Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Medicine/Archive 89

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Antibiotic chart

I'm wondering how useful people find this. It is a list of the most common antibiotics (albeit in Sweden, but most of them are common elsewhere as well), and the most common bacterial infections — showing which antibiotics work for which infections. I like it because it helps you use narrow antibiotics.

Antibiotic
G+ aerobic
G+
anaerobic
G- aerobic
G-
anaerobic
Elimination











Administration
Indications
Warnings
ß‑streptococcus
(group A, C & G)
Phenoxymethylpenicillin, PcV PO 1,2
Benzylpenicillin, PcG IV 1,2
Pivmecillinam PO 3 3 3 3,4 3
Amoxicillin/Ampicillin PO / IV 2
Amoxicillin & clavulanic acid PO
Flucloxacillin/Cloxacillin IV
Piperacillin & tazobactam IV 4
Cefadroxil PO 4
Ceftibuten PO 4
Cefuroxim IV 4
Cefotaxim IV 4 1
Ceftriaxone IV 4 1
Ceftazidim IV 4
Imipenem IV
Meropenem IV
Ertapenem IV
Aztreonam IV 4
Erythromycin PO& IV
Azithromycin PO& IV
Clindamycin PO& IV
Doxycycline PO Dental toxicity 1 1
Metronidazole PO& IV
Ciprofloxacin PO& IV 2
Moxifloxacin PO& IV 2
Trimethoprim PO 2
Trimethoprim/sulfa PO& IV 2 2
Nitrofurantoin PO 3 3 3
Amikacin, Gentamycin, Tobramycin IV
File:Kidneys noun 524431 cc Solid red.svg Vancomycin PO& IV
Efficacy: = Effective = Uncertain effect     = No effect/natural resistance  —  Adverse effects: = Medium effect = Severe effect = Reversible effect  —  Other considerations: Drug of last resort= Drug of last resort
1. High dosage 2. 15-20% resistance 3. Only lower urinary tract infection 4. Inducible resistance
For licence (icons, images, layout) see the template documentation.

It isn't finished — ideally it would include some simple icons for no use in children, cardiac toxicity etc., basically the most important points of consideration for each antibiotic. I've used a simpler version quite a lot in my clinical practice, and it saves time because you can go directly to look up the dosage of a certain antibiotic. It's based off the Swedish: [1] — (so it might not be accurate with regards to resistance percentages in other countries), but I think this is a good start.

If people are interested I may take to creating one for harder to treat infections such as VRE, MRSA, ESBL, Acinetobacter, (possibly Tuberculosis and MDRTB, XDRTB, TDR-TB) etc... This is the type of thing that I would be willing to collaborate on to publish in the Wikiversity Journal of Medicine as well (if we find any good way to cram in references in the tables).

Thanks in advance for any comments and suggestions!
Also, if you don't really get what it is, or find something is difficult to understand in the chart, please ask and I will try to clarify.
Carl Fredrik 💌 📧 14:19, 29 September 2016 (UTC)

I would say very useful I'm certain it could be put to use in several articles (great work CF!)--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 15:17, 29 September 2016 (UTC)
Unable to get it on a single screen and it is a disaster on mobile with respect to formatting. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 17:56, 29 September 2016 (UTC)
Okay, Doc James. Ignoring the formatting for a while, do you think it's useful at all? Formatting can be changed, but if it isn't potentially useful I don't want to waste too much time. Carl Fredrik 💌 📧 18:34, 29 September 2016 (UTC)

They can also be displayed as images, having them on Wikipedia is primarily to make them editable by everyone.

(They can also be sorted into two images by G+ and G-
Carl Fredrik 💌 📧 18:46, 29 September 2016 (UTC)

As an ER doc we treat everything empirically as we generally do not know the specific bug present. Useful I imagine for IM docs. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 18:47, 29 September 2016 (UTC)

I like it. CFCF, what made you want to create the chart? Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 06:54, 30 September 2016 (UTC)

Thanks, in part I'm contemplating whether to get into IM, and in part because I read the book "Missing Microbes" by Martin Blaser, which brought back some of my interest in antibiotics. (It's a pretty good read, but nothing I would cite on WP).Carl Fredrik 💌 📧 10:54, 1 October 2016 (UTC)
@CFCF fantastic work. Any where we can centralise discussion on this now and in the future to provide corrections/feedback other than the med page? Skiming through some small things - trimethoprim missing an "H"; ceftriaxone should be PO & IV, and I was under the impression most e faecalis is sensitive to it? I am wondering if it is better to separate vancomycin PO and IV given PO form has such limited oral absorption and so is mainly used for treatment of c diff? Great work in general though this chart must have taken quite a long time to prepare! --Tom (LT) (talk) 23:11, 30 September 2016 (UTC)
And not to overwhelm you but I can't see the colouring for the severity of side-effects? And trimethoprim should be marked as teratogenic. --Tom (LT) (talk) 23:18, 30 September 2016 (UTC)
LT910001 — I'm very much willing to work on this if I know people will find it useful. However it is not finished, and there are currently lots of warnings missing (I intend on populating these fields soon, and the ear icon is sort of difficult because its hard to find an image that isn't just thin lines), — but I very much welcome any critique because it's difficult to get everything working at once (and I'm not overwhelmed).
Concerning ceftriaxone — it isn't licensed for PO use in Europe or the US and fass.se or drugs.org do not list it in PO form. Does Australia have a different drug administration that I could link to as a reference? If I have time I will try to give references for all the susceptibility data — right now it's just sourced from a clinical guidance document that doesn't give it's own respective sources (but however passes MEDRS).
For Vancomycin — absolutely, that wasn't something I had thought of. However I'm thinking I'd like to add a field of what % is absorbed when given orally and that it might fit better in a different chart (I'll have to think about it). Carl Fredrik 💌 📧 10:27, 1 October 2016 (UTC)

On a side note Bluerasberry, Daniel Mietchen, & Tobias1984 — would it be possible to introduce all this data into Wikidata (especially MIC and resistance profiles) — to automate the creation of this type of table? It might be a bit complicated, since we need to cross-reference it with absorption and in vivo usage, but the data is out there, and I think it could be a very useful project to show off. Carl Fredrik 💌 📧 10:40, 1 October 2016 (UTC)

CFCF Yes of course Wikidata is supposed to be for things like this. No, I have never seen anyone demo this sort of application from Wikidata source material. I do not event recall seeing anything like this in English Wikipedia manually created. Where have you seen charts like this used? It would be a great idea to have Wikidata generate these sorts of things. Blue Rasberry (talk) 02:37, 3 October 2016 (UTC)
@CFCF: It would probably not be too difficult to import it into Wikidata. Can you start a thread about it here: d:Wikidata talk:WikiProject Medicine? Since about 2 months we have items for 9675 Bacteria plus Bacdive ID, so the situation for both the medications their targets is well organized. We only need to work on the connection. --Tobias1984 (talk) 18:02, 3 October 2016 (UTC)
I just started that thread there. Have to think about it a bit more, but my gut feeling is that the time may be ripe for doing this via Wikidata. -- Daniel Mietchen (talk) 13:28, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
I like the chart. My suggestions for improvement are to add the liver/kidneys pictures to the caption/legend and indicate that they indicate the liver/kidneys respectively. I'd also probably add {{abbr}} templates to every entry (PO / IV) in the route of administration column and use {{abbrlink}} in the first instance of the abbreviations (POTooltip oral administration / IVTooltip intravenous administration). Seppi333 (Insert 2¢) 16:40, 3 October 2016 (UTC)
A slidder like this would work [2] Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 04:43, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
agree it would--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 11:18, 31 October 2016 (UTC)
It is a list of the most common antibiotics (albeit in Sweden, but most of them are common elsewhere as well) - an obvious thing to do would be to cross-reference to the WHO Model List of Essential Medicines#Antibacterials to catch all the internationally-important ones regardless of local licensing. I can see the odd discrepancy there.Le Deluge (talk) 14:02, 4 October 2016 (UTC)

Great charts. One remark about the kidney icon: it is rather weird and anatomically incorrect with the ureters originating far too high in both kidneys. --WS (talk) 21:46, 12 October 2016 (UTC)

I think that is an artifact owing to the small size of the image, however I'll go through all of them and see if I can find anything better.Carl Fredrik 💌 📧 10:17, 21 October 2016 (UTC)
Very useful - the spellings of the cephahosporins needs the ultimate "e".Graham Beards (talk) 12:35, 21 October 2016 (UTC)

A2 milk

A2 brand

I was overzealous here, but how much should we emphasise systematic reviews over narrative reviews? I'm unconvinced myself by the review cited to support this edit. Bondegezou (talk) 15:36, 29 October 2016 (UTC)

apparent edit war[3]--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 21:15, 29 October 2016 (UTC)
Systematic reviews are not inherently more reliable than narrative reviews. They each have their strengths and weaknesses. For example, if all else is equal, a systematic review might be better for a purely quantitative statement ("98% Oxygen saturation has better survival than 90%") but worse for a qualitative question ("Patients quit this drug because they hate the side effects"). NB that "all else" is rarely equal, and that the best practice is usually citing multiple sources of multiple types (especially if decent examples of the different types of sources disagree with each other). WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:10, 30 October 2016 (UTC)
"All else" can quite impossibly be equal because the systematic review takes into account far more sources, and a better selection — even for statements such as patients hating the side-effects. That said, a systematic review would not try to answer that unless it was part of or at least related to its original question. A systematic review is only better in so far it answers its specified question, and that it summarizes the conclusions from a large number of sources. I'd like to see a case where a systematic review strongly supports a statement that it didn't set out to find an answer to — otherwise we should be pretty clear that the systematic review is a stronger source nearly all the time. Carl Fredrik 💌 📧 08:41, 30 October 2016 (UTC)
You are assuming that the systematic review found any sources that met its criteria,[4] that it came to a conclusion, and overall that it was well-performed. You're also assuming that the Wikipedia editor is using the review only for its official conclusions (e.g., rather than an emphatic statement in a background section). I agree with you – but only to the extent that those assumptions are true in a given case. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:20, 30 October 2016 (UTC)
One can tackle qualitative questions systematically. The problem with narrative reviews is that they can be too biased in what material they include: that's true regardless of whether they're covering quant or qual work. Good narrative reviews can pick out answers and issues that systematic reviews have failed to consider, and there are flaws in modern systematic review approaches, but narrative reviews are also much more prone to bias. Bondegezou (talk) 20:55, 30 October 2016 (UTC)
We're not allowed to assess the quality of sources WhatamIdoing, per the recently reintroduced: Wikipedia_talk:Identifying_reliable_sources_(medicine)#No_peer_review.
And of course you are right… Carl Fredrik 💌 📧 12:07, 31 October 2016 (UTC)

benzodiazepine biosynthesis

Benzodiazepine Structure

send help to fill the section in page — Preceding unsigned comment added by Minimobiler (talk • contribs) 14:52, 22 October 2016 (UTC)

@Minimobiler: Which article? What section? Create a new section? Based on what source? Please provide links and be more specific. Your post is decidedly not helpful. Also please keep in mind, {{sofixit}}. Boghog (talk) 15:44, 22 October 2016 (UTC)
Are you thinking of PMID 17584616? It seems that we already have an article on anthramycin which is probably a much better article than benzodiazepine to discuss its biosynthesis. There may be other natural products that also contain the benzodiazepine substructure and their biosynthesis by definition differ. It would be better to state that there are natural products that contain the benzodiazepine substructure in the parent benzodiazepine article and leave the details of the synthesis to the specific natural product pages. Boghog (talk) 15:53, 22 October 2016 (UTC)
Please do not add empty sections to articles again. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 16:28, 22 October 2016 (UTC)


RFCs on citations templates and the flagging free-to-read sources

See

Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 16:13, 29 October 2016 (UTC)

I'll mention here that one of the aspects under debate is whether or not the ability to automatically create links to free identifiers (like is currently the case for article with a PMC identifier) should be extended to other free identifiers, restricted to PMC only, or removed entirely. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 10:55, 30 October 2016 (UTC)
And I'll mention here that the RFC doesn't offer the choice to entirely remove the identifiers for links to free content. More eyes needed. --RexxS (talk) 16:57, 30 October 2016 (UTC)
Why would that be a choice in the first place? No one has ever proposed that. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 17:21, 30 October 2016 (UTC)
Because it's something that editors want and I'm astonished that you didn't consider it in your proposals. I believe that it's been the norm for years and my judgement is worth no less than yours. Free content needs no icon to warn readers that the content is free. Reduce the clutter and stick with notifying readers about non-free content. --RexxS (talk) 20:45, 30 October 2016 (UTC)
What reader has ever proposed/desired the removal of free identifiers? In my ~10 years here, I've never once encountered that opinion, nor could I even start to begin to understand how such a removal could be seen as remotely positive. You're certainly free to propose that, but that's a SNOW not going to happen if I ever heard one. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 20:54, 30 October 2016 (UTC)
There is always a tradeoff between the amount of information displayed and the clarity and simplicity of the display. Some want less clutter, some want more information. Personally I'd rather not have icons at all. Why bother with tiny, hard to visually parse, far from universally understood icons in the first place? If the free status is important, why not indicate free status with clear, unambiguous text instead? --Mark viking (talk) 22:07, 30 October 2016 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Who proposed marking links to some types of article when they are non-free (and not marking free content), but marking links to other types of article only when they are free (and not marking non-free content)? Where's the consensus for that 'smart' idea? In my ~9 years here, I've seen plenty of icons/notes indicating non-free content over the years, but this useless clutter indicating free content has only shown up recently. I think you'll find your proposal to mark free doi links, but not non-free ones, is the one that has SNOW chance of acceptance. --RexxS (talk) 22:16, 30 October 2016 (UTC)
First you're conflating many things. The removal of free identifiers means "removing |pmc=" support. That won't pass. Second, "marking links to some types of article when they are non-free (and not marking free content), but marking links to other types of article only when they are free (and not marking non-free content)" is not my idea. It is however, the current way of doing things, and the rationale behind it. It was implemented as the most closest thing to current editorial practice. I disagree with it personally, I think all locks should be allowed. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 22:30, 30 October 2016 (UTC)
The Humpty Dumpty problem: it would help if you were to use English in the same way as everybody else. "The removal of free identifiers" to most folks is going to mean the removal of identifiers for free content, which is what needs to be done. Removing support for the |pmc= parameter is a very different thing and nobody has suggested that, except you, apparently. --RexxS (talk) 01:24, 31 October 2016 (UTC)
You're the one that suggested it. PMC is a free identifier, as are arxiv, SSRN, RFC, and many others. bibcodes, DOIs, etc.. are sometimes free identifiers. If anything, you're the one that should start using English in the same manner as the rest of us. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 02:39, 31 October 2016 (UTC)
Utter garbage. "PMC is a free identifier". That doesn't even make sense. An identifier in English is "A person or thing that identifies someone or something". The identifiers for free content in citations are the useless little green lock symbols you've invented. The previous identifier for restricted content was the {{Subscription required}} template. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdL95Lj5V3M --RexxS (talk) 21:49, 1 November 2016 (UTC)
"Identifier", a name that identifies (that is, labels the identity of) either a unique object. See also Help:Citation Style 1#Identifiers. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 16:11, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

I think that RexxS is asking for this:

It doesn't seem too far from what some editors do now with the {{Subscription required}} template. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:10, 31 October 2016 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing:, yes but that template is ambiguous when multiple links are available. And in the first case (registration), that could be flagged with a yellow/blue registration lock. See Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#Second_aspect. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 11:39, 1 November 2016 (UTC)
AFAIK, this is a tracking category populated by setting |registration=yes, not a cleanup category. Not really sure of its current value, but it would make bot maintenance easier. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 11:36, 1 November 2016 (UTC)
I'm not worried about the ambiguity, as that's solvable. I'm more worried about the case that seems to be popular but unrepresented in the original proposal, which is only flagging links that cost money. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:31, 1 November 2016 (UTC)
Well that was the original rollout, done as a 'minimal change from current practice', which disallowings flagging of the main url, but allows flagging of free identifiers. The option certainly is there in the RFC to allow for the flagging of free sources on the main url. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 17:40, 1 November 2016 (UTC)
Where's the option for: using symbols to identify restricted content on each type of resource (replacing the single subscription required, etc. parameters); not having symbols to identify free content; leaving everything else (like linking to free content from the title) the same as it is now? Because that's the option that would be really useful. --RexxS (talk) 21:57, 1 November 2016 (UTC)
I'm just getting around to reading these RfCs, and I'm having trouble understanding your preference, Rexx. My naive default preference would be to use a symbol to flag the free stuff and leave the non-free stuff alone, as a way of giving a little extra boost of visual prominence to OA sources. (If anything I'd separate stuff as "compatibly licensed" or "free to reuse", "free to read but otherwise restricted", and "other".) Opabinia regalis (talk) 22:16, 1 November 2016 (UTC)
@Opabinia regalis: It's simply this: I'm considering the average reader who might be interested enough to follow a link to get more information. How do they benefit from a link being identified as free content? They don't. They are just going to click on it and read the content as anyone would expect when following any hyperlink. However, if we don't mark up, for example, a 'subscription-required' link, then the reader follows the link expecting to be able to read more and is faced with a paywall message. That's not what we want to happen, so we should be using indicators to mark those links - there's a very clear benefit in warning readers that the content is going to require subscription. Consequently, I believe that only marking links to restricted content – and doing so consistently, whether it's via doi, bare url or whatever – brings the most benefit to our readers. I know it's nice to give a boost to OA sources, but I suspect most of our readers won't find that as important as not wasting their time, especially if they are on slow or metered connections. Cheers --RexxS (talk) 22:32, 1 November 2016 (UTC)
Fair enough - I suppose that what you expect the reader's default expectation to be will depend on the topic area. I wouldn't expect people to be blind-clicking on scientific journal references and then getting disappointed when they find a paywall. But that sounds like an argument for using indicators for both free and non-free content. The position I can't get my head around is labeling the non-free stuff but leaving the free stuff unmarked, which both reduces the visual prominence of the best links and confuses readers who don't have "free to read" as their default expectation. Opabinia regalis (talk) 22:52, 1 November 2016 (UTC)

The benefit is pretty clear. For instance, you can have

The green lock tells you which of these multiple links you can actually access without having to worry about paying something. RexxS would rather have a red lock on the non-free doi, and leave the arxiv (and other free identifiers) link without a green lock.

I personally would allow for all locks, both green and red.

It's, IMO, much more important to flag what readers can access than to flag what they can't, but there is value in flagging both. Anyway, feel free to make yourself heard at the RFC. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 16:04, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

Circumcision content at Men's rights movement article

Some of you might be interested in Talk:Men's rights movement#Circumcision. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 23:02, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

Article on WikiProject Medicine

This was posted to the Wikipedia and Libraries mailing list. The author requested comment there in that list. I linked that thread to this online discussion because I thought this community here might have its own discussion, as the paper is about WikiProject Medicine. Blue Rasberry (talk) 14:08, 20 October 2016 (UTC)

comments on reading level required for our articles are interesting.
something we should keep in mind per WP:NOTJOURNAL: "A Wikipedia article should not be presented on the assumption that the reader is well-versed in the topic's field. Introductory language in the lead (and also maybe the initial sections) of the article should be written in plain terms and concepts that can be understood by any literate reader of Wikipedia without any knowledge in the given field before advancing to more detailed explanations of the topic. While wikilinks should be provided for advanced terms and concepts in that field, articles should be written on the assumption that the reader will not or cannot follow these links, instead attempting to infer their meaning from the text."Jytdog (talk) 14:19, 20 October 2016 (UTC)
@Jytdog: We have an unexplored offer from Content Rules / Translators without Borders, which is a partner at WP:TTF.
A major problem with Simple English Wikipedia is endless squabbling over what constitutes "Simple English". There are a range of standards, like Voice of America's style, Basic English, any controlled vocabulary, or anyone else's promoted manual of style. Some people want 4th grade reading levels while others say 8th grade is fine, but also, no definition is accepted. I do not know how to sort this, but Content Rules has offered to donate a dictionary of medical terms to Wikimedia projects if some things could be negotiated. The dictionary has recommendations for word replacements for general use, and comes with a medical writing guide. Maybe a guide like this is or is not appropriate for either English or Simple English Wikipedia, but at least it is a freely licensed plausibly reputable guide for producing accessible medical content and it is more of a starting point than we have now. I would not want to dictate how anyone has to write, but if anyone wants suggestions of what to consider, a plain-language guide to medical writing from this partner might be useful.
Their guide includes a database dictionary and some writing suggestions. Part of what it would take for them to share it is having a plan to present it which preserves its integrity. They would not want it migrated into Wikimedia projects if it kept their brand on it and it was remixed into chaos, but it also is not easily accessible on their website. A middleground could be bringing parts of it here and linking to their database. More conversation would be necessary and so far this online community does not have point people who can negotiate exchanges like this.
Without a manual of style somewhere I am not sure how to promote standards in Wikipedia's medical content. It is difficult to adopt any standard. Blue Rasberry (talk) 15:40, 20 October 2016 (UTC)
some missing or extraneous words? after English.,. --Jeremyb (talk) 14:33, 20 October 2016 (UTC)
Perhaps the Journal of Hospital Librarianship needs an editor.  ;-)
All mistakes in the pre-press version are mine! This was corrected in the final published version.Richardjames444 (talk) 02:29, 24 October 2016 (UTC)
I'm glad that you caught it. It's so easy to lose a couple of words in a word processing document – an accidental selection, an accidental key press, and everything's gone. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:47, 24 October 2016 (UTC)
agree --Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 11:11, 3 November 2016 (UTC)
Bluerasberry, have you talked to Lydia with WMDE/Wikidata about this? She knows quite a lot about these kinds of issues. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:47, 20 October 2016 (UTC)
I have received training from Content Rules regarding simplification and they have done some degree of simplification for us through me. Simplification is very controversial within our community. Attempting to simply often results in a barrage of personal attacks and thus I would not be willing to ask people from Content Rules to become directly involved. We need to get greater support within our own communities that we want this done first. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 19:27, 20 October 2016 (UTC)
@WhatamIdoing: What should I ask her? Is there any precedent of anyone importing a database glossary of technical terms into a Wikimedia project? Is that what you had in mind that I could ask?
I agree with James that we should not ask any institutional partner to get involved in onwiki policy discussions. Having anyone propose a manual of style would be controversial. Still, without enforcing anything, I wish that we could offer a manual of style if anyone choose to use one. Blue Rasberry (talk) 19:46, 20 October 2016 (UTC)
There are discussions about changing Wiktionary into a structured database. It's possible that some of the ideas behind that would be useful for this. Also, if you don't want it on a typical project, then it's possible that it could be posted at outreach:, alongside some other resources for educators and GLAM professionals. Wikidata, of course, imports a lot of things, but they're not exactly a dictionary.
(It makes me sad when we say things that amount to "some of our editors are so badly behaved that we have to keep experts away from them". It may be true, but it makes me sad.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:50, 20 October 2016 (UTC)
See Category:Wikipedia articles that are too technical
and Wikipedia:Make technical articles understandable
and Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 18#Suggestion: readability test(s) for Wikipedia articles (January 2008)
and Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 35#Easy as pi? (July 2008)
—Wavelength (talk) 21:07, 20 October 2016 (UTC)
Discussing simplification here Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 23:34, 21 October 2016 (UTC)

Feedback - insomnia article

Insomnia

I'm new to posting, and recently made an update to Insomnia. Could somebody please comment or let me know if this is an appropriate edit?

JSaragossi (talk) 17:45, 24 October 2016 (UTC)

Yes, that looks good. You cited a systematic review, which is a good type of source for information about prevalence, and you accurately reported the contents.
By the way, if you're interested in this subject, then you might want to read about the problem of delayed sleep phase syndrome being misdiagnosed as insomnia. It's the difference between "can't fall asleep before 1:00 a.m." (a problem whose prevalence peaks in late adolescence/early adulthood) and "can't fall asleep, no matter what time it is". WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:59, 24 October 2016 (UTC)
still some citations needed[5], will try to find references for them...--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 11:19, 3 November 2016 (UTC)

Roche images - PD-L1 testing

Hello everyone,

I had some back and forth with people at Roche about open content and how the lack of information is a barrier to better care and them selling more drugs and the companion diagnostic tests.

Exciting is that I managed to convince them that it is in their interest to provide information to us. Today they uploaded images related to PD-L1 testing which is used to predict response to PD-L1 inhibitors.

The images are here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Carmen.bonvin Nephron  T|C 01:22, 4 November 2016 (UTC)

That's fantastic! Do we have any Commons regulars around, to make sure that the images stick/don't get deleted on grounds of the user's account name not being listed as the author? WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:13, 4 November 2016 (UTC)
I am. There are two ways to make sure they stay, someone sending a permission email from an official address to OTRS or the images being published on an official website under a free license. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 16:22, 4 November 2016 (UTC)
Official email from Roche address sent. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 09:13, 5 November 2016 (UTC)
WhatamIdoing: Your post moved me to pro-actively work the issue. James helped out... and then beat me to posting a reply here. Nephron  T|C 18:48, 5 November 2016 (UTC)

Suggestions on Common cold page and Dementia page

Rhinovirus

I am new to wikipedia and thought I would practice editing by trying to update a couple of references. If you have a chance, I would appreciate some feedback. Please see my new comments on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Common_cold and on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Dementia Thanks very much! JenOttawa (talk) 17:21, 5 November 2016 (UTC)

Thanks User:JenOttawa for posting. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 05:42, 6 November 2016 (UTC)

Chorophobia article

See Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Chorophobia (2nd nomination). Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 21:53, 2 November 2016 (UTC)


give opinion(gave mine)--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 11:19, 3 November 2016 (UTC)

Added to List of phobias. QuackGuru (talk) 05:53, 6 November 2016 (UTC)

Merge

I would like to propose merging about 120 of these articles to List of phobias. Peoples thoughts? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 09:16, 5 November 2016 (UTC)

  • support --Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 12:25, 5 November 2016 (UTC)
  • comment it seems to me that such an act would require notice on many pages and fairly extensive discussion - you're talking about erasing a lot of editors' work, with unclear benefit. I've been surprised by how many pages are devoted to focused things, but I also see the benefit of having them when there is notability based on verifiable coverage in reliable sources. It seems that many phobias satisfy those criteria - so I don't support this proposal as it stands, but I also think that the proposal is improperly positioned. The pages should be considered on their merits. — soupvector (talk) 05:03, 6 November 2016 (UTC)
Looking at ones like this Nyctophobia, not sure why there is the "And Obama" but it is basically a dictionary definition. This one Mechanophobia has zero refs and is one line. Small stub Osmophobia. This one is basically unreferenced Frigophobia
One could have the exact same "signs and symptoms" and "treatment" sections in all of them. No refs Prosophobia so redirected that last one. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 05:40, 6 November 2016 (UTC)
I agree that many of those phobia articles should be merged, but you said "about 120" and I don't see how anyone could assess your proposal without knowing which ones. I guess you're just asking about whether others share the sense that these should be merged, and I would agree that there are many that should be merged (but the devil is in the details). — soupvector (talk) 21:54, 6 November 2016 (UTC)
  • Comment—like soupvector, I'm hesitant about giving this the all-out green-light, even though I support it in principle.
It seems like a lot of work for very questionable benefit. People are obsessed about having phobias for all manner of nonsense—if we merge them we'll have hell each time someone reads about their pet phobia in a newspaper and decides its article should be restored on Wikipedia. Then again we already do, because people add wonky references to the articles already.
So it boils down to whether you think its worth spending time (and energy debating with shills about) on — and if you had any cut-off point in mind? E.g. merging everything that is stub-class, or everything that has less than 3 independent sources etc. etc.?
Carl Fredrik 💌 📧 22:22, 6 November 2016 (UTC)

Wikidoc

Wikidoc appears to be offline. Wonder if they are no more? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 07:30, 6 November 2016 (UTC)

[6]could be--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 13:07, 6 November 2016 (UTC)
Cool link. Thanks. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 14:17, 6 November 2016 (UTC)
I have marked it as offline. If anybody tries this again and it comes back, please change the "current status" in List of medical wikis. Looie496 (talk) 14:31, 6 November 2016 (UTC)
Back up so I guess that just had tech issues. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 06:34, 7 November 2016 (UTC)

RfC about image on dental caries

Please comment here Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 06:32, 7 November 2016 (UTC)


give opinion(gave mine)--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 12:48, 7 November 2016 (UTC)

Alexandria's Genesis

There is some concern over this newly re-created (after numerous deletions) article. I'm posting it here for consideration. Softlavender (talk) 14:01, 7 November 2016 (UTC)

Pop culture rather than medicine. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 14:19, 7 November 2016 (UTC)
Yes, but the concern of others was that the fact that it is completely fictitious was not made clear enough in the first sentence and lede. Someone has edited better just now. Softlavender (talk) 15:06, 7 November 2016 (UTC)

WP:Reftoolbar

Anyone know if this is still being maintained? Autofil appears to be down Wikipedia_talk:RefToolbar#Autofill_2 for PMIDs Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 12:05, 7 November 2016 (UTC)

posted village pump/technical[7]--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 15:14, 7 November 2016 (UTC)

Sofosbuvir/daclatasvir

Thoughts? Jytdog (talk) 07:01, 8 November 2016 (UTC)

It appears it was written by a person who has a connection with Beacon Pharmaceuticals. QuackGuru (talk) 07:23, 8 November 2016 (UTC)
Looks fairly decent. Have formatted it some. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 08:27, 8 November 2016 (UTC)

Dementia and antihypertensive meds

Alzheimer's disease brain comparison

I made a suggestion on the talk page for dementia, adding in a new sentence re antihypertensive agents and cognition from a Nov 1 2016 Cochrane review. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Dementia If you have any suggestions, I would appreciate them. Thanks! JenOttawa (talk) 15:42, 7 November 2016 (UTC)


Tech proposals

The second round of the community wishlist[8] is open for applications. Do we have any tech proposals we are looking to be solved? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 08:28, 8 November 2016 (UTC)

Pyruvate dehydrogenase deficiency

This one needs a lot of improvement.

Especially the "Treatment" section, and the other parts of info lacking sources.

Thank you ! 69.57.225.245 (talk) 17:34, 8 November 2016 (UTC)

will look--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 19:20, 8 November 2016 (UTC)

Sensory motor amnesia

Please see: Muscle memory#Sensory motor amnesia. (I'd cut the entire section, but an ip editor is probably not the best person to do such things ;-) 86.186.168.226 (talk) 23:22, 31 October 2016 (UTC)

[9]--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 11:14, 1 November 2016 (UTC)
Thank you, but per WP:BURDEN "The burden to demonstrate verifiability lies with the editor who adds or restores material, and is satisfied by providing a citation to a reliable source that directly supports the contribution." (Section now trimmed.) —86.186.168.226 (talk) 21:33, 8 November 2016 (UTC)
I agree with this removal. The phrase "sensory motor amnesia" does not appear explicitly in any of the sources found by the Pubmed search, and the source cited in the article text should not be considered reliable. Basically there is no scientific backing for the existence of any such entity. Looie496 (talk) 21:57, 8 November 2016 (UTC)

Draft talk:Dan Riskin#edits

need opinions at above draft, thanks--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 10:53, 9 November 2016 (UTC)

New microscopy images

A while ago, I persuaded Carl Zeiss Microscopes to open-licence a number of their images. I've just uploaded another batch, to commons:Category:Images donated by Carl Zeiss Microscopy. They include some pictures of various types of human cells, which may be interest to this project. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:34, 9 November 2016 (UTC)

Cool thanks User:Pigsonthewing Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 19:14, 9 November 2016 (UTC)

Featured article nomination for Acne vulgaris

If anyone is interested in reviewing this FAC on an important topic, I'd be most appreciative. Thanks! TylerDurden8823 (talk) 05:24, 10 November 2016 (UTC)

Community Tech Proposal

I have submitted a tech proposal here regarding introducing further offline capability to the main Wikipedia app. People's thoughts? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 19:14, 9 November 2016 (UTC)


give opinion(gave mine)--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 12:00, 10 November 2016 (UTC)

Last year, I believe that they had over 100 ideas proposed; so far, we have 77 proposals at m:2016 Community Wishlist Survey, and there's still 10 days to go. For those who participated last year, I thought I'd highlight a few things that might help you get what you want.
First, this is the "make proposals and discuss ideas" phase. The goal for this stage is to collect proposals, merge duplicates, and make sure that the proposals are specific enough that people know what they're voting on. You don't want to have a proposal that says (to give an irrelevant example) "Improve citations" with lots of support, but half the voters meant "improve it by requiring the use of citation templates" and the other half meant "improve it by deleting the citation templates". Discussion and questions are particularly important at this stage, so that a clear description can be put before voters. This is true whether you think you're likely to support a proposal or not. (In fact, if you think that a proposal is a bad idea, then you might want to join that discussion to make sure that the problems are clear to everyone.) It is also particularly helpful if you identify how a proposal will affect other projects. By sheer size, the English Wikipedia could outvote any other project. But it's important for the overall movement's health to step outside of the mindset that the English Wikipedia is the only important project, or that what works here will work everywhere. So if you've got experience with any other project, please add your thoughts about how a proposal will affect other wikis.
Second, the voting stage, which starts on 28 November, is expected to use approval voting. You will be able to vote in favor of as many things as you want – but not until then.
Votes (and also !votes) on wiki have some problems, such as people being more likely to read and answer the first item than the last. (With luck, they'll decide to change the order of items on the page every now and again, but I wouldn't count on it.) Also, many local rules, such as the ones at the English Wikipedia that prohibit unfair canvassing, don't apply, so it may feel doubly strange to many editors here (and very familiar to editors at most other projects). But it's a straight vote, and you're welcome to beg your friends to vote for your proposal. The 10 most popular ideas will be addressed by the team during the next fiscal year (NB: "addressed" and "implemented" are not the same. If a truly bad idea wins the vote, then it will likely be "addressed" with a note explaining that they won't do it, and perhaps making some related counter-proposals).
So: How to win? The most important thing you can do to help your favorite proposals is to make sure that the description is clear and complete, that questions about it have been asked and answered, and that the proposal has been copyedited so that it can be easily understood by non-technical contributors and people who don't speak English natively. The next most important thing you can do is to mark your calendar for 28 November, to make sure that you vote for your favorite proposals. I hope that you will take some extra time to consider proposals that might be very good but might also be neglected (e.g., because they're not relevant to the English Wikipedia, or they're at the end of the page). WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:28, 10 November 2016 (UTC)

Determining the "main article"

Testosteron

Have a proposal here[10] regarding which use of testosterone (as a medication or as a hormone) are our readers most interested in. Wondering peoples thoughts. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 17:59, 10 November 2016 (UTC)


more opinions(gave mine)--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 21:53, 10 November 2016 (UTC)

Chiropractic

There appears to be a coordinated campaign to remove the work "pseudoscience" from the opening sentence of Chiropractic. The talk page is being filled with new editors and IPs, as the article is semi-protected. There is now an edit war beginning to remove "pseudoscience" from the opening sentence by confirmed editors. I've requested discretionary sanctions against one editor, but more eyes are needed on the article and talk page until this campaign dies down. --RexxS (talk) 17:54, 8 November 2016 (UTC)

Will watch Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 19:46, 8 November 2016 (UTC)
(edit conflict) This is a perennial problem, with editors endlessly talking past each other, because they each know The Truth™ and it's extraordinarily easy to find The Right Source™ that supports your position, whatever that position is. And this battle to have The Truth™ in the articles is resulting in sloppy work and bad writing. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:17, 8 November 2016 (UTC)
You mean with essentially all non-chiro sources claiming it is based in pseudoscience — that isn't true? Carl Fredrik 💌 📧 20:47, 8 November 2016 (UTC)
I mean that almost the only sources that even bother to mention that aspect, much less to discuss it, are advocacy sources (defined loosely here as sources trying to change people's choices, not merely sources that have a POV). See, e.g., the long list of medical dictionaries such as Dorlands that I posted to the article's talk page just now. Go read them all. Please tell me if you find even one standard medical dictionary or similar basic source that uses the word pseudoscience, or any similar term, in its definition of that field. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:12, 8 November 2016 (UTC)
Then you're simply wrong. Go read a few of the 612 sources that Google Scholar finds and try to dismiss them all as "advocacy". You'll be rightly laughed at. --RexxS (talk) 18:18, 9 November 2016 (UTC)
@WhatamIdoing: It's a perennial problem as long as people who have a financial interest in a particular medical topic can freely edit our articles anonymously for their own benefit, without needing to disclose their conflict of interest. Why should a disinterested editor who applies the guidance in WP:FALSEBALANCE to chiropractic be accused of battling to enforce The Truth™? Do you realise how offensive that is to good-faith editors? --RexxS (talk) 21:07, 8 November 2016 (UTC)
IMO it's a perennial problem as long as we have editors who believe that they will WP:RIGHTGREATWRONGS (against a helpful profession that gets much of its business through referrals from primary care physicians, or against science, depending upon which side you're pointing fingers at) by re-writing articles to strongly over-emphasize an aspect that is omitted from most mainstream, non-advocacy medical sources. We'll stop this problem only when editors stop trying to change readers' choices. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:12, 8 November 2016 (UTC)
Agree with WAID - polar opinions are generally farthest from the truth. Scientific consensus is closer to the middle. — soupvector (talk) 04:38, 9 November 2016 (UTC)
Specific questions cannot be answered by looking at the answers to a bunch of similarly-looking questions. Sometimes the middle ground is right and the extremes are wrong, and sometimes one of the "extremes" is right and the middle ground is half-way to Crazy Town. To say "polar opinions are generally farthest from the truth", thus "solving" a problem without even looking at it, is not just lazy, it is silly. --Hob Gadling (talk) 10:36, 9 November 2016 (UTC)
I have looked at the problem - and was speaking of the polar positions on that topic when I made my comment. I'm familiar with chiropractic, and not a fan, generally (but there are areas where studies have supported some aspects of the discipline). The could be said of many areas of "modern" medicine - we still have much to learn, and should not be dismissive when there is some evidence of benefit. — soupvector (talk) 01:23, 10 November 2016 (UTC)
Just as one example, from a review article published in the New England Journal of Medicine 6 months ago (PMID 27144851): "A randomized trial of chiropractic manipulation for subacute or chronic “back-related leg pain” (without confirmation of nerve-root compression on MRI) showed that manipulation was more effective than home exercise with respect to pain relief at 12 weeks (by a mean 1-point decrease on a pain-intensity scale on which scores ranged from 0 to 10, with higher scores indicating greater severity of pain) but not at 1 year.35 In addition, a randomized trial involving patients who had acute sciatica with MRI-confirmed disk protrusion showed that at 6 months, significantly more patients who underwent chiropractic manipulation had an absence of pain than did those who underwent sham manipulation (55% vs. 20%).36 Neurologic complications in the lumbar spine, including worsened disk herniation or the cauda equina syndrome, have been reported anecdotally, but they appear to be extremely rare.35-37" My point is that the current scientific consensus is not exclusively negative - it's more complicated than that. — soupvector (talk) 01:45, 10 November 2016 (UTC)
@Soupvector: Yes, we can all find single primary studies that document some evidence of efficacy. But the only secondary sources that look broadly at the literature (e.g. Cochrane reviews) show no evidence of effectiveness beyond being no worse than most other attempts at fixing chronic lower back pain. And that's well documented already in the article. Nobody's trying to deny chiropractic's claim to being a legitimate component of alternate medicine, but I'm sick of the POV-pushers who try to pretend that that underlying theory that drives chiropractic - "vertebral subluxations - is anything other than complete woo-woo and should be accurately labelled as pseudoscience. If our article simply defines chiropractic as alt med and nothing else, then it is whitewashing the majority of practitioners and chiropractic associations who subscribe to the pseudoscientific nonsense. --RexxS (talk) 03:08, 10 November 2016 (UTC)
I cited a high-quality source - I think you trivialize a NEJM review by responding "..we can all find single primary studies...". I agree there are "woo woo" beliefs underlying chiropractic - but what you and I think doesn't matter. We are here to represent high-quality sources, and there is a significant perspective that supports some aspects of chiropractic as being comparable in efficacy to some mainstream medical practices (and I'm a mainstream medical practitioner). — soupvector (talk) 03:55, 10 November 2016 (UTC)
The cited review article essentially says "these two primary studies reported statistically significant results favouring chiropractic". But – tellingly – the "Conclusions and recommendations" section says nothing about chiropractic. You say above "the current scientific consensus is not exclusively negative", but this source does not support that claim. Apparently after reviewing the primary literature, the authors of this review found insufficient evidence to recommend chiopractic or make any claim about its efficacy. And this was a review about back pain... Adrian J. Hunter(talk•contribs) 06:41, 10 November 2016 (UTC)
"I think you trivialize a NEJM review by responding "..we can all find single primary studies..."" - No, RexxS is exactly right. Statistical significance as a criterion has the big weakness of being false-positive 5% of the time when there is no effect, and primary studies often omit basic safety measures against certain sources of error because the researchers do not know any better. Anybody who looks for positive results for any arbitrary nonsense will find it as long as the subject has been scientifically researched at all. Examples: Homeopathy, Astrology, Water witching. Because of that and other reasons, Wikipedia prefers secondary sources (e.g. Cochrane reviews) that summarize the results of primary sources, taking quality into account. --Hob Gadling (talk) 10:13, 10 November 2016 (UTC)
"I have looked at the problem" - your contribution above did not reflect that, back then. --Hob Gadling (talk) 10:13, 10 November 2016 (UTC)
It is easy to ignore an aspect of reality, such as the poor evidence base of chiropractic and the poor connection between chiropractic and reality, by defining all the sources that mention that aspect as "advocacy". This is a common ploy of defenders of all sorts of pseudoscience who try to paint themselves as "neutral". They also often use reasoning that can easily be turned around and used in the opposite direction with equal justification. When you are removing the word "pseudoscientific", aren't you WP:RIGHTGREATWRONGSing? --Hob Gadling (talk) 10:36, 9 November 2016 (UTC)
No, when we make the word pseudoscience (and its variants) appear "only" six times in the article, rather than seven times including the very first sentence, we're following the WP:DUE weight. Why? Because very, very few of the sources about chiropractic think that "pseudoscience" is the first thing to say about the subject.
I've just followed RexxS's advice to see what scholar.google.com says – only, I search about the subject of this article, i.e., "chiropractic", not "chiropractic pseudoscience". I clicked every single item on the first page (my default search length is probably longer than yours). Zero hits included the word pseudoscience in any form. Now – perhaps your results will be different. Perhaps you will have access to a paywalled paper that I didn't, or perhaps Google will remove the two deadlinks from their search results by the time you do it.
But we could look at it another way, too: RexxS reports 612 Ghits on the subject of pseudoscience in chiropractic. I got 151,000 Ghits on chiropractic. That means that approximately 1 in 250 sources about chiropractic mention pseudoscience. IMO, when merely 0.4% of sources mention an aspect of a subject, then that aspect probably doesn't belong in the very first sentence of an article. If that seems unreasonable, then consider this: 1 in 21 (twenty-one; more than a full magnitude more frequent) current news articles mention rape in connection with Donald Trump. But the first sentence in that article isn't, and shouldn't be, "Donald Trump is a rapist, American businessman, and politician". That's the logical conclusion from learning that it is not mentioned in 96% (or 99.6%) of articles on the subject. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:07, 10 November 2016 (UTC)
Not sure that that is a correct metric. Not all things on Google Scholar have the same WP:WEIGHT, and not all items will discuss whether it's pseudoscience or use that word, either. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 16:36, 10 November 2016 (UTC)
I think it's a reasonable metric for determining whether something is the single most important fact about a subject, and it's passed the few simple tests I've run: "Charles Manson" is associated with murder, "George Washington" is heavily associated with the presidency, Saskatchewan is very strongly associated with Canada, mammals are associated with milk and being vetebrates, and somewhat associated with hair, etc. All of this is exactly what you'd expect, and exactly in line with the opening lines of the Wikipedia articles on those subjects.
I'm open to more suggestions, though; it'd certainly be better to have multiple such metrics. In any given case, any single metric might be misleading or incomplete. So far, though, I've tried two metrics (what professional medical dictionaries say plus what Google Scholar associates with this subject), and both of them indicate that the pseudoscientific problems with chiropractic are not the single most important fact. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:27, 10 November 2016 (UTC)
Are we talking about the same article? [11] has "pseudoscience" in the fifth senetence, not in the first. I also count only four "pseudos*", two in the introduction and two in the body, not counting categories, banners, sources, and "See also". The "See also" can go, and the rest seems to be necessary, since they explain which part of chiropractic is pseudoscientific. I don't think that any of the WP rules states that the incidence of each word within an article has to correlate with the incidence of the same word in scholar.google.com. Though that could be easily done by a bot! --Hob Gadling (talk) 16:55, 10 November 2016 (UTC)
I'm talking about the specific dispute at the article, which is about the recent edits that repeatedly added the word pseudoscience into the very first sentence during the last two weeks. (Also, I'm counting the two instances of pseudomedicine in my six.) I've not seen anyone say that pseudoscience shouldn't be mentioned, or even that it shouldn't be mentioned clearly and relatively prominently. But there are multiple editors saying that it's not the very first thing that we should have in the article. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:15, 10 November 2016 (UTC)
@WhatamIdoing: Not all scholarly sources bother to state the obvious: "flat earth" = 24,100 GScholar hits; +"flat earth" +pseudoscience = 387 GScholar hits. That's 1.6%. By your logic we ought not to mention pseudoscience in the lead of the Flat Earth article either. So your tests are clearly too simple. Rape is by no means a defining characteristic of Trump; but pseudoscience is a defining feature of chiropractic theory (otherwise it would be no more than spinal manipulation). Both flat earth and chiropractic theory are pseudoscience and need to be reported as such. Or are you going to tell me next that what chiropractic calls vertebral subluxations isn't "a claim, belief, or practice presented as scientific, but which does not adhere to the scientific method" (the definition of pseudoscience)? --RexxS (talk) 17:57, 10 November 2016 (UTC)
Perpetual_motion is considered pseudoscience, yet not the whole physics is labeled as such. 46.13.136.230 (talk) 18:12, 10 November 2016 (UTC)
That's true. Chiropractic is considered pseudoscience, yet not the whole of alternate medicine is labelled as such. So what? --RexxS (talk) 18:16, 10 November 2016 (UTC)
Proper analogy is Vertebral_subluxation <> Chiropractic. 46.13.136.230 (talk) 18:18, 10 November 2016 (UTC)
No, RexxS, by my logic, Flat Earth shouldn't use the word pseudoscience in the first sentence – and it doesn't. (The word is mentioned instead in the third paragraph.) I think that Flat Earth's first sentence hits the correct balance, both in what it says, and in what it doesn't say. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:37, 10 November 2016 (UTC)
[12]--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 21:18, 10 November 2016 (UTC)
@46.13.136.230: Thing is, Vertebral subluxation == Chiropractic. Unless you're one of the small minority of chiropractors who reject the theory. Are you?
No, WAID, by your logic Chiropractic shouldn't use the appellation alternate medicine in the first sentence either. But it does. So it should present the other valid categorisation equally prominently. In the same sentence. Over to you for your suggestion on what the first sentence should be. --RexxS (talk) 01:42, 11 November 2016 (UTC)
With regard to the first sentence, it should define the profession in a way that reflects high-quality sources. WP:MEDRS says that guidelines from International medical and scientific organizations represent some of the highest quality sources available. The chiropractic profession has been defined by the World Health Organization, in the glossary of it’s Guidelines on Training and Safety: "Chiropractic - A health care profession concerned with the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of disorders of the neuromusculoskeletal system and the effects of these disorders on general health. There is an emphasis on manual techniques, including joint adjustment and/or manipulation, with a particular focus on subluxations.”
Not sure if it is helpful, but the idea of whether to label ‘chiropractic’ as pseudoscience or to label the ‘some of the ideas espoused by chiropractors’ as pseudoscience has been discussed before here in 2011. 2001:56A:75B7:9B00:FC52:6CE8:6010:FF27 (talk) 03:39, 11 November 2016 (UTC)

Is this a medical claim?

I am attempting to add a source to the spine manipulation article; this source indicates that the vast majority of physical therapy programs in the US are teaching some kind of thrust-based joint manipulation. It has been suggested that it is a medical claim to describe the education of physical therapists with regard to spine manipulation and thus the primary source is not good enough for inclusion. At the reliable sources noticeboard it has been suggested that the source is reliable for the claim; however, there is still disagreement at the relevant talk page over whether MEDRS should be applied to exclude the source. The discussion at the relevant talk page can be found here. Any comments would be helpful.75.152.109.249 (talk) 19:42, 10 November 2016 (UTC)

Yes, the source does indicate that 99% of the survey respondents are teaching some kind of thrust joint manipulation. Which makes me question why the text you added said "99% of programs were now teaching some form of spine manipulation". --RexxS (talk) 20:21, 10 November 2016 (UTC)
What an educational program does, or doesn't, teach, is not a biomedical claim. It's a social claim (=what happens in a society, because of laws, etc.). Therefore, MEDRS doesn't apply. Or, more precisely, the MEDPOP section that says even a decent newspaper article is plenty good enough for such claims, applies. See also WP:Biomedical information#What is not biomedical information? on "Training", and consider what the minimum standard for a similar statement in another field would be, e.g., "99% of Canadian medical schools offer at least one class on nutrition". WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:46, 10 November 2016 (UTC)
Agreed with not needing MEDRS. But if the survey found that 99% of the 148 Canadian medical schools that responded offer at least one class on nutrition, would it be fair to write "99% of Canadian medical schools offer at least one class on vitamin supplements"? --RexxS (talk) 21:00, 10 November 2016 (UTC)
I call that a case of {{failed verification}} myself. However, it looks like the edit said "A survey of faculty from first-professional physical therapy programs in the US found that, as of 2012, 99% of programs were now teaching some form of spine manipulation" (the most recent one, anyway; I didn't check for any earlier attempts), which isn't quite analogous. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:24, 10 November 2016 (UTC)
RexxS, you said "the source does indicate that 99% ... are teaching some kind of thrust joint manipulation. Which makes me question why you added 99% of programs were now teaching some form of spine manipulation."
The source says: "Of the body regions, the cervical spine received the least amount of emphasis, with 35% of programs not currently teaching cervical manipulation. In contrast, the greatest percentage of time is devoted to teaching lumbar spine TJM with 99% of programs including this content in their curriculum." If 99% teach lumbar manipulation, it seems accurate to say that 99% teach some form of spinal manipulation. This may have been too simplistic; at the article talk page I have suggested more specific text.2001:56A:75B7:9B00:FC52:6CE8:6010:FF27 (talk) 05:40, 11 November 2016 (UTC)

Digital health/healthcare

I've proposed a merger of Digital health and Digital healthcare. Both are pretty poor as articles and they're clearly synonymous (the Digital healthcare article explicitly states that). Input and help welcome.

I'm also involved in an edit dispute at Digital health with a WP:SPA: input there also welcome. Bondegezou (talk) 11:24, 11 November 2016 (UTC)

Merge away. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 19:39, 11 November 2016 (UTC)

Neuropathic pain and Fentanyl

I just left a comment on the neuropathic pain talk page re: my suggestion to add in a 2016 cochrane review on Fentanyl. I would appreciate a few people looking at my wording before I post it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Neuropathic_pain#Opiods_Section-_Fentanyl Thanks, and have a terrific weekend! JenOttawa (talk) 21:19, 11 November 2016 (UTC)

Replied there. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 00:08, 12 November 2016 (UTC)

Spam attack

Hey, just a quick note for those who don't follow the ol' DRAMA board: There's been a multi-wiki spam attack today, perpetrated by hacking admins' accounts and using the admin bit to replace protected pages with blatant spam. This sort of thing happens every now and again, although it usually just results in the hacker posting "guess what, I hacked this account" messages rather than spam. So far, all the accounts I've seen are WMF-associated admins, including Jimmy. So don't panic, but please do keep an eye out for each other. Now's not the time to assume that you don't need to review changes made by familiar names. In the unlikely event that you see something, revert it if you can, and drop by WP:ANI to ask for help. And please watch out for the smaller wikis, too, because this problem has not been confined to the English Wikipedia. WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:37, 12 November 2016 (UTC)

will keep an eye on, thanks WAID--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 11:27, 12 November 2016 (UTC)

Concern with Wikidata

Trypophobia is one of our most read medical articles. Since we auto-pull info from Wikidata people can add vandalism such as occurred here on Sept 24 2016 [13] and it often goes unfixed. Not sure how we are going to address this? Was brought to my attention here[14] Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 19:24, 14 November 2016 (UTC)

There is a preference at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rc to make Wikidata edits display in the watchlist. I don't know of any other method. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 19:35, 14 November 2016 (UTC)
Is there a cluebot equivalent on Wikidata yet? Would likely be harder to write as one has less context avaliable. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 21:37, 14 November 2016 (UTC)

Stress incontinence - question posed on talk page

I posted a question re using peer reviewed primary sources to describe medical procedures on the talk page of the Stress incontinence page. Being a new editor, I am still learning about what is suggested in this context. I know that systematic reviews are by far preferred. If you have a chance, I would appreciate feedback. Thanks.JenOttawa (talk) 17:24, 14 November 2016 (UTC)

replied talk/article--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 21:46, 14 November 2016 (UTC)

Student editing

More eyes would be useful at Chronic stress which is getting typical student treatment of badly sourced, overly generalized, and way-too-certain content added and now being edit warred back into the article. Jytdog (talk) 00:55, 13 November 2016 (UTC)

will keep eye on--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 11:17, 13 November 2016 (UTC)
It is disappointing also at Hyperandrogenism. I have already deleted material which was in breach of WP:BLP. Trankuility (talk) 12:20, 13 November 2016 (UTC)
I checked one diff (so keep in mind that n=1 for my comments), and I think that we may be reacting a little too strongly. That diff blanked an entire section with an edit summary claiming that it was "unsourced" (it contained five sources, e.g., to the review PMID 17716101) and had other problems. But the bigger problem is that we had a section on ==Mental symptoms== (e.g., people with chronic stress can have symptoms similar to depression), and now we don't even have a complete sentence on mental health effects – which is particularly weird for a subject that is all about "the response to emotional pressure suffered for a prolonged period of time", to quote the first sentence!
Rather than blanking imperfect but basically accurate (AFAICT) information, maybe we should try helping them find better sources or re-phrasing things to be more precise. I think that collaborative editing will get us a better article than blanking sections. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:08, 13 November 2016 (UTC)
What you are saying here would have credibility to me, if you were actually helping to manage student editing - and when I say manage, I mean stick with it to ensure that what is left when they are done is not a badly thought out, skewed-WEIGHTed, badly sourced, badly written ... thing. Your response is too typical of the WMF and Ed Program which seems to value "the chance for new editors" above everything else and ignores - ignores - the quality of WP content. I recognize the potential value of these school programs but they are terribly managed and too many of our articles have been left mangled by students. But I would love for you to show me how it is done. To "collaborate" with students who come here to get assignments done, don't listen to feedback and edit war bad content into WP. Show me by example over the course of a round of student editors swarming an article. Just send me the link to the article at the end of it, and I will follow what you did. Jytdog (talk) 22:36, 14 November 2016 (UTC)
Here's one of the links you asked for. But I don't expect you to follow that example in full, because I don't expect students to nominate articles for GA any longer. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:10, 14 November 2016 (UTC)
wedding invitations are very obviously not what I am talking about Jytdog (talk) 00:41, 15 November 2016 (UTC)
Wedding websites, not invitations. Wedding invitation has historically attracted spammers instead of students. It's such an oddball subject that it's an easy example to remember.  ;-) WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:14, 15 November 2016 (UTC)
done here. waste of time. Jytdog (talk) 07:22, 15 November 2016 (UTC)
There's a proposal to merge Chronic stress into Physiological stress. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:07, 14 November 2016 (UTC)

Massviews tool improved

Hello WikiProject Medicine! The Massviews tool, which is used to import pages and get their pageviews, is now twice as fast and supports processing of up to 10,000 pages. That's still not enough to process all Medicine articles, but you should be able to do most (all?) of the different classifications. For instance, you could get the most-viewed pages of the high-importance medicine articles. To run queries like this, provide the full URL to the category in the Massviews tool, and select "Use subject page instead of talk page" (since Category:High-importance medicine articles shows talk pages). You can of course select any arbitrary date range, or click on the date range field to reveal the date picker, and some shortcuts like "last month" are available. Feedback most welcomed at meta:Talk:Pageviews Analysis. Best — MusikAnimal talk 01:25, 11 November 2016 (UTC)

MusikAnimal, thank you--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 13:04, 11 November 2016 (UTC)
User:MusikAnimal it is beautiful. Much much faster :-) Well done. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 19:48, 11 November 2016 (UTC)

Okay so to get monthly page views all we need to do is add:

  • Category:FA-Class_medicine_articless
  • Category:FL-Class medicine articles
  • Category:GA-Class_medicine_articles
  • Category:B-Class_medicine_articles
  • Category:C-Class_medicine_articles
  • Category:Start-Class_medicine_articles
  • Category:Stub-Class_medicine_articles
  • Category:List-Class_medicine_articles

Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 20:10, 11 November 2016 (UTC)

User:Nettrom, do you think that something similar to m:Research:Screening WikiProject Medicine articles for quality/Stub prediction table could be run for Start-class articles? WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:53, 12 November 2016 (UTC)
Limit has been raised to 20K. We now have the ability to run this query Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 15:47, 13 November 2016 (UTC)
WhatamIdoing Yes, that should be possible. I went and looked at the performance statistics for ORES and Start-class is also reasonably easy to predict. Similarly as before we probably want to only flag articles that are predicted to be B-class or higher because the Start/C-class boundary is somewhat fuzzy. I'm thinking the tool I have should be modified to use ORES for predictions as that's the go-to place for those. Is there a particular deadline for this? Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:05, 15 November 2016 (UTC)
No deadline, as long as you ping me when it's done.  :-) WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:24, 15 November 2016 (UTC)

Ran the numbers. Currently readership for Oct is 179.7M[15] Not much changed from prior Template:WikiProject_Medicine/Popular_pages/Total Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 16:55, 13 November 2016 (UTC)

Mental health among editors

m:Grants:Project/Mental health within the community and a discussion about it at w:de:Wikipedia Diskussion:Kurier#Psychische Gesundheit might interest some of you. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:05, 14 November 2016 (UTC)

thanks WAID(the second links in german?[16])--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 22:21, 14 November 2016 (UTC)
Yes, that's the German Wikipedia's version of WP:The Signpost. There's a short article in Die Kurier (which says approximately the same thing as the grants proposal), and a long discussion on the talk page (linked). WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:11, 14 November 2016 (UTC)
If someone wants to write a summary of the current evidence on mental health issues within the Wikipedia community, not convinced this is something we should be funding. This is more or less paid editing. They should just do it as a Wikipedia page as a volunteer as the rest of us typically do. Funding stuff outside of this maybe. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 01:05, 15 November 2016 (UTC)
I suspect that the main point is item #2, in which she creates a stress-management training program specifically suited to the needs and environment that Wikipedia contributors have. WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:17, 15 November 2016 (UTC)
Yes exactly. So do the first bit and than we would consider funding for the second more favorably. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 20:06, 15 November 2016 (UTC)

Journal citation template autopopulate from PMID broken?

It might just be me, but can't get journal citations entered by PMID to autopopulate. Is that function broken? If so, anyone know who to ask to fix it? BakerStMD 15:29, 15 November 2016 (UTC)

Are you using VisualEditor? Carl Fredrik 💌 📧 15:32, 15 November 2016 (UTC)
I'm at work so I'm stuck using internet explorer and am using the built in functionality from the toolbar at the top of the text editor. BakerStMD 15:43, 15 November 2016 (UTC)
NM, turned on the citation bot which seems to be working. Thx! BakerStMD 15:49, 15 November 2016 (UTC)
user:Bakerstmd I have been having trouble getting it to work aswell. Been having to use "citoid" which you find in the left column. Still dose autofil on dois Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 20:04, 15 November 2016 (UTC)
yes it is busted and the only that works is doi. doc james left a note about this at the toolbar's talk page, Wikipedia_talk:RefToolbar#Autofill_2. I will pursue. Jytdog (talk) 21:18, 15 November 2016 (UTC)
I added a followup here at the MediaWiki page. Jytdog (talk) 21:22, 15 November 2016 (UTC)
The thingy [here] seems to be working okay, as a stop-gap. Alexbrn (talk) 21:23, 15 November 2016 (UTC)
When entering inline citations, Citation bot works fine for populating PMID info. The editor simply enters "cite journal |pmid=xxxxxx" with required before/after tags and activates the bot by clicking "Citations" at the bottom of the editing page, checks the edit, then saves. It's enabled via Preferences/Editing/Citation expander. --Zefr (talk) 22:52, 15 November 2016 (UTC)
Thanks User:Zefr will give that a try. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 23:55, 15 November 2016 (UTC)
  • was just picked up and added to the IT people's to do list: here. Jytdog (talk) 00:46, 16 November 2016 (UTC)
  • and fixed, they say. hooray! Jytdog (talk) 02:17, 16 November 2016 (UTC)

Testosterone

Testosteron

Now that the article is a dab page, there are a thousand or two incoming links that need to be disambiguated. Those of us at WP:DPL would be grateful for your expert help. I've completed the dab page, so it's ready to use. Just go to this list, pick an article (or redirect) and click "FIX". Having this done by subject-matter experts will be much better for the encyclopedia than having us yobs worker bees try to do it.

@Boghog, Doc James, Trankuility, BatteryIncluded, Graeme Bartlett, Evolution and evolvability, Bluerasberry, Minimobiler, Soupvector, Meodipt, Iztwoz, Nwbeeson, Distrait cognizance, Looie496, and The Banner:

(Pinging those who took part in the split discussion.)

— Gorthian (talk) 18:46, 12 November 2016 (UTC)

Aren't we collecting data for a month or so to see if one of these pages should be the default? Should we wait until that is determined? Sizeofint (talk) 18:51, 12 November 2016 (UTC)
Those articles all link to the dab page now. The data won't be worth much if readers end up on the dab page every time they click a link to testosterone. We can always move to a WP:PRIMARYTOPIC later if one is indicated.— Gorthian (talk) 19:01, 12 November 2016 (UTC)
If people go to the dab page they will than pick the topic they wish. It is the subpages that we are looking at so the data we collect will be just fine. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 21:03, 12 November 2016 (UTC)
Or they will give up and go ask Mr Google instead. Every click costs you readers. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:55, 13 November 2016 (UTC)
This would not have been a problem if the split was done the way I originally proposed and for which there was a developing consensus. But no, we have to first perform an experiment to determine which is the primary topic. Three observations. First, for the last 16 years, before the article was hijacked by Doc James two months ago without consensus (WP:MED über alles), it was clear what the primary subject was (the natural hormone). Second, the majority of wiki links are to the natural hormone, not the drug. Third, it is also clear from vast majority of foreign language testosterone articles that the primary subject is the natural hormone. Boghog (talk) 19:04, 12 November 2016 (UTC)
Boghog What made it clear that the primary subject was the non-medical use? I did not agree to this experiment being done in lots of articles, only one, but I still think that it seems reasonable that if an article has a lot more traffic than the others then it should be primary. Do you disagree with that premise and think, for example, that incoming links should be a determining factor? Do we need to clarify some part of WP:PRIMARY? I would like your support for a clearly-stated system and beyond that consensus from everyone. Blue Rasberry (talk) 22:24, 12 November 2016 (UTC)
Bluerasberry What made clear that the primary subject of testosterone for the first 16 years of its existence is that drug or medication wasn't not even mentioned in the first paragraph of the lead whereas hormone was. Drug/medication was only added to the first paragraph in the last two months. Per WP:PRIMARYTOPIC, two major aspects should be considered, usage and long-term significance. Both the historical record of the English testosterone article and the focus of the vast majority of the foreign language Wikipedia articles on the hormone argue that the primary topic is the hormone. Until relatively recently, testosterone has not been widely prescribed as a drug. Per WP:PRIMARYTOPIC, arguments based on recent widespread notability and prominence are less persuasive. Judging notability based on incoming wiki links is fairly useless since there a number of bloated navboxes can could easily skew the results one way or the other and many times, it is debatable which link is most appropriate. Page views are useful since they directly measures usage. The most persuasive argument for hormone over drug is that hormone is the more fundamental concept. To understand why testosterone is a drug, one needs to first understand that it is a hormone. Boghog (talk) 23:17, 12 November 2016 (UTC)
Some responses -
  • I have no particular respect for the quality of Wikipedia's older content so I will not defend it from change. If it was a certain way for a long time I will not take that alone as evidence of consensus or support, because so few people actually edit. I am comfortable saying that Wikipedia's content is poor quality as compared to the ideal we want. I am not afraid of changes, especially when they come with discussion, and I think this current discussion is appropriate to have.
  • I agree that incoming wiki links from infoboxes navboxes is no indicator of importance.
  • We have agreement that pageviews are important. I expect that you also would be interested to see which article gets more views from a disambig page, whether hormone or medicine. If I were to draw a line, I would suggest that if there are multiple topics and one gets 80% of the views, then definitely it should be primary. I am not sure if you would draw a line or where, but perhaps sorting that detail could wait. Perhaps incoming traffic should not be the only factor.
  • I am not sure how much Wikipedia should emphasize historical science when another concept seems more popular for a few years. I am prepared to say that if a new concept like a drug is much more studied than an older fundamental concept like a hormone of the same name, then I would be fine with the drug taking precedence in Wikipedia, but also I do not think that the conversation around this is developed and I am open to hearing suggestions for how this works and what exceptions, if any, there should be. Different people have different concepts of "recent", with some thinking that means 1, 5, 15, 30, or 50 years. Personally, I would say that a concept that has gotten 80% of traffic every month for about 3 years is beyond being recent. I am expecting that medical testosterone has been in this position for 5+ years, but we neither have data to confirm this nor do we have any rule that says "80% for 3 years" is a valid determinant.
I am not sure what the rule should be but I think there should be a rule because there must be several hundred similar cases. I do not know how to resolve this discussion, but I would propose "80% for 3 years" as a starting point, and then ask what more you or anyone else might want. Blue Rasberry (talk) 18:22, 14 November 2016 (UTC)
I suspect that you meant "navboxes" rather than "infoboxes". WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:07, 14 November 2016 (UTC)
Yes! Blue Rasberry (talk) 19:35, 15 November 2016 (UTC)
  • I fixed 5 of them, but then the list went down (service not available). For the ones I examined, they were pretty consistently referring to the hormone, but I cannot say that it was a statistically-valid sample. I decided not to change a couple where the page would need to be refactored to tease out the distinction between the endogenous hormone and the drug (e.g. a Tour de France article referring to a high level of testosterone in an athlete's sample, for a substance on the UCI banned list - in this case, the assay was for the hormone, but the banned substance is the drug). — soupvector (talk) 19:35, 12 November 2016 (UTC)
    • The DPL bot goes down intermittently, but comes back up within a couple of minutes. And yes, some articles will require abandoning Dab solver and editing the page as you normally do. Those "tricky" ones are where we really need help! Best practice is to tag it as {{dn}}, so other editors are alerted that it may be difficult. — Gorthian (talk) 19:43, 12 November 2016 (UTC)
I did not want there to be a dab page. The more generic hormone page should have been the primary topic, and then most links would have been correct and not need to be changed. But since an experiment is running we will probably get less hits overall. But let us see what happens. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 21:18, 12 November 2016 (UTC)
Tool works great. Will not take long to fix. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 21:55, 12 November 2016 (UTC)
That's easy for YOU to say! :-D
Seriously, thanks for the help, all of you. — Gorthian (talk) 05:01, 13 November 2016 (UTC)
It looks like there's about 80 pages that still need to be fixed.
A few of them will be difficult: "Antiandrogens block the effects of testosterone on certain prostate cancers" refers to both endogenous and exogenous testosterone, and there no longer seems to be a page that covers both. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:18, 14 November 2016 (UTC)
  • OMG, you guys are killing it! This is amazing, thank you! — Gorthian (talk) 01:33, 15 November 2016 (UTC)

As noted here and here, I disagree with the move. I'm not going to heavily invest in this dispute, though. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 02:00, 15 November 2016 (UTC)

Give it a bit of time. Things will iron themselves out.Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 03:19, 15 November 2016 (UTC)
And a non-expert, testosterone should clearly be about the hormone. The 'medication' is about the medical uses of the hormone, which makes it clear that testosterone itself should be about the hormone. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 19:43, 16 November 2016 (UTC)
could be time will tell--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 20:35, 16 November 2016 (UTC)
The statistics so far are at least 5:1 in favor of the hormone. Note that the disambiguation page was modified so that we can get direct statistics the preference of readers for the hormone or the drug article. Please also note that free testosterone redirects to testosterone (hormone) and testosterone (drug) redirects to testosterone (medication). The reduction of clicks from testosterone (hormone) is directly proportional to the increase in links to free testosterone. Hence the 5:1 ratio has been quite steady over the first five days of the data collection. Boghog (talk) 21:16, 16 November 2016 (UTC)
yes, I see your point--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 21:23, 16 November 2016 (UTC)

I don't see the point in running this test for more than 2–3 more days unless the pageviews for these two articles happen to markedly converge during at least one of those days. Quite clearly, readership interest greatly favors the hormone over the medication on the DAB page and on the basis of daily pageviews for each article, per the pageviews statistics: [17]. Seppi333 (Insert 2¢) 23:50, 16 November 2016 (UTC)

PMID magic links

Hey all,

It looks like PMID magic links are going away – well, losing their magic. "PMID 12345678" will just be plain text.

It looks like the new format for PMIDs is an interwiki link: "[[pmid:12345678]]" for pmid:12345678. You can add a label just link any other link; it could look like [[pmid:12345678|PMID 12345678]] or that paper or whatever you want.

RFC and ISBN magic links will also be changing. The formats are listed as "alternatives" (they work now) at mw:Help:Magic links.

This change is being made for technical reasons. The technical RFC, with some information about the rationale, is here: mw:Requests for comment/Future of magic links. Most of our links are in citation templates, which will be fixed centrally, and all of this can be fixed by bot or WP:AWB, but it'd be a good idea to keep an eye out for these changes. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:34, 15 November 2016 (UTC)

ARGH. Thank you for notifying us. Hopefully this is not actually a fait accompli, as you frame it. Jytdog (talk) 23:50, 15 November 2016 (UTC)
We use "pmid=" in our references. Never used this magic link. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 23:54, 15 November 2016 (UTC)
Just to be clear, as Doc James noted, previously if you typed in the regular editor (anywhere in any article) "PMID 12345678" (this has no brackets around it or anything), it would appear as a link to pubmed. Frankly, I didn't even know this was the case until today. Support for this will be discontinued. If you type "pmid=blabla" in a "cite xxx" citation, that will continue to appear as a link. I've never seen anyone use the "magic links", so I doubt this will affect many of us. Ajpolino (talk) 03:57, 16 November 2016 (UTC)
My thoughts are much the same. PMIDs have never really come up except in citation templates, so I don't think I'll miss the magic link functionality that much. James Hare (NIOSH) (talk) 04:06, 16 November 2016 (UTC)
for pete's sake just control-f PMID on this page and its archives - look here. Jytdog (talk) 04:37, 16 November 2016 (UTC)
Where can we register our objections to this proposed change? Boghog (talk) 04:49, 16 November 2016 (UTC)
The talk page associated with this: mw:Requests for comment/Future of magic links. They apparently do RfCs diffferently on wikimedia. Jytdog (talk) 05:04, 16 November 2016 (UTC)
Very differently. Technical RFCs can last longer, their subjects are different, the main discussions are held in real-time, and they almost always (in the end) result in a firm decision that gets implemented by the people involved in the discussion. Speaking purely as a volunteer, I'd say that "registering your objections" would be a waste of time. (Also, if anyone decides to post anyway, remember that they block people over perceived rudeness much more freely in the technical spaces.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:27, 16 November 2016 (UTC)
This is not true, please don't spread FUD like this again. Legoktm (talk) 04:22, 17 November 2016 (UTC)
So the RfC is actually fake. This again is why people who work on content get frustrated with how the technical people work. That is a messed up system. Jytdog (talk) 07:50, 16 November 2016 (UTC)
Well you can still make a PMID link in talk with brackets [[PMID:12345678]] renders as PMID:12345678. Talk pages are the only places I would ever use the magic links in the past I think? I can't think of a reason I would use one on a regular page... Ajpolino (talk) 05:23, 16 November 2016 (UTC)
Just an added note, for refs which use the "magic links" because they don't use templated "cite journal" refs, I'm sure a bot will convert the old PMID 12345678 to the new [[PMID:12345678]]. So this shouldn't require any extra work on our part, except to add the brackets in the future. Ajpolino (talk) 05:27, 16 November 2016 (UTC)
So this proposed change will not apply to the rendering of |pmid= in {{cite journal}}? Boghog (talk) 05:33, 16 November 2016 (UTC)
And {{pmid}}, etc.? Boghog (talk) 05:36, 16 November 2016 (UTC)
Any templates that rely upon the magic link will need to be updated, if they haven't already been. But {{pmid}} doesn't use it anyway, and I'd be surprised if {{cite journal}} did (and if it does, it'd be an easy fix). WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:27, 16 November 2016 (UTC)
yes User:Ajpolino I can read. The point is that this is more work for editors to communicate with one another. What is the benefit to editors? This seems driven by some coders desire for elegance in the code. I don't give a rats ass about that. I just know the result is that I will have yet another template I have to type perfectly to make work. Jytdog (talk) 06:13, 16 November 2016 (UTC)
For the (apparently) few of us who used the magic links, I recommend just typing "[[pmid:12345678]]" instead of using a template. I don't think it'll be a noticeable amount of extra typing for me, although of course reasonable people could disagree on this point. WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:27, 16 November 2016 (UTC)
Or just use {{PMID|123456778}}. But yes, bots could fix anything that would break. Even old discussions. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 12:02, 16 November 2016 (UTC)

(unindent) Yes, what Headbomb says. Magic links were added before MediaWiki existed. They were added before the notion of templates and transclusion existed in MediaWiki. Making the parser guess at whether a user intended for there to be a link leads to bugs and unexpected behavior. Explicit markup is better and these days considered a lot more standard. That is, ISBN, PMID, and RFC magic links are by far the exceptions and not the rule. Jytdog: I absolutely agree that there's no rush here and that we don't need to break anything unnecessarily. The deprecation process hasn't even formally begun, as far as I'm aware, it's still just moving forward slowly with notes and heads-up like this. (In some ways, this note was perhaps a bit premature or phrased in a way that makes it seem a bit premature.) Speaking broadly, the harsh reality is that wiki markup has evolved in ways that will likely require some substantial changes. Wiki markup's flexibility and free-form nature has made it wild in places; when trying to replicate and pin down its behavior, we've seen the need to make adjustments, such as cutting obscure (mis-)features such as magic linking, in order to make the overall system more sane and predictable and less buggy. If there are strong reasons we must keep magic links around, you should absolutely raise these points on MediaWiki.org or in Phabricator or here (Legoktm and others are very responsive) so that we can plan and adjust accordingly. :-) --MZMcBride (talk) 04:58, 17 November 2016 (UTC)

a bad process

So I am looking at the fake RfC here. At the upper right there is grey box that says "Tracked in Phabricator Task T145604".

If you click on the link at Task T145604 you arrive here.

If you look there it says: The RFC proposes three steps:

  • Disable the magic link functionality by default for the MediaWiki 1.28 release, and mark it as deprecated. (approved in E287)
  • Deprecate magic links on Wikimedia wikis (e.g. Wikipedia), providing alternatives for this functionality and tools to aid the migration. We agreed to start building these tools in E287.
  • Disable magic links functionality a year or so after the MediaWiki 1.28 release (in time for the next MediaWiki LTS release)

Look at E287. That is a "meeting" to which five people were apparently invited and twelve "people" (two appear to be bots?) participated. And it was "decided" to disable the functionality.

That is a bad process. Jytdog (talk) 09:49, 16 November 2016 (UTC)

This process is designed for developers to participate in. Just because you don't agree with it doesn't make it a bad process. 2607:FEA8:2CA0:251:158D:8228:F3B9:7303 (talk) 11:58, 16 November 2016 (UTC)
I don't understand why you think that the RFC process is "fake". What does that mean to you?
As for "only" five people being invited, the invitation to the Phab calendar item has very little to do with actual invitations. The seven-person committee in charge of MediaWiki's architecture is invited en masse on the Phab calendar item, but they reply individually, so your "five" invitees is actually ten humans. But that's just the invitation to the Phab calendar item, which anyone can sign up for. If you want your name in that list, then just click on "Join this event" in the box on the right-hand side. This is a standing weekly meeting, and you are welcome to attend if you're interested in the topic for that week.
The normal invitations are issued outside of Phab. Technical RFCs are always posted publicly in Phabricator (on a designated, public board) and announced in e-mail (minimum of the general-interest mailing list for MediaWiki software), and typically on wiki as well (automatically listed in a central page). Every one of those posts constitutes an invitation to the public to participate in the decision, whether during the regular weekly IRC meeting or elsewhere. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:05, 16 November 2016 (UTC)
I do not think it is a significant issue. There is a simple work around. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 18:52, 16 November 2016 (UTC)
of course it isn't a huge deal. this was just one of the only things about the platform we work on that was gratuitously, wonderfully, easy. it was aptly named. and now going away because a few developers huddled and found it inelegant. so yeah, i protest and yeah i know it is pointless. this is just yet another bump on the ugly tumor that is developer/editor relations here. Jytdog (talk) 10:41, 17 November 2016 (UTC)
I've spent far too many years developing software, so I have some natural sympathy with the devs wanting to rationalise how MediaWiki works (although I'd never admit that to them). But I will remind them that the work that they do is for the benefit of readers and editors, not to massage their own foibles. Anyway, I can see a real practical upside to the changes: When referring to an article in talk pages, other editors sometimes use a pubmed id, while I usually use the form "author year" but there's no quick way to make that linkable if its available via pubmed. I have to link via a url like this: Rothberg 2016 - a few of those in one post and the wikitext becomes clogged and unreadable. Optionally I can use a Magic Link: Rothberg 2016 (PMID 27751598), but that's much longer when displayed than I wanted, and again doesn't scale well. The new system will allow me to write [[pmid:27751598|Rothberg 2016]] which gives Rothberg 2016. The ability to pipe a pmid link is a nice improvement, in my humble opinion. --RexxS (talk) 19:22, 17 November 2016 (UTC)

AfD

An article has been nominated for deletion which may be of interest to members of this project. The discussion can be found at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Fulvic acid. -Ad Orientem (talk) 16:52, 17 November 2016 (UTC)


give opinion(gave mine)--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 22:10, 17 November 2016 (UTC)

Kava#Effects_of_consumption

Would anyone be willing to take a look at this section of this article? It is making some very bold claims about safety with what appear to be mainly old and/or primary sources. I'd do it myself but I've been short on time the last few months. Sizeofint (talk) 18:26, 15 November 2016 (UTC)

will look(beginning section[18])--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 13:18, 16 November 2016 (UTC)
Thanks, the sourcing is much improved. It's still using lengthy quotes but that isn't as serious a problem. Sizeofint (talk) 00:51, 18 November 2016 (UTC)
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