isn't a bad idea, nor is peer review, but it does mean that they spend weeks "on Wikipedia" editing in a space where they won't come across other editors and are not in any way part of the community. So on their final week, they post their draft shiny two new paragraphs into the article and disappear. This instant is the first and only time other editors notice their existence, and by then they really aren't interested in your feedback, as the homework is done.
Personally, I think Wikipedia is primarily a collaborative editing project, with the creation and maintenance of a free-content encyclopaedia as our collective mission. The moment you forget that, and think it is just a free-to-read encyclopaedia, or a host for commercially created educational videos, or source text for a translation project, or a place for student homework, you've lost it. None of the stats at the top of a page like Psychology of the Family measure collaborative editing. The definition of a Wikipedian: "The Wikipedia community, collectively and individually known as Wikipedians, is an online community that volunteers to create and maintain Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia." requires both community interaction and voluntary contribution. The courses require students to make unvoluntary edits and be kept away from the community as much as possible. It is hardly surprising that doesn't make Wikipedians. And it is hardly surprising that lecturers who aren't Wikipedians are running such courses. -- Colin°Talk 11:09, 10 April 2023 (UTC)
I wonder if it would help if the student editors were better instructed in the collaborative process and perhaps were asked to make an early talk page edit with their plan on what they hoped to do to improve the article. I fully believe that seasoned editors would go out of their way to help and assist the students in their edit plan. For example, in that way the student that added an entire section on breastfeeding in the extended breastfeeding article could have been saved ending up with no time to make other edit plans. Furthermore, this student had a very good student reviewer, but they could hardly have picked up on that either. So it ends up with a meannie like me deleting the whole thing, perhaps. Sectionworker (talk) 14:04, 10 April 2023 (UTC)
We have had student editors post on this page in the past, and usually I say something encouraging in reply to them. I don't think that posting on the article talk pages has resulted in much interaction. Look at pages such as Talk:Nursing shortage and Talk:Registered nurseand see how little interaction the students have managed to get over the years.
I have wondered in the past whether students should be encouraged to do some RecentChanges patrolling, so that they can get an idea of what kinds of edits are made/wanted.
On the question of why they spend so much time in their sandboxes, the fact is that back in the day, this was not recommended. Then The Community™ (not you personally, but multiple editors from multiple subject areas) kicked up a huge fuss about students screwing up in their first edits (we all screwed up in our first edits, too, but that hasn't stopped us from pulling the ladder up behind ourselves), and Wiki Ed changed their standard process to recommend the use of sandboxes and multiple rounds of peer review. The inescapable fact is that learning to add content is difficult. Either they learn to do it by "collaboratively" screwing up articles, or they learn to do it in their sandboxes, so that the content added to the mainspace is (usually) in passable shape. We have to pick one or the other. We can't realistically demand that they provide high-quality work on their first try. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:16, 10 April 2023 (UTC)
Again, these student edits are in no way similar to normal newbie edits. It isn't fair to compare counts and it isn't fair to compare "first edits". Look at our first edits and you see editors tackling subjects they know something about already and also engaging on the talk page (basically saying the article is wrong and here is what I have / will do to fix it -- as WAID says further up, we were motivated by something being wrong on the internet and realising we could fix it).
Sure there are things we get wrong that the students also get wrong, but I don't think the reaction is ladder pulling. That isn't fair at all. And sure there are some editors who are so mean to all newbies that they clearly forget what it was like to be one. But they are mean to all newbies, not just students.
What we had back in the day was User:Colin/A large scale student assignment – what could possibly go wrong? where one class of 1500 students were asked to edit Wikipedia. Fortunately only 10% managed to actually do any editing here, but that was enough. There was very very much a belief that Wikipedia had such an army of editors that the student editing could be handled by the normal review process on Wikipedia and the students would be marked by Wikipedians. The realisation that Wiki Ed had to be much more self-supporting in terms of review and care before publication was a result of that kind of mistake, not that editors don't want to see new editors. The "huge fuss" you mention makes it sound like Wikipedians were being over-the-top unreasonable. That isn't what I remember at all. We had newspapers claiming Wikipedia had hundreds of thousands of active editors like bees swarming over articles ensuring it was correct. We knew that in practice an article might have a few active watchers and there were only ever around a few dozen people active at WP:MED. We knew that if this student editing approach continued, Wikipedia's medical articles would be overwhelmed by plagiarism and nonsense from students who didn't really have the first clue what they were writing about. We knew that when you got lecturers running Wikipedia-classes who had themselves never edited, or only made some test edits, it would not end well.
Look at User:Doc James/Recommendations. Same demands. That those running the process must be Wikipedians and the first task should be that the students engage with the community. If you guys look at your earliest edits, you see engagement with the community right from the start.
Can you imagine if the NHS, in order to save costs, decided that the NHS website would now be written and maintained by attendees at St John Ambulance First Aid classes. They would be given a leaflet "cheat sheet" on Wikisyntax, and offered a selection of graduate-level medical textbooks from which to consult. That frankly was how bad that psychology class's edits were. -- Colin°Talk 09:22, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

Functioning of the 'participate' button?

Does anyone here remember whether there was some configuration needed when the "participate" button module was set up for this wikiproject? We use the same module over at WP:MolBio but when the "participate" form is filled in there, it creates a user subpage (examples) but doesn't add it to the members list. Any ideas? T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)talk 04:40, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

I think that the bot for Wikipedia:WikiProject X stopped working last year. You could try to track down the bot op and asking him again, but you might have better success asking for someone new at Wikipedia:Bot requests. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:19, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

Project-independent quality assessments

Quality assessments by Wikipedia editors rate articles in terms of completeness, organization, prose quality, sourcing, etc. Most wikiprojects follow the general guidelines at Wikipedia:Content assessment, but some have specialized assessment guidelines. A recent Village pump proposal was approved and has been implemented to add a |class= parameter to {{WikiProject banner shell}}, which can display a general quality assessment for an article, and to let project banner templates "inherit" this assessment.

No action is required if your wikiproject follows the standard assessment approach. Over time, quality assessments will be migrated up to {{WikiProject banner shell}}, and your project banner will automatically "inherit" any changes to the general assessments for the purpose of assigning categories.

However, if your project has decided to "opt out" and follow a non-standard quality assessment approach, all you have to do is modify your wikiproject banner template to pass {{WPBannerMeta}} a new |QUALITY_CRITERIA=custom parameter. If this is done, changes to the general quality assessment will be ignored, and your project-level assessment will be displayed and used to create categories, as at present. Aymatth2 (talk) 14:21, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

Hey, all:
I've been involved in some of these discussions, and overall I think it's a good idea to have one person (normally) assess an article for quality, and then we inherit the result. We would still have to set our own |importance= and other settings (e.g., |society=yes for articles about people and organizations), but it should reduce some of our assessment workload.
We have always followed the standard assessment approach, so if you all accept my recommendation, in practice that means: we do nothing now, and less later. ;-) WhatamIdoing (talk) 14:49, 12 April 2023 (UTC)
But how do we override faulty (external to us) assessments ? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:50, 12 April 2023 (UTC)
As now, I think - just overwrite. Johnbod (talk) 15:13, 12 April 2023 (UTC)
I believe the plan is that individual projects can disagree on specific articles (that is, it could say {{WPBannerMeta|class=C}} and we could say {{WPMED|class=B}}, if we really wanted to, but it's not very common for our assessment to intentionally disagree. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:33, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

Good article reassessment for Condom

Condom has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 00:52, 14 April 2023 (UTC)

Proposed Chronic Fatigue Syndrome article name change

FYI: There has been another move/rename request to change the article name Chronic Fatigue Syndrome to Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome. There are comments about it all over the talk page. ScienceFlyer (talk) 19:06, 15 April 2023 (UTC)

commented--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 01:07, 17 April 2023 (UTC)
ScienceFlyer, since you are alerting a WikiProject about this there are more WikiProjects on the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome talk page which haven't been alerted, you may want to do that. Thanks. Randy Kryn (talk) 03:45, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

Post-Vac

Please could someone from here should probably check Post-Vac. Cheers,  – CityUrbanism 🗩 🖉 13:18, 9 April 2023 (UTC)

seems to have been redirected[22]--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 01:28, 19 April 2023 (UTC)

Dutoprol listed at redirects for discussion

FYI, the redirect Dutoprol has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meet the redirect guidelines. --Whywhenwhohow (talk) 03:15, 12 April 2023 (UTC)


Muscle

Muscle has been a redirect to skeletal muscle for almost two years now; prior to that it was an independent. There are many incoming links that aren't about skeletal muscles. E.g., cnidarians aren't vertebrates and don't have skeletons; their muscles are not skeletal muscles. {{Skin microanatomy}} should probably link to smooth muscle. Should muscle remain a redirect, with incoming links that are about non-skeletal muscles fixed? Should it be a disambiguation page? Should the article be restored? Plantdrew (talk) 16:28, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

I think it should be changed. I lean slightly towards an article (maybe even a deliberately short and simple one, similar to an Introduction to... article), because if it's a disambiguation page, it will be frequently mis-linked.
Iztwoz, was there any particular reason you settled on a redirect to one type of muscle tissue (e.g., it's almost always what people meant in links)? WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:32, 17 April 2023 (UTC)
It was originally changed as a result of an uncontested merge. There was a lot of duplication of material on the pages and inclusion of irrelevant material - that is material that had its own pages to redirect to. Muscle is also an aka for skeletal muscle so seemed reasonable to propose merge to Skeletal muscle. I have just looked at the Muscle tissue page and made a couple of edits - if Muscle tissue was changed to Muscle, think this would be a better redirect.--Iztwoz (talk) 07:35, 18 April 2023 (UTC)
@Plantdrew, do you agree with Iztwoz about repointing Muscle to Music video instead? WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:02, 19 April 2023 (UTC)
If muscle remains a redirect, muscle tissue would be a better target (fewer incoming links would be going a blatantly wrong subject). I'm not sure if Iztwoz was suggesting a move with "if Muscle tissue was changed to Muscle...". Of muscle, skeletal muscle and muscle tissue, muscle tissue hasn't the fewest interwiki links which suggests to me that if English Wikipedia isn't going to have an article at one of these titles, muscle tissue should be the one without an article. Plantdrew (talk) 01:15, 19 April 2023 (UTC)
Was not thinking in terms of a redirect, (badly expressed), just making the target page of 'Muscle', all other types are clearly and early linked on present Muscle tissue page the only edit needed would be to remove 'tissue'. Have posted an RM on talk page. Thanks --Iztwoz (talk) 10:40, 19 April 2023 (UTC)

Post-SSRI sexual dysfunction—major issues with original research and non-MEDRS sources

I've done what I can but I'm not the most experienced editor in medical topics and this article still needs a lot of cleanup. (t · c) buidhe 06:44, 18 April 2023 (UTC)

Link? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 07:32, 18 April 2023 (UTC)
Post-SSRI sexual dysfunction (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 07:40, 18 April 2023 (UTC)
Thx, Jo-Jo; we need a blow-it-up-and-start-over essay that doesn't apply to AFDs. Indiscriminate uncited lists all over the place. If I had the time, I'd outright delete more than half the page. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 07:48, 18 April 2023 (UTC)
Feel the same. Isn't this a POVFORK of the various meds where this is covered anyway? Bon courage (talk) 07:51, 18 April 2023 (UTC)
This article has been a challenge for years. I think that the main thing is that people need to feel like their POV has been represented, even if it's not presented as the sole or accepted idea. The approach that SandyGeorgia took on PANDAS would probably work well. Unfortunately, that means someone will have to do a lot of work. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:05, 19 April 2023 (UTC)
I regret that I just don't have the time ... probably until well into July ... SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:50, 19 April 2023 (UTC)
Step one is assembling sources. I see a book chapter of some sort cited, so that's one potentially good source. There are an unfortunate number of primary sources. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:19, 19 April 2023 (UTC)

Post-coital tristesse and "post-nut clarity"

Hello all, would appreciate your input at Talk:Post-coital tristesse#"Post-nut clarity" an opposite? in sorting out a slang term from a medical concept. --BDD (talk) 19:38, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

QPNC-PAGE

Don't know what this is, no time to investigate, but it smells like puffery with a side dish of COI editing. [23]SandyGeorgia (Talk) 12:36, 21 April 2023 (UTC)

NoFap

There are talk page posts such as [24] and [25]. But I do not want to perform the edits, since I risk of being accused of proxying for a banned user. If someone with more knowledge of Wikipedia can reflect thereupon, you're welcome. tgeorgescu (talk) 15:45, 19 April 2023 (UTC)

perhaps you should post at the other wikiprojects [26] as well--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 01:41, 22 April 2023 (UTC)

Piaget's theory of cognitive development#Postulated physical mechanisms underlying schemes, schemas, and stages

Piagetian operations

A request for review: Could some editors who are knowledgeable about neuroscience please take a close, hard look at the section Piaget's theory of cognitive development § Postulated physical mechanisms underlying schemes, schemas, and stages? The same editor who was edit warring over this section two years ago is back (e.g., Special:Diff/1018291061, 17 April 2021).

Here is what the section looked like two years ago before the editor in question started editing it: Special:Permalink/1013759982 § Postulated physical mechanisms underlying schemas and stages. Thanks! Cross-posted to WT:NEURO. Biogeographist (talk) 21:37, 18 April 2023 (UTC)

thanks for posting--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 11:31, 22 April 2023 (UTC)

Bisantrene

History of editing that looks COI and promotional. No secondary sources. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:46, 24 April 2023 (UTC)

It looks like the drug is about 50 years old (so it's generic, with no patent protection) and not actually legal to sell anywhere? That doesn't sound like a typical candidate for COI editing, but I suppose it could be someone hoping to improve recruitment for the two trials. I've added a pair of sources, both of which are older, and one of which is secondary. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:46, 24 April 2023 (UTC)

Advice on source choice and usage

Dear WT:MED,

I have some questions about sources - whether they're considered primary, and if so, what information can be used despite their 'primariness'.

Cannabis (drug)/Fatality states "A 16-month survey of Oregon and Alaska emergency departments found a report of the death of an adult who had been admitted for acute cannabis toxicity."

I found this information to be rather... lacking, so I checked the (secondary) source (a meta-review in Int J Emerg Med). The only mention of this death is "There was (...) one death".

The meta-review links the section on the OR+AK ED reports to an observational study published in Clin Toxicol (Phila). This study gives some context:

"One 70-year-old man died shortly after presentation to the ED after intentional inhalational exposure to vaporized liquid concentrate product, with documented wide-complex tachydysrhythmia and ST-segment elevation on electrocardiogram. Autopsy revealed acute myocardial infarction of the anterior left ventricular wall, acute thrombosis of the left anterior descending artery, and atherosclerotic disease of multiple coronary arteries."

This statement is, then, sourced to an abstract of the NACCT 2017 congress, which gives a more detailed account:

88. Fatal myocardial infarction after inhalational cannabis use.

Background: (...) We report a case of fatal MI following vaping of concentrated cannabis product.

Case report: A 70-year-old male with no known chronic medical conditions and remote marijuana use (pipe smoking of loose leaf plant material several decades previously) presented to the Emergency Department (ED) in cardiac arrest. The patient had been admitted to the hospital 1 week prior to his arrest with chest pain and exertional dyspnea, and was found to have anemia due to a bleeding duodenal ulcer attributed to non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) use for headaches. (...) Following discussion with the patient’s family, the decision was made to terminate the resuscitation. Autopsy revealed acute myocardial infarction of the anterior left ventricular wall, acute thrombosis of the left anterior descending artery, near complete occlusion of the right coronary artery, and atherosclerotic disease of multiple coronary arteries.

Discussion: Acute cardiovascular and cerebrovascular events following inhalational cannabis use have been reported but remain rare. This patient, with previously unrecognized critical atherosclerotic coronary artery lesions, suffered a fatal MI that was temporally associated with and putatively precipitated by inhalational cannabis use. With the increased number of US states in which medical and recreational cannabis use is allowed, an increased prevalence of such use may be expected. As such, providers should be aware of the cardiovascular risks of inhalational cannabis use and the implications for users who may otherwise be at risk of coronary artery disease.
— Matt Noble and Shana Kusin, Oregon Health & Science University, Oregon Poison Center. In: Clinical Toxicology (2017), 55(7)

As stated, my questions are: are these sources considered primary? And what info can and can't be used to elaborate on the statement on the Cannabis (drug) page? Douweziel (talk) 15:10, 25 April 2023 (UTC)

Note this has been discussed at Talk:Cannabis (drug)#Fatality: relevance of Fatality, second paragraph. My principal concern there was misrepresentation of sources which would make it look as if Wikipedia was pooh-poohing the dangers of cannabis. Assuming the proposal now is not to do that, but merely to bring the primary sources into play, my question would be – Why? Wikipedia is meant to be a summary of what's in reliable sources, not an expansion of it drawing on lesser sources. Bon courage (talk) 15:25, 25 April 2023 (UTC)
@Douweziel, I think Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Medicine-related articles#Cite sources, don't describe them is relevant.
More generally, I find that in this set of articles there is a very strong aversion to admitting that The dose makes the poison for everything. There have been a surprising number of rationalizations along the lines of "Yes, she had an asthma attack after smoking marijuana. Yes, smoke, or inhaled particulate matter from any source, can trigger asthma attacks. Yes, when you smoke marijuana, you are inhaling particulate matter of the type that triggers asthma attacks. But, no, we can't possibly say she died from smoking marijuana. Smoke from any source in the world, whether it is a cooking fire or cigarettes or wildfires or anything else, certainly kills millions people, but smoking marijuana is 110% safe and healthy for everyone under all possible circumstances!!!11!"
Water kills people. Flour kills people. Walking kills people. Marijauna kills people, too. Don't try to cover it up or pretend that marijuana only kills people who were about to die from unrelated causes anyway. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:36, 25 April 2023 (UTC)

Plasma exchange or plasmapheresis?

Do you guys call it plasma exchange or plasmapheresis? I call it plasma exchange, and in fact I'd never heard it being called "plasmapheresis" before I saw this article. From looking at the sources cited in the article, it would appear that plasma exchange is the WP:COMMONNAME. Am I ok to move this to plasma exchange? Dr. Vogel (talk) 22:32, 25 April 2023 (UTC)

The plasmapheresis article discusses both plasma donation and the therapeutic procedure carried out on patients, and I think plasmapheresis is the only term used for both. When I worked in blood donor operations (admittedly ~20 years ago), we would never have used the term plasma exchange for a plasma donation, but the procedure performed on patients could be described with either term. (But I haven't lost much sleep over WP medical article titles since finding out long ago that the common name for a heart attack is a myocardial infarction.)  :) Larry Hockett (Talk) 23:50, 25 April 2023 (UTC)
what? no! The common name for a heart attack is "MI"! :) Dr. Vogel (talk) 00:27, 26 April 2023 (UTC)
We use plasmapheresis and "PLEX" interchangeably at my institution but it is always in the context of treatment. PatrickOConnor (talk) 21:16, 27 April 2023 (UTC)

Edwards syndrome moved to Trisomy 18

Hi, just seen that this got moved today as non-admin closure to an unopposed RM without any votes, and I'm not sure if it had been posted here, so people who may have had an opinion were able to comment. Dr. Vogel (talk) 01:20, 29 April 2023 (UTC)

agree --Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 01:23, 29 April 2023 (UTC)
ICD-11 uses Trisomy 18 as the preferred term,[27] where as ICD-10 was the reverse.[28] If I recall correctly, WHO has done this for many of the eponymous syndromes within the newer classification; but not all (to pick just 3 examples). Little pob (talk) 21:55, 29 April 2023 (UTC)

Category renaming

Please see Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2023 April 28#Category:Ancient people who committed suicide, which has been re-listed for further discussion. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:39, 29 April 2023 (UTC)

A more specific category?

Hi there, could someone please help me in identifying whether there is a more specific category in which an article can be placed within? The article is persistent stapedial artery, and the most specific category I have now is simply Category:Ear. I've had a rummage around, to no avail. If anyone is in knowledge of a more specific category regarding ENT anomalies, please do add it in. Thank you for your time. X750. Spin a yarn? Articles I've screwed over? 21:39, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

yes it comes off Stapedial branch of posterior auricular artery (which mentions it)...however I see no other category--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 01:07, 1 May 2023 (UTC)
Do you think I should include Category:Arteries of the head and neck in the article? I mean, it is technically speaking an artery situated in the head... X750. Spin a yarn? Articles I've screwed over? 07:44, 1 May 2023 (UTC)
That sounds reasonable to me. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:49, 1 May 2023 (UTC)
Consider it done. X750. Spin a yarn? Articles I've screwed over? 04:30, 2 May 2023 (UTC)
Perhaps Category:Congenital disorders of eye, ear, face and neck too? (Based on the ICD10 code and code range in the category hat) Little pob (talk) 12:28, 2 May 2023 (UTC)
Consider it done. Thanks for all the help regarding the ICD stuff, it's still rather new to me. X750. Spin a yarn? Articles I've screwed over? 20:52, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:Muscle tissue#Requested move 19 April 2023

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Muscle tissue#Requested move 19 April 2023 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. – MaterialWorks 21:02, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

Physician assistant

Hi guys, I think more eyes may be needed there. People have been using terminology that is confusing and misleading, and readers may be left thinking that PAs are doctors. Now the first line of the lead even says that they're preferred over doctors, rather than do what the first line of the lead should do, which is say what the subject is. PAs are a type of non-doctor health care provider. I don't want to get into an edit war, but this is getting out of hand. Dr. Vogel (talk) 14:06, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

Except that if PAs have a doctorate, then they're "doctors". They're a type of non-physician health care provider.
I've seen disputes over related providers (e.g., Nurse practitioner) around whether to call them mid-level practitioner or otherwise imply that they are somehow "less than" a physician. AFAICT this type of dispute always involves Americans. It's a political thing, and I can imagine people on both sides wanting the Wikipedia articles to represent The Truth™, just in case someone in the legislature might read it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:42, 3 May 2023 (UTC)
Tomorrow, I'm hiring a doctor to help with my clinic part-time: I will be his employer, as I own the clinic, and he will be my collaborating physician. I'm excited to have him on board for his experience and cachet which will help extend my clinic's mission. Doesn't sound like what you'd expect from a PA, does it?
To your point, people DO routinely confuse PAs for physicians, because we do almost all the things that physicians do, and often with quite a bit more compassion and patient communication, while physicians tend to either have their own patients or simply not be around leaving PAs to run the show in their absence. That is to say, patients have only ever rarely cared that I did a little less schooling than an MD, and see me as equal or better than one in the measures that they care about. Now, is "not a doctor!" something that needs to be in the lead? Of course not. No one claims PAs are doctors: we're generally better at some things, worse at others, and know when to refer on. Of course, I'm speaking from the US perspective, where PAs have been around for 55+ years and established ourselves as a profession not completely overshadowed by physicians. Jclemens (talk) 08:07, 3 May 2023 (UTC)
I'm just struggling to see what the big deal is. If you want to be a lawyer, you go to law school. If you want to be a PA, you go to PA school. If you want to be a doctor, you go to medical school. Nothing is better or worse, or "preferred" or not. But we can't not be clear on what things are, otherwise we're doing the reader a disservice. Dr. Vogel (talk) 09:46, 3 May 2023 (UTC)
I tend to use the term "medical doctor" (MD) for clarity. Also if you want someone to help you with research maybe you want an MD PhD.... Talpedia 13:54, 4 May 2023 (UTC)
In the UK the word doctor, when used as a noun, is unambiguously understood as medical doctor (BMBS/MBBS/MBChB). Dr. Vogel (talk) 19:19, 5 May 2023 (UTC)
I think in the US, that "I'm going to the doctor's this afternoon because I think I have a UTI" means "I'm going to some place where I expect to find a person who can diagnose and treat a UTI", and not specifically to a person with an MD (or DO). WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:33, 5 May 2023 (UTC)
I think Waid is right about the US. I asked my daughter what she'd do if she thought she might have a UTI and she said, "I'd go in to see my doctor." Her "doctor" is actually a PA. She said that her friends would also say doctor regardless of whether or not it was a PA or a MD. Sectionworker (talk) 22:05, 5 May 2023 (UTC)
Oh dear. Ok, point taken. Extremely different here. Dr. Vogel (talk) 23:18, 5 May 2023 (UTC)
Not entirely - Here in London I went to the doctor's [surgery] today, but did not see a doctor, but a nurse. Johnbod (talk) 02:50, 6 May 2023 (UTC)
Yeah but we wouldn't call it "the doctor's" if there weren't doctors who work there. Dr. Vogel (talk) 11:59, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

Featured Article Save Award for lung cancer

There is a Featured Article Save Award nomination at Wikipedia talk:Featured article review/Lung cancer/archive1. Please join the discussion to recognize and celebrate editors who helped assure this article would retain its featured status. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:54, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

Student editing

I reverted several articles edited for Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/University of Manitoba/PHMD 2040 Service - Learning Spring 2023 (Spring term) because the added text was dosing, guides, lists, or for the wrong audience (WP:NOTGUIDE, WP:MEDMOS). --Whywhenwhohow (talk) 05:30, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

I see there is a previous discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Medicine/Archive 165#Student_editing. --Whywhenwhohow (talk) 05:31, 8 May 2023 (UTC)
@Whywhenwhohow, which articles were affected? Did you leave a note at Wikipedia:Education noticeboard? WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:16, 8 May 2023 (UTC)
The affected articles are Beta2-adrenergic agonist, Apixaban, Pimozide, Tetrabenazine, Siponimod, Piroxicam, Flurbiprofen, Brexpiprazole, and Erdafitinib. I didn't know about the other page and posted the note here. --Whywhenwhohow (talk) 20:42, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

Input requested for COVID-19 Pandemic

Input would be greatly appreciated at Talk:COVID-19 pandemic about the quality of sources for declaring end of pandemic.

To summaries, we've agreed with the WHO that it has no authority to declare pandemics, and they themselves have stated they're unlikely to ever come out and call it over. We're just stuck in a loop of whether we need primary and secondary medical sources or whether regular articles, citing reputable public health officials/health ministers will be good enough. Whether it is still a pandemic per WP:Weight is for later once we have a better consensus on sources to use. AndrewRG10 (talk) 09:19, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

To summaries, we've agreed with the WHO that it has no authority to declare pandemics ← I don't think that's quite agreed, unless there's special emphasis on the odd word "declare". Whether a disease is pandemic or not is something the WHO is an excellent source for, for Wikipedia's purposes. Other MEDRS are of course also relevant. Newspaper articles, politicians, etc. are not however useful. I don't see how regional health bodies can be relevant to question of pandemic status (though probably relevant to their region). Add: it's also not right that WHO doesn't consider the end of pandemics. 2009 flu had a defined end for example.[29] Bon courage (talk) 09:24, 6 May 2023 (UTC)
WHO have declared the PHEIC over, but the WHO documentation is very clear that COVID-19 remains a pandemic. Bondegezou (talk) 12:08, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

The Steere-Williams quote in the endemic covid article

I believe the quote from Jacob Steere-Williams in the Endemic COVID-19 should be removed, as least as a definite statement on the definition of "endemic". It's an opinion piece published in an academic journal that has a grand total of five citations, not all of which cite it in relation to its argument. The sole editor defending its inclusion's argument is essentially "it's a reliable source, and we should treat it as representative of the entire medical community unless you provide sources disagreeing with it", which I don't think holds up. They are now refusing to respond to my comments on the talk page and told me to take the discussion here. Eldomtom2 (talk) 21:46, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

It looks like the text in question is whether to include this one sentence:
"According to historian Jacob Steere-Williams, what endemicity means has evolved since the 19th century and the desire to label COVID-19 as being endemic in early 2022 was a political and cultural phenomenon connected to a desire to see the pandemic as being over.[1]"
  1. ^ Steere-Williams J (May 2022). "Endemic fatalism and why it will not resolve COVID-19". Public Health. 206: 29–30. doi:10.1016/j.puhe.2022.02.011. ISSN 0033-3506. PMC 8841151. PMID 35316742.
This claim feels plausible to me. Why do you want to remove it? WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:08, 9 May 2023 (UTC)
Eldomtom2 has misrepresented my argument, which is not that quotation is necessarily "representative of the entire medical community", but that it is DUE, being peer-reviewed research from an expert, in a high-quality journal, which is exactly on point for the topic. So far as I can see certain editors don't like this content because it goes against the grain of the "COVID's over and we're FREE" message they want to have in this article, delivered via a synthesis of newspaper snippets and factoids. Bon courage (talk) 05:20, 9 May 2023 (UTC)
Noting that there's a bit of discussion Talk:Endemic COVID-19#The_Steere-Williams quote about this sentence. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 08:09, 9 May 2023 (UTC)
No, you have repeatedly claimed that it is "representative of the entire medical community" by claiming that, for instance, the article is "not contended at all" and "shows what the WP:BESTSOURCES are saying on this topic". We do not quote every single opinion article that is pulished in a scientific journal. The new quote added by a different editor is much more appropriate as it was chosen due to being heavily cited.--Eldomtom2 (talk) 11:58, 9 May 2023 (UTC)
There is a lengthy discussion at the relevant Talk page. Bon courage is not the only editor to support this sentence. We do not base what to include on citation counts and 5 citations ain’t bad for a recent paper.
There are plenty of other actual problems with Endemic COVID-19 as an article. Bondegezou (talk) 12:07, 9 May 2023 (UTC)
And I am not the only editor to oppose the sentence.--Eldomtom2 (talk) 14:14, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

Feedback on a credibility design for Vaccine Safety citation screening

Please check this out:

Wikipedia:Vaccine_safety/Sources

What do you think of it as a topic/project-based credibility screening interface?

Feedback please... questions/comments/questions/suggestions? Ocaasi t | c 17:53, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

@Headbomb, I wonder if you would be interested in the list of "unknown domains" at Wikipedia:Vaccine safety/Reports#Frequent use of unknown domains. Some of them are obvious enough (nih.gov, who.int, fda.gov, cdc.gov) and I'm not sure that some others should be included at all (viaf.org, doi.org, wikidata.org – also, is google.com actually books.google.com?) but I suspect that a number of these could be classified pretty readily. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:29, 12 May 2023 (UTC)
@Ocaasi, looking at Wikipedia:Vaccine safety/Perennial sources#Expanding the vocabulary of source assessments I think it's difficult to talk about whether the sources are "reliable". We use this term to mean two different things:
  • This scholarly book is a reliable source, because it's likely to be acceptable for the kinds of ways that experienced Wikipedians would normally use it.
  • This self-published, non-independent social media post is a reliable source, because it's appropriate for the specific sentence that it's supporting, even though you would normally not recommend such a source for general use.
Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Perennial sources tends to mark mainstream media sources, in particular, as being reliable in the first sense, but that doesn't mean that they're reliable for the particular statements that the source is supporting. In vaccine-related articles, a news source is reliable for statements about a business but not for statements about (e.g.,) side effects. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:42, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

Stop Mandatory Vaccination

So I'm not really good on the confluence of news and WP:MEDRS. This article is following the newspapers in the implication that the group caused the death of a child by spreading misinformation about tamiflu. The thing is that tamiflu doesn't really do that much and there is a cochrane review saying so. I can see why pulling in the MEDRS cochrane review hits up against WP:DUE, and sort of puts wikipedians in the role of "fact checker". I incidentally think we would do a better job than fact checkers... but that's an aside.

I found an opinion piece that points this out while also mention the story so I'm citing that. I don't know how this should work. I don't think having the page making up misleading MEDRS'y claims about tamiflu is okay either way. I dislike that I've used an opinion piece for the MEDRS'y claim when I could have used the cochrane review.

I imagine this sort of thing must have come up with COVID - was there an approach there? Page merging to deal with WP:DUE violations is one hack, but it's clearly a hack (e.g. we might pull most of the details into flu and then talking about the effectiveness of tamiflu suddenly becomes due). Talpedia 01:27, 13 May 2023 (UTC)

I'm not sure that we really need an entire article about this website, but if we're going to have one, it's possible that the key point in this story is "the mother trusted unqualified people on the internet more than the pediatrician, and her child died" rather than the specific brand-name drug in question.
I think the article might benefit from a quick copyedit for concision. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:38, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

Add an Etymology parameter to infobox medical condition?

As above, suggestion/discussion here: Template talk:Infobox medical condition#Etymology thanks Little pob (talk) 21:24, 29 April 2023 (UTC)

thank you for post --Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 11:59, 4 May 2023 (UTC)
The label Named after has now been added to {{infobox medical condition}}. It will accept the parameters |named after= and |eponym=. Feel free to add to any articles you know as being eponymous. (Already added to Parkinson's disease, Down syndrome, and Alzheimer's disease.) Little pob (talk) 14:36, 17 May 2023 (UTC)

Excitement at Clobenzorex

Clobenzorex

Hi all--I'd like it if some of you could have a look at the recent history of the article and the dispute on the talk page, including the history of that talk page. I posted already at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Pharmacology#Dispute_at_Talk:Clobenzorex and Tryptofish suggested I post here also; you may be interested in their remarks. Thanks so much: I believe some article improvement can help settle whatever that dispute is about. Drmies (talk) 01:49, 17 May 2023 (UTC)

thank you for post--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 12:22, 17 May 2023 (UTC)
This amphetamine prodrug is legal in Mexico, so a Spanish speaker with a couple of hours to look for sources might be helpful.
There are also some unfortunate allegations of COI (e.g., telling people on other websites that it's safe to import) that, if true, would suggest that the article might need to be on a lot more watchlists. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:10, 18 May 2023 (UTC)
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