User talk:ImperfectlyInformed

Please comment on Talk:Optical Express

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About a gripe/criticism section; did not comment. II | (t - c) 00:44, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Fringe theories

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Broad or narrow application of WP:FRINGE; no consensus; I did not comment. II | (t - c) 00:44, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Public Relations Society of America

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Question about the use of a "controversy" section; I was much too late to comment. II | (t - c) 00:44, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Jaguar Cars

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Bleh, tediuos. Looks like they're working it out. II | (t - c) 05:10, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

Thank you

Thank you for writing to me with advice. It is rather stressful editing CAM topics and any suggestions in that minefield are always appreciated. I'm rather surprised at the amount of controversy it generates at WP; there is so much good research now on certain CAM interventions it would be hard to "sway" it one way or another. But, I will add there seem a bit of reluctance to add favourable reviews or when the evidence is inconclusive, loosely paraphrasing and stating "poor evidence". It comes off as overly critical and I object to straying too far from the language cited in the source. I learned about DN tonight (which would have saved me a few gray hairs and a round of hair dye) and do appreciate your help. I won't be shy to ask questions :) Cheers, DVMt (talk) 07:01, 3 March 2013 (UTC)

I actually don't know what DN is? II | (t - c) 08:11, 3 March 2013 (UTC)

I think it's for dispute content noticeboard. It was brought to my attention yesterday when matters get to a stalemate regarding inserting new content. DVMt (talk) 16:22, 3 March 2013 (UTC)

That would be WP:DRN, usually referred to as WP:DR/N. WP:DN goes nowhere. II | (t - c) 18:43, 3 March 2013 (UTC)

Indeed. Thanks for last night. Too much coffee and editing for too long are a bad mix for my health. Regards, DVMt (talk) 01:47, 4 March 2013 (UTC)

The moment you've been waiting for...

Research status on manual and manipulative therapy! I know your professional interest is in herbs and vitamins, mine is in manipulative therapy and acupuncture. There is a proposal to update the current section here [1] and your critical and balanced eye would be appreciated if you could find the time. Regards, DVMt (talk) 04:08, 8 March 2013 (UTC)

To clarify, my interest in herbs and vitamins is personal, not professional. II | (t - c) 00:44, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Traditional marriage

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Poorly-presented RfC closed. II | (t - c) 00:44, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for your welcome

Thank you for your welcome message and comments on the article talk page. I plan to start actually editing soon. I think I understand ref and cite well enough to make them work. --EllenCT (talk) 07:58, 11 March 2013 (UTC)

Voting results

Thank you for requesting the ArbCom voting results for Will Bebacks unblock appeal. ```Buster Seven Talk 06:42, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

You're welcome. Someone should have done it sooner. Exhaustion of remedies and so on. II | (t - c) 00:44, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the welcome; Forgive me if I should have replied on my talk page

Sorry, will be more careful about edit summaries from now on. I realize the article is getting pretty long (which is why I was tidied up some sections early as 111.69.155.164 before I remember I had this from ages ago - I don't suppose there's a way to add edits from an IP to one's account?). I try to be concise but for the legislative history people just hadn't been clear on why certain things were reconciliation and others weren't but I try and think 'does this bit add something that isn't already in.' It could probably be more concise, at the same time it was a complex process and I'm trying to elaborate enough to be clear (e.g. the House previously was all disjointed and unrelated whereas actually Rahm's suggestion, the abortion executive order, etc. were all related to reconciliation). — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sb101 (talk • contribs) 17:21, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

Oh, and I'll take a look at the filibuster stuff when I have time to see if I can help (no guarantees though =P) User: Sb101 Apologies for the multiple edits/messages; I also wanted to say nice to see another TNR reader (I think) - based on one of your reference earlier re: Pollack/experts endorsing bill =) Sb101 —Preceding undated comment added 17:27, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

Alas, not a regular TNR reader, just pulled that up during my Googling research. My politics newsfeed consists of my subscription to Bloomberg Businessweek plus RSS for federal actions (bills, exec orders, Federal Register, a couple committees, Secrecy News, Sunlight Foundation, etc). I added the Federal Regulations Advisor to my feed a couple days ago. I may look into TNR though, now that you mention it. II | (t - c) 17:41, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

Ah, well. The only person I read as much as TNR for political/policy analysis is Jonathan Chait (the rest of Nymag is not worth your time but this guy and TNR would be the places I strongly recommend). Just glanced at FAS - reminds of Scientific American (which certainly isn't a bad thing).

Also, I had a thought re: PPACA length: one could move 'Provisions by effective date' to a new page and put a link under the 'Provisions' subsection (in the overview area) - similar to Regulation of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. I don't know how to create a page so I won't be doing that. Besides, I'm preoccupied with a few related things (merging PPACA 4.2.4 + 4.2.5; and tidying 'Health insurance mandate' 1.3 + 'Contraceptive mandate (United States)' 1.1/1.2 ). One question I do have though, if you can help, is how much is it alright to delete? For example: PPACA 4.2.2 - I figure it makes sense to remove the party lines; I mean, one's right and one's wrong but we look to third party sources to verify which and those are the ones you'd quote in WP, right? Sb101 (talk) 18:23, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

As I mentioned in the PPACA talkpage, we're fast approaching the point where it makes more sense to not list the provisions by date but rather summarize by significance. As far as "who is right" and "who is wrong", we try to stay neutral as much as reasonable. Certainly, we have to use editorial judgment and filter out things that are just flat out wrong or misleading (or qualify them with a rebuttal) and we use our background knowledge and third-party sources to determine that, but if it is experts making legitimate arguments, we put both. It's often impossible to determine who is right or wrong without significant original research. Which sources to include is a contentious source of protracted dispute around here. I also think telegraphing where an argument comes from politically can be helpful to readers, but I imagine there's some stylistic reasons to disagree in certain cases. II | (t - c) 19:28, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

I strongly think it's a good idea to preserve the timeline of implementation, with all its details, and hence it's better just to move and link that section. We've already got a summary of significant provisions in the overview section. And I understand and agree about the neutrality bit (which I've tried to make sure my edits have been); I meant for working out credible sources for those trying to work out what's right and wrong. I ultimately left the bits about the parties (in that section) there, cause I agree about telegraphing. Also, I hope to go over the filibuster stuff at the end of the week (I've got two essays I'm working on so bit strapped for time) =) Sb101 (talk) 08:33, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

A kitten for you!

This kitten is about to trip over a garden hose and get a splinter stuck in its nose, causing unfathomable physical and emotional pain and suffering along with incalculable lost cuddle time. But thanks to your amazing work on Tort over the past weeks, including more than 14,000 bytes of expansion, it will know far more about the relief to which it is entitled! (If it could read.) Thank you! (Thanks also for your good advice on the IPO talk page :)

EllenCT (talk) 00:45, 4 April 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, you're the first person to comment on it. I'm keeping track of the hard work you're doing around here! I noticed that you disclose an interest in taxation - it took me a while to develop that interest. You and I may have to partner up sometime to fix some tax articles. II | (t - c) 01:23, 4 April 2013 (UTC)

Cool! Here are the tax-related sources I've been looking at, trying to figure out whether I can get any good edits out of them: [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], and [7]. It's kind of a hodge-podge, but the first three and last three both have a coherent underlying theme, sort of (neither of which are particularly uplifting, which is probably why I haven't turned them into edits yet, but some are just new.) EllenCT (talk) 04:22, 4 April 2013 (UTC)

I just did some edits over at Tax evasion in the United States. Right now my focus is more on offshore tax havens, so of those links, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists project on "Secrecy for Sale: Inside the Global Offshore Money Maze" is the most interesting to me. I haven't looked too much into Cyprus and the Tax Justice Network, but from what I've read in Bloomberg Businessweek Cyprus as a tax haven is a bit hyped. Cyprus Isn't Even Such a Big Offshore Bank Haven discusses this a bit. I trust BBW quite a bit. II | (t - c) 19:29, 11 April 2013 (UTC)

Talk:Aphthous stomatitis#Recent revisions harmful?

With respect, I now think that the point you raised was bogus, based on this line in core wp policy: (WP:Verifiability#Accessibility) "Other people should in principle be able to check that material in a Wikipedia article has been published by a reliable source. This implies nothing about ease of access to sources: some online sources may require payment, while some print sources may only be available in university libraries." Lesion (talk) 12:15, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

With all due respect, you think the line was bogus entirely because of some sentence you read in a policy somewhere? So previously you thought this was a legitimate concern, but now because of something you read, you don't? Does that mean that your independent thought is automatically superseded by that which is imposed upon you by an external force? That policy is not news to me; it has been around for a long time. But I've never seen an article quite so devoid of publicly-available sources in my time on Wikipedia (and an apparent disregard of such sources), nor have I seen an article which went to quite some length to remove all publicly-available sources and replace them entirely with sources which have very limited accessibility. There is a wide group of Wikipedia editors (as well as likely most users) who do not agree with the strict, closed-off view of Wikipedia. Accessibility has been the subject of numerous debates, but probably due to inertia and the lack of widespread use of inaccessible sources there hasn't been much move to change things. We are not writing Scholarpedia. We are writing Wikipedia, the encyclopedia anyone can edit.

Incidentally, have you ever heard of or seen Wikipedia:Jagged_85_cleanup? I was part of the group which discovered that he was negligently (and perhaps willfully) misrepresenting sources. The damage spreads to tens of thousands of edits, many of which were "referenced". Luckily, many of the sources were readily-available which greatly aided our ability to discover the fraud. He was eventually banned, but this happens all the time. In fact, I could easily argue that your work on this article also engaged in negligent misrepresentation, in that you put in the lead of the article that the disease affects "about 20% of the general population" which my questioning reveals is a number basically dropped out of nowhere by a random (published) source and should probably be attributed as the opinion of the author (WP:ATTRIBUTEPOV). Notably this number and the article does not even clarify as to whether this is lifetime prevalence for a given individual (most likely) or whether it is the number estimated to affect the population any given time. Just because something is published doesn't mean we throw it in an article. It requires editorial judgement to not toss around facts into Wikipedia which are not really factual. The power of Wikipedia is that it can make things which are untrue, true, by virtue of its widespread use and authority among the general public.

Also, if you had spent more time using reviews published in journals which were paywalled I wouldn't be as bothered. Cochrane reviews, although not immediately accessible, are much more accessible than dead-tree textbooks. They also tend to be more reliable at least in my experience, whereas dead-tree textbooks tend to be a bit more loose with the facts and somewhat remiss on footnoting their statements. II | (t - c) 12:34, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

Yes I thought it was a legitimate point, and I will still try to include as many pubmed central references as possible when re-working articles. Often they will be the first sources I look for and choose. However it is apparent that this is personal preference, a type of editing which does not need to be enforced on other editors. Did you notice how much of the article was based on the Cochrane reference, this is highest quality and freely available to all. I could have looked harder for freely available sources to include, as demonstrated by the sources you were able to add. I consider the reworking I carried out on that article to be the creation of a skeleton upon which future edits can now be more logically build upon. The headings now follow MEDMOS and several tertiary sources have been used to give the general frame of the topic. The criteria I used to remove the previous article's sources were not based at all on whether they were freely available or not, my decisions were based on MEDRS...Literally the only content we have not carried forwards is the stuff about Zinc, and I would like a secondary source to put that back in. I'm just respectfully pointing out that verifiability =/= accessibility according to core wp policy, because it seemed to me that you were not aware of that either by the nature of the comments. I get what you are saying about "closed off wikipedia", however you could also look at as a good thing, making esoteric and closed off scientific knowledge available to the mainstream. Making the inaccessible accessible.

Neville et al. is probably the most widely used oral pathology text in the US, which is where the 20% figure came from. I already stated that a source which gives an average incidence an explains the derivation of that figure would be an improvement, but in the mean time, I think that is a good source to use in addition to the slightly vague "5 - 60%" offered by Cochrane.

The use of textbooks is not a bad thing, as long as they are mainstream and good quality. I find they have the space to fully lay out a topic in all its detail, often this is not matched by a scientific paper. Also "dead tree" is inaccurate, since most of my textbooks are electronic =) The major textbooks in modern times tend to have "continually updated online content" and gimmicks like that...so they might not be as out of date as would have been the case a decade ago.

Overall I think I am just trying to say that the revisions were not harmful, and I don't see how anyone could think this version (before my fist edit) [8] (and later I tweaked things a bit and added tags highlighting the multiple remaining problems [9]) was better than what we have now. Lesion (talk) 13:11, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

I'm sorry about the harsh wording in my section title on that talkpage as it was likely an overreaction. Yes, I agree that the article is largely improved, and I don't want to be discouraging about the work you've put in, which I do appreciate. :) I also didn't mean to mislead you that my personal opinion represents policy. I know policy pretty well, and if accessibility to sources was required, yeah, that would be a big change. I personally often find things out in sources of limited accessibility and then search it out in a widely-accessible source, but that is just a personal practice. By the way, Cochrane is not freely-accessible to Americans, not that it is a big deal. Of facts in the previous version and not in the current version, I noticed that the previous version says 85% have fewer than 4 episodes per year whereas the current version which may be worth discussing. II | (t - c) 13:56, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Ugg boots trademark disputes

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Good job

I didn't envy the task of anyone attempting to write a summary of that discussion.[10] You did a commendable job. Fladrif (talk) 14:49, 25 April 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. I'm guessing you read it carefully and noticed that I have a crack at you in there, to follow-up on my original dig. I figured you weren't really in a position to complain. Do you have anything to say about that whole thing? Also, why prevent easy viewing of your talkpage conversations? (Extremely irritating to me.) Kiefer.Wolfowitz, who had similar issues with becoming emotional, found the following quote helpful:

“It is a wise thing to be polite; consequently, it is a stupid thing to be rude. To make enemies by unnecessary and willful incivility, is just as insane a proceeding as to set your house on fire. For politeness is like a counter--an avowedly false coin, with which it is foolish to be stingy."

— Arthur Schopenhauer, Wisdom of Life and Counsels and Maxims

In pulling this is up, I noticed that WP:CIVIL has a quote from Schopenhauer these days: "Civility is to human nature what warmth is to wax." II | (t - c) 15:18, 25 April 2013 (UTC)

I read it very carefully. I have no complaints about any aspect of the summary. I've made it pretty clear what I think about the "whole thing"; it would serve no useful purpose to embellish further. Fladrif (talk) 15:26, 25 April 2013 (UTC)

When I said "that whole thing", I meant my criticism of your behavior in particular, which you haven't commented on per se. I understand it is a sensitive subject and you are not required to discuss it. I used to have a temper/moodiness problem, which is reflected in my earlier Wikipedia attitude, so I sort of understand (and I still lose it every once in a while). I suspect mine was partly due to health issues (and perhaps age) and it resolved after I became better at cutting out gluten. II | (t - c) 15:50, 25 April 2013 (UTC)

• I meant to write as well to thank you for trying to bring some semblance of order or closure to that thread. It's frustrating to see a very simple request - for a public statement of Arbs' positions on the appeal - derailed in such dramatic fashion, although I suppose I should be used to it after 7 years on Wikipedia. Anyhow, thanks for your cogent summary and your efforts to refocus the discussion.

  On another note, I haven't been following your editing recently (or, I should say, I haven't seen your name popping up on my watchlist much), but I hope you're still active here. You've always been one of the more thoughtful and thought-provoking editors on medical topics. In fact, given our current dearth of clueful admins and editors, you should let me know if you think you'd like to run the gauntlet at RfA in the future. I'd be happy to support or nominate you. Either way, thanks for the statement and I'm glad to hear things are going better from the health perspective. MastCell ^Talk 16:08, 25 April 2013 (UTC)

• Thanks MastCell. There's certainly no one that I would rather be nominated by, so I may take you up on your offer at some point, although right now I'm trying to reduce the burdens on my time and focus more on improving my own personal situation. In theory, I spend my time where the marginal benefit is greatest (either for the cause I'm involved in, or myself), but in practice I'm controlled by my interests, which on Wikipedia has never really included administrative stuff. I don't think I've gone a month without an edit or two in several years, but up until the past few months I was pretty inactive but spent much of that time substantially building a personal knowledgebase (using ubernote.com, though evernote is the more common tool). In the last few months I've went on a small spree by adding numerous freely-accessible law review references to tort and contract and substantially improving a few other law-related articles (such as warranty, assignment (law), directors and officers liability insurance, investment banking, and some tax stuff). It's rather relaxing to work on law articles, where there's hardly anyone to bug you and the academic literature is in less flux!

  My latest spree of activity is actually related to a landmark health improvements. After my gut problems healed I still had major problems including (1) fatigue, particularly in the mornings, (2) back pain, (3) wrist problems (tendinitis or tendinosis). I woke up exhausted every morning and bought a device from Zeo, Inc. which told me I wasn't sleeping well. I had learned that valerian helped me sleep but a tolerance developed quickly, besides which I'm always after cures rather than ongoing treatments. After learning that I toss and turn a lot at night (making it difficult for the Zeo to even stay on), I discovered the clinical trial "Does valerian improve sleepiness and symptom severity in people with restless legs syndrome?" and while I have never experienced restless legs, I did find that periodic limb movement disorder was related to restless legs (both are treated similarly, and clinicians often observe that their standard dopaminergic therapies "augment" periodic limb movement disorder into full-blown restless legs syndrome; see PMID 8723377). I wasn't about to take a chance of augmentation or deal with that mess. Although the relationship between iron and these disorders had been hypothesized for decades (I believe), I wasn't too surprised to find in our remarkably dysfunctional system, the results are "mixed" (summarized in the 2012 practice guidelines with some dbRTCs reporting dramatic improvements and others none (because collaboration between disagreeing research teams in objective science is, of course, unheard of in the medical field). I knew my iron was low-normal. About a year ago I started popping an iron pill with vitamin C on an empty stomach, and by the end of a month and a half or so, I was sleeping like a baby. Haven't taken one since. With the wrist problem, I bought a Kinesis keyboard (a night and day difference). With the back problem, I had tied it to a mattress using Kovacs 2003, the only decent mattress clinical trial out there and still unreplicated. At first I got a memory foam pad for my terribly firm mattress but that only lasted so long. Since the objective firmness standard used in the Kovacs trial is basically not widely-recognized, even in the follow-up academic literature, I ended up just purchasing a knock-off sleep number bed a couple months ago. The result is amazing if you figure out the correct number, which appears to be similar for most people (mine is around 35, firmer than I had expected). The back pain industry is a great example of how modern medicine just completely misses the mark and causes enormous harm. I'm not saying that there aren't other causes of back pain, but these should only be looked at after the most obvious, low-hanging fruit is handled, which currently is practically ignored. I also spent some time on the board of a payer (a self-funded health trust), and tried unsuccessfully to convince my colleagues to take this direction with back pain. Meanwhile, we were paying out tons on MRIs (though sometimes rejecting payment on preauthorization grounds and telling the provider sue our insured instead) and back surgeries.

  Anyway, I don't see myself going back to editing medical articles as a focus anytime soon, but I am definitely continuing to watch it. In addition to my RSS feed to Eurekalerts, I monitor the American Society for Nutrition journals, NEJM, and JAMA. I suspect that medicine on Wikipedia these days may have too many rules associated with it for me to spend too much time on it. I've never been interested in focusing on perfecting a particular article, as that breaks my personal marginal benefit rule. Plus I have little interest in protracted debates. I'm more interested in getting into the details so I'm editing up my personal knowledgebase instead. Examine.com's project also has my interest: a wiki which is systematically building a clinical trial database (see e.g. the page on memory) and summarizing straight to the primary literature. There's some benefit to researchers not reinventing the wheel over and over again, each with their own little version of the primary literature. Building out a full clinical trial database, with effect sizes and even at some point participant demographic statistics included, has been a backburner project in my mind for a while to allow anyone to do a meta-analysis on the fly and play with the data. Of course it's way beyond my skills for the foreseeable future. I'm not involved with Examine.com at all and I'm not sure Examine.com is setting it up like that, but it's a good start. I would imagine that the Cochrane Collaboration might be trying to impose some structure on the data their reviewers are collecting, but if they are or are inclined to make this public, I haven't heard about it - then again I haven't dug into that topic lately. Medical research, academic publishing and clinical trial and have not changed much since the last time I did a little work on them, though, and that might be nice place to play near the middle between medical science and the more social science stuff I've been looking at lately. II | (t - c) 06:16, 26 April 2013 (UTC)

Clarification request

I have filed a request for clarification of ArbCom's decline of Will Beback's ban appeal. The clarification request is here. You are being notified as you recently participated in discussion of this ban appeal. MastCell ^Talk 18:30, 29 April 2013 (UTC)