Talk:Emergent virus

Editing assignment

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​My name is Aida Getachew, and I am a third year biochemistry student at Imperial College London. As part of my science communication module, I have selected this page to edit. This editing assignment will end by Friday 17th April 2020. Aida Getachew (talk) 13:09, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

Edit

Ok, I see that someone made Emergent Viruses a redirect to Virus and you're trying to deal with that, but making the main article be "Emerging viruses, the concept" makes no sense.

I put the latest version of the content back here in the Emergent Viruses article. I suggest you stick with editing this one, and if someone disagrees with the existence of it, they should nominate it for deletion and a debate can be had to see if there can be an article on this at all. Unless they do so, assume it's ok to have an article on this, and use the article name which makes the most sense, that being Emergent Viruses or Emerging Viruses, you decide. --Xyzzyplugh 01:37, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

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Citation Help

Hello! This article is in need of citations. I plan to help find sources to add, however, if anyone would like to help, that would be great! LPW22 (talk) 18:47, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

RE work in progress

@Aida Getachew: A couple of thoughts...

I'm wondering whether/how we can

- maybe frame/weight the Bat-man transmission content in a proportionate way (avoiding any perceived 'Gotham City bias' ;-)

- more clearly focus ===Influenza=== on the specific 'emergent virus' aspect and somewhat less on more general characterization (per the Influenza page).

Note (also to self :): I'm aware that the sentences giving examples of recent in the current lead is overloaded with technical links. Since some of the links might be usefully incorporated into the text further down the page,I've left them there for the moment. But I realize you may want to slim that part of the lead down in due course.

86.134.212.26 (talk) 13:43, 14 April 2020 (UTC) [Robin]

- I agree with your observation on Bat-man - I was thinking of maybe taking out the final paragraph about how bats can tolerate viruses (it's not that relevant), as well as mentioning that bats are in fact essential members of the global ecosystem

- I also agree with your second point, and I plan to take out the more general information on the influenza virus.

Thank you for your thoughts :) Aida Getachew (talk) 14:14, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

Thanks @Aida Getachew: Maybe also more mention of other relevant animal species under ==Zoonosis== (before introducing ===Bats=== as one particularly pertinent one)? I don't have any one-stop solution to suggest overall... Balancing large wikipedia pages is always one of the harder tasks, imo. I think it's helpful to bear in mind that wikipedia pages generally (perhaps apart from those that have reached Featured Article status) are always community works-in-progress. So, we're generally aiming to *improve* rather than arrive at a *perfect* finished product. And I think this page has definitely been improving overall (since your arrival :-) 86.134.212.26 (talk) 14:44, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

That's a good idea, I've just added a short sentence about other animals under ==Zoonosis==. And I agree, balancing Wikipedia pages is much harder than it sounds. Also, thank you! I appreciate that :) Aida Getachew (talk) 15:47, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

:-) It's a pleasure @Aida Getachew: Yes, it's certainly not straightforward to cover/balance all the various aspects of a broad topic such as this (pages with a narrower scope may be easier to approach), but at the same I think it can make for a rather rewarding experience. A key point is that the work you're putting in is genuinely improving and expanding the article (and it's worth remembering that it can leave a useful legacy for the future, both for wikipedia readers, and as a template for further development).

A sort of thought experiment that I think might be worth somehow exploring (and you may already have thought of something along these lines yourself :) is to take a couple of mental steps back and *scan* some of the more general recent literature on the topic (eg [1]) to get a feel for all the various aspects/dimensions of the topic (eg public/regional/global health impact, epidemiology, spread, etc; ecology, environmental health, climate change, industrial farming etc, all affecting animal-animal, human-animal, human-human contacts; transmission mechanisms; ...... etc, etc... varieties of disease, and ideally also [haha :] some sort of a broad historical / history of medicine perspective) that may be calling for some sort of consideration somewhere or other on the page. You may find that you're picking up on areas which you might not otherwise have immediately been drawn to... Then, maybe you (and any other interested editors...) can form a bird's eye view, or somehow echolocate, an overall skeletal picture of the page, however sketchy (content can always be relocated/rejigged and, if necessary, better contextualized/weighted), with the *key* points briefly touched upon in the lead. Whatever the practical limitations, you'll be leaving something organic as a real legacy. Just a thought, 86.134.212.26 (talk) 20:42, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

Definition?

I was wondering about perhaps merging the content of the ===Definition=== section with that of the lead section, just to avoid any repetition - what do you think? Aida Getachew (talk) 17:36, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

Yup, in a conceptual article such as this it's quite normal editorial practice to have a ==Definition== section after the lead. But I too have been thinking about the possibility of moving some of the content about 'newly-detected' viruses down from the lead into ==Definition==, or perhaps a ===Newly detected viruses=== subsection. At the moment that content is unsourced (I don't know if you happen to have some good, reliable sourcing to hand for that?). There's also a broader scope issue of how much this page (or perhaps Novel virus?) should be discussing newly-detected viruses, which *most* definitions probably wouldn't count as 'emergent' (FWIW, to me it feels like it makes good sense to illustrate briefly the general distinction). 86.134.212.26 (talk) 19:31, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

Adding: RE your query about "avoid any repetition": Actually the lead should (a bit like an abstract) provide a succinct lay summary of the overall content of the article. So, some overlap is normal. (In the present case, I don't think it would be appropriate to consider the fuzziness of the definition/s in the lead, which is why it feels right to me to have a brief ==Definition== section to point out the existence of the issue.) 86.134.212.26 (talk) 19:47, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

Okay, I've just moved down the 'Newly-detected viruses' content into ==Definitions==. I do think that it is necessary to keep this information in, as the difference between emergent and newly-detected viruses often goes over peoples heads. I'll add in the references for this content today. Aida Getachew (talk) 12:33, 16 April 2020 (UTC)

Just a heads up, I'll be making my final few edits today and tomorrow - the deadline for my editing assignment is 5pm tomorrow :) Aida Getachew (talk) 12:33, 16 April 2020 (UTC)

Yes Aida Getachew, I quite agree, and it would be great to have good sourcing of the general distinction.

The lead will ultimately benefit from a brief mention of both the newly-detected and the re-emerging ones. I think re-emerging virus should definitely be a redirect to this page, and *possibly* (for now at least?) newly-detected virus, though I think an expanded Novel virus page might ultimately be a better target for the latter. We also need a redirect for emerging virus (there's already one for 'emerging viruses'). For someone editing as a registered user (like yourself :), creating a redirect page (like this one) is quite straightforward, and if you you'd care to put these ones in sometime that would be much appreciated. Thanks, 86.134.212.26 (talk) 14:00, 16 April 2020 (UTC)

For now, I've created the section ==Emergent vs newly-detected viruses== and I will also briefly define newly-detected and re-emerging viruses in the lead section. I'll also try to figure out redirecting :) Aida Getachew (talk) 15:00, 16 April 2020 (UTC)

No problem :-) 86.134.212.26 (talk) 15:06, 16 April 2020 (UTC)