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Obesity disease status

Resolved

 – Thanks everyone, this is very informative and clear now. EllenCT (talk) 23:14, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

The American Medical Association recently reclassified obesity as a disease instead of simply a medical condition. Firstly, what is the status of obesity outside the US? Second question: why isn't a condition with deleterious consequences caused by other recognized risk factors always a disease to begin with? Is this just convention or is there a default definition? Disease seems to imply that obesity is certainly a disease. EllenCT (talk) 19:26, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

On your second question, according to this, it's more about knowing the etiology. Biosthmors (talk) 09:37, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

Aside from the popular perception of obesity as a comical trait, the status of "disease" very much depends on definition of the term. In general in the UK, obesity per se is not regarded as a disease—there are many obese people do not suffer ill effects and are not ill. Rather, obesity is regarded as a modifiable risk factor associated with a number of diseases such as metabolic syndrome and obstructive sleep apnoea.

I suspect that the reclassification by the AMA is due to a number of reasons, some of which may be political or economic in nature. Obesity is a growing problem (pardon the pun) in the USA and many other countries. By calling it a "disease", it draws more attention to the condition. This may have ramifications for the potential to draw funding for research into the condition and welfare for obese people. Axl ¤ [Talk] 09:48, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

The question isn't really whether it's a "disease", but whether it's "a" disease. It could be three or four of them (e.g., is "I love French fries" obesity really the same disease as "My thyroid is broken" obesity?). That's why knowing the etiology is important for declaring something to be a proper disease rather than a syndrome. WhatamIdoing (talk) 14:50, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

Regarding obesity related to hypothyroidism, I don't think that any healthcare professional would regard obesity in that context as a disease. Rather, it is a symptom or sign.

Hypertension is in a similar position to obesity. (Primary) hypertension typically does not have symptoms but it is a risk factor for several serious diseases (or complications?). On the other hand, "primary obesity" has traditionally been regarded as self-inflicted, thus eliciting little sympathy from healthcare professionals or from society in general. That attitude has slowly changed over the last decade or so, reflected by the change in the AMA's stance.

In any case, these issues are incidental to Wikipedia. Wikipedia's articles must reflect the dominant phrases in the literature. Axl ¤ [Talk] 18:44, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

Axl, you say primary obesity has "traditionally been regarded as self-inflicted". What other direct cause is there? While I accept there are indirect factors that lead to a "more energy consumed than expended" lifestyle and that solving a weight problem is far from trivial, I'm not aware of any new scientific understanding beyond "too much calorie-rich food eaten". I'm interested that one "expert" said this will put obesity on the "level of asthma", a disease with poorly understood environmental and genetic causes, no clear preventative measures, and for which nobody is considered individually responsible for their own condition to any degree whatsoever. -- Colin°^Talk 19:20, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

One very recent proposal is that obesity may be an infectious disease [see PMID 23235292 (warning: primary animal study) and PMID 20804522]. Of course this proposal is a long way from being widely accepted. Boghog (talk) 19:46, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Interesting research. The statement "obesity may be an infectious disease" is somewhat overstating the research though, which suggests it may be a factor for people who already each too much calorie-rich (high fat) food. The mice who ate a normal diet didn't get fat whether they had this germ or not. Unlike asthma, primary obesity is not only preventable but a treatable, albeit with difficulty. Like smoking cigarettes. Colin°^Talk 10:06, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Colin, of course obesity is due to an imbalance between calories eaten and calories expended. While it is easy to ascribe this to a combination of greed and laziness, perhaps it is not so simple. The sensation of hunger is an essential survival feature and it cannot be controlled—at least not in any reliable way other than by eating.

In general, traits are due a combination of genetics and environmental factors. 100 years ago, obesity was a rare trait in human societies. Genetic factors have not changed much in that time. In modern affluent Western societies, we often have a combination of sedentary lifestyle (such as office work), easy access to high calorie foods (such as those containing fats and refined sugars) and more disposable income with which to afford these treats. But our hunger instinct is genetically based on the paleolithic lifestyle when high calorie foods were rare and highly desirable for basic survival.

I'm not sure if the "expert" you refer to is supposed to be me. I am not an expert on obesity and I never claimed to be, although I do treat patients who have obesity, notably those with obstructive sleep apnoea. Axl ¤ [Talk] 18:19, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Template:Reliable sources for medical articles

Template:Reliable sources for medical articles generates this -

A robot has put this template on the talk pages of many health articles. The goal behind this was to give users who visit the talk pages of health articles a recommended search which would assist them in finding appropriate scholarly articles which they could use to develop the Wikipedia article. The template does a search in a United States government health database, and the search is for the article's name.

Previous discussion of this template happened in the following places:

• Here on the WikiProject Medicine Board - Archive 34 - A link from the talk page to evidence
• At Wikipedia's Village Pump Archive 103 - Proposal to add a template to medical article talk page

Blue Rasberry (talk) 20:18, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Um, actually a bot put a different template on talk pages, and the template given above (as well as the discussion added to the introduction) contains the adjustments made after the discussion below. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:05, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Considering the Trip database

why is this happening? This Trip database identifies primary sources ... why are we encouraging new editors to source incorrectly? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:44, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Can someone explain a) where it came from, b) why we are encouraging the use of primary soures, and c) how I can get that bot to not visit TS talk? [1] SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:52, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

It does seem a little self defeating to have a banner advising MEDRS which gives one of the suggested links for sources to a repository that lists both primary and secondary sources. I followed the link from another page [2], and Cochrane Reviews do seem to be displayed first, but lower down in the results there are primary sources. There is a side menu on the right with options to narrow the search results to systematic reviews etc. Maybe the link could point to one of these narrowed search results, as the links in template giving PubMed search results do above. Nice template btw not sure who made it, but thanks for going to the effort. Now we just have to hope that people will read the talk page before adding their primary source ... =D well might dissuade some people anyway. Lesion (talk) 17:04, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

The discussion happened on this talk page in May. I think it's an awesome idea and a great template. Thank you all concerned. But I also agree with Sandy that we should be pointing to reviews, meta-analyses, etc. and not primary sources. Is it possible to tweak the TRIP link as Lesion suggests? --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 17:21, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Not sure what others are seeing, but for me the Trip results are pre-sorted in decreasing order of evidence quality. That seems to be exactly what we want: to find the best available evidence that relates to the topic. We might narrow it to publications in the past five years as with this. A few cautionary words in the Trip discussion might be worthwhile, but I don't see a fundamental problem.LeadSongDog come howl! 18:24, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

The first 50 results on my test search were all secondary. Fifty-one onwards RCTs start popping up. It's still awesome. Really thank you. But if it were possible to eliminate primary sources altogether, that would be super awesome. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 18:46, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Does this look better? The categoryid list seems to enumerate the article types to include. Some experimentation will clarify what each of those values means. LeadSongDog come howl! 20:14, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Yep. I looked at the first 120 and they were all secondary from 2012 & 2013. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 20:26, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

I think the template is great, and it is probably one of the best ways of encouraging wise editing. I have nevertheless noticed that in the case of Huntington's disease it makes a strange thing saying potentially useful sources of information about Huntington%26%2339%3Bs+disease . I suppose it will not be the only case. Can it be fixed?--Garrondo (talk) 20:23, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

• I agree with SandyGeorgia that this system has problems and will give primary sources sometimes but the intent is to standardize a process which will usually send people to good sources. Anyone who is willing to start at Trip and do research is someone that I would assist guiding if they had trouble understanding MEDRS. I would love to hear more criticism if others have any. I like this template but would like all problems with it documented. I am posting a link to this so that the problems Sandy and Garrondo found will be recorded. Here is the template's talk page - Template talk:Reliable sources for medical articles. Blue Rasberry (talk) 20:30, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Why is this thing being installed by bot, and does anyone know how to make the bot STOP ??? I don't have time to sort it ... but this seems to be another chapter in the Build An Encyclopedia Via Bot While Making Editorial Decisions By People With Brains Harder and Harder. I do not want this misleading info on talk pages of articles I edit; if someone wants to deal with primary sources on another article, or if the list for a particular article is sound, they can install it on talk-- why is it being done with automated tools? The links for the articles I primarily edit are not generally articles we should be encouraging new editors to use, and it is not hard to see that this blanket referral of articles will lead to problems with new editors who use sources inappropriately. Again, those who want to deal with that can and should by adding the link, but will someone PLEASE stop the bot (preferably the person who started it)-- this should not be an automated task. Editorial discretion should be used. The template is labeling frequent primary sources (simply because free full text is available) as sources we should be using ... I can't wait to deal with new editors on that. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:25, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

If it's just the Trip link that is causing concern, would it be sensible to remove that link from the template rather than stop the bot doing this task. The PubMed links seem OK to me, and suspect with some tweaking the Trip link could work the same. Lesion (talk) 22:34, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

It's not the only one causing concern-- the PubMed links are going to anything that is free full text even when not reviews, and in every case I have checked is returning sources that shouldn't be used, or returning nothing. The concern is that a bot should not be adding this to talk pages ... it should be a matter of editorial discretion. We should not impose bad sources on talk pages in an automated fashion-- it will cause problems with new editors who push a POV, or don't understand DUE weight, or don't know how to correctly weigh sources. This Is A Bad Idea. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:37, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

There's no absolute reason we should discourage new editors from editing say, a FA or a GA ... any given user has as much a right to approach such an article as a neglected stub. A banner of advice about sourcing policy could be argued to be more needed on pages that are likely to attract edits based on primary sources ...

Having said that, (whoever made this template) are the links functioning as intended on all pages, and if not, could this be fixed at all ? Lesion (talk) 22:40, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Where did I say my concerns were limited or restricted to FAs or GAs? I am seeing this on every article I edit. The advice is wrong; it is listing sources are useful only because they are free full text available ... which has nothing to do with ... anything. The question is, why is this being installed by bot? If some editors determine the links are appropriate for some articles, they can add them. They are not appropriate for the articles I edit, and since they are being installed based on a transclusion of an infobox, my next recommendation will be to remove the blooming infoboxes which force us to link to inaccurate information anyway. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:46, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

It seems to me that the chances of anybody actually using those templates are pretty low. When I try to visualize the sort of person who would click on that link and then systematically start reading things in order to improve our article, I come up empty. So it seems to me that all of this is kind of moot -- we're really just cluttering the talk page with more stuff that nobody will look at. Looie496 (talk) 22:51, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Okay so I started this template. Consensus for it was developed on this page as linked above. TRIP database shows secondary sources first (they are in green and they label these as secondary sources). I am sure we can get rid of the primary source if people wish. Pubmed does a good job of linking to secondary sources. If you are seeing stuff that is not secondary sources in these pubmed links please let me know. Discussion for improvement can occur here as well Template_talk:Reliable_sources_for_medical_articles

Yes there is not going to be free content for every search. But not everyone has access to full no free sources and thus why it was added. Sorry about the strange text in the name. I have fixed it by changing PAGENAMEU to PAGENAME.

With respect to building an encyclopedia by bot these edits are not being made to the main space of any article and they of course never will be. This is simply to help editors find sources. All content edits still require humans.

What we link to can be adjusted. Is it a bad idea to try to direct people to high quality searches for evidence? I fo not think so. This is better than a google search which would otherwise be the default. Nowhere in the evidence box does it say that an editor can through away their brain and just use whatever is provided blindly. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 23:00, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

By the way template does not properly handle apostrophe's in article titles. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 00:15, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

The out-of-place apostrophe in your comment is amusing.  :) -- Scray (talk) 01:52, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes and I do not use them properly either :-) We have the ability to just show secondary source at TRIP. I have update the template so that it ONLY lists secondary sources here [3]. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 05:08, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I disagree with SandyGeorgia and Looie this time: the template even if not 100% perfect in the sources it points out, can be a good start point for interested users. Moreover, it has the advantage that it gives a link to MEDRS at every medical talk page, and also says how to find potentially useful (bolded mine, but maybe there is a way to remark that they are only potential). I would say that damage the template can bring is minimal, whereas benefit still has to be seen (although as Looie says it will probably not be huge).--Garrondo (talk) 06:34, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Have bolded "possibly useful" to decrease potential confusion. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 06:49, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

This seems to be a case of throwing out the baby with the bath water. While imperfect, I think the advantages of this template outweigh the disadvantages. It is important to note that the template also includes a link to relevant review articles listed in PubMed before the Trip link. As already mentioned several times above, ideally the Trip link should also be filtered to return only review articles. Boghog (talk) 08:15, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Has already been changed to ONLY show secondary sources as per the request here. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 08:22, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Opps, sorry. I obviously didn't read the entire thread. The major shortcoming of the template now appears to be fixed. Thanks for taking care of this. Boghog (talk) 08:29, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for, at least, the correction to remove the primary sources from the list (which was a surprising oversight that leads to concern about how many experienced eyes are following WT:MED these days). Using a bot to recommend sourcing is still sub-optimal for a multitude of reasons I don't have time to outline today, but which I am certain editors will experience once the university term starts. This discussion was split to my talk page: [4] At minimum, I do not want automation taking over on talk pages where real brains, real eyes, and real editor discussion is needed, and anyone who thinks POV pushers and unknowledgeable students won't use these lists to advantage has perhaps not spent enough time editing articles where same dominate. Please stop the bot addition to talk pages and allow those editors who can ascertain that the list is useful to manually install the template on talk pages of articles they watch. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 11:20, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

If students and POV pushers started using secondary sources exclusively it would allow more productive conversations to begin a lot earlier. Doubt it will solve the issues with students by any means as they have mostly revolved around plagiarism and misrepresentation of sources. WP:MEDRS already recommend source types and the links we are providing is to sources that potentially meet MEDRS requirements. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 11:30, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

More to the point, where were the knowledgeable eyes on WP:MED issues when a template was designed and installed via automation that was recommending primary sources on talk pages? I am glad that part is fixed, and hope my point is made-- this has taken unnecessary time and is something that I am quite surprised to see no one picked up on earlier. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 11:45, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

IMO it is precisely for articles where students and other people without prior knowledge on wiki policies where it is specially interesting: as I have already said, it both provides them with a link to MEDRS and a link to some sources which in average are of far higher quality than those they usually use when they end up here. I would say however that it will be specially useful in the less developed (and less watched) articles, since it is in them in which it is harder to check refs but I neither find any convincing argument to think it will be harmful.--Garrondo (talk) 11:47, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

The secondary sources all came before the non secondary sources. And each were marked clearly by what type of source they were. The reference box gave no guarantee that the sources linked to could be used without the application of proper editorial judgement and it still dose not. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 11:51, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Have the primary sources been removed now, or not? The template language still indicates they are there:

For a list of review articles from the last 5 years at PubMed, click here (limit to free articles or to systematic reviews)

Part of the problem was that the inclusion of "free articles" resulted in primary sources. If that has been addressed, the template text is wrong. If it hasn't been addressed, we still have a problem. The language (and the "or") is confusing ... is it reviews only? Is it reviews "or" free full text (which was the problem before that yielded primary sources). Please clarify the text. Also, since the template was not subst'd, will the corrected text show on articles, or does the bot need to fix them all? <groan> ... In addition to the problem of "who is minding the store" these days, since no one apparently noticed during the bot test that we were recommending primary sources on article talk pages. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 12:00, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

From what I understand it has been fixed and language is correct: now you can choose to see all kind of reviews, only free reviews (systematic or not), or only systematic reviews (free or not). --Garrondo (talk) 12:10, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

if that is the case, then perhaps someone will correct the template wording: I attempted a fix, but the text is now redundant. If we have removed free articles that were not reviews, the wording needs to reflect that. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 12:13, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Per "Part of the problem was that the inclusion of "free articles" resulted in primary sources" I do not see any "none review articles" when I click on this. These are free articles that are reviews articles and are from the last 5 years. It has always been like this. This click has NEVER yielded primary sources.

Per "since the template was not subst'd, will the corrected text show on articles". Um this is a template. It does not need substitution. Any change we make in the main template automatically flows everywhere it exists. This means we can change the wording in one spot and it is changed on all pages. I am happy to adjust the wording to clarify it. Just wanting to keep the template from getting to long. Suggestions appreciated.

Per "we were recommending primary sources on article talk pages" We were never recommending primary sources. All the secondary sources were clearly marked and the template specifically links to WP:MEDRS which emphasis that we should use secondary sources. The TRIP link has been FIXED to reduce this small amount of room for error. And this correction has rolled out automatically to every talk page on which this exists being that it is a template. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 12:20, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I agree with SandyGeorgia that this tool is bad and has lots of problems but it is also the best that the entire world and the entirety of all work done by all of humanity has to offer. Some people at the National Institutes of Health - an organization which is not involved in this and which has no official relationship to this - volunteered their time away from work to develop this project as an experiment to check the public's interest in accessing available medical resources, so I feel that there is some good will and respectable guidance in this project from beyond this board. This is not supposed to be the solution to fix the problem of access to information, but it is supposed to be a step towards identifying the best way to help users find sources for this project's 20,000 articles. I am not convinced that this tool providing easier access to scholarly articles is going to result in an increase in the ratio of bad contributions to good contributions, even if many times the articles shared through these links are inappropriate for Wikipedia. However - SandyGeorgia's argument is valid and we do not have the ability to predict what could happen, and this could result in a surge of bad content being added. My opinion that this is worth an experimental run, and that we would notice if people starting saying things like, "I followed the link, so anything I found is appropriate to add to the article." I would like to see the day come when all governments and all research organizations feel an obligation to provide the public and taxpayers with the medical information which all people have a right to access, but that day is not here and I am willing to make compromises to get a little problematic access when the alternative is restricting access more than we must. I really, really, appreciate SandyGeorgia's criticism and I would like anyone else with concerns to state them as best they can. Ideas for what kinds of links might be appropriate to share - or saying that none at all are appropriate - would be most welcome feedback. Blue Rasberry (talk) 12:28, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I already deal with "I found it on pubmed and it is peer review therefore you must let me use it" when they are talking about a "12 petri dish study" they are trying to use to support that X cures cancer. If people started with a review article from the last 5 years at least we could than begin discussing how to best paraphrase the content in question and balance it with other high quality sources. Maybe we could develop some more excellent editors to make up for the many who have faded away over the years. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 12:39, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Judging the impact of this proposal

Additionally we will be looking at the number of the TRIP link generates so we can determine if anyone uses them. If the answer is "no one" than of course we can pull them. I however sort of like having a link to WP:MEDRS on every article talk page. I know I post it on enough IPs talk pages. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 12:24, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Disagree with the view that this kind of thing clutters the talk page. I like the templates on the talk page, and the more the better. It sets the tone for behavior on the talk page not being a forum, and give a professional feel to each page. The support by the wikiprojects, the assessments, and now links to potential sources for their research... It all has the potential to encourage new users to see what wikipedia is all about and how they can get involved. Visit a page with minimal talk page headers etc and you will often see the discussion in a poor state. For me, the first thing I do when looking for new sources is go to pubmed, enter the search term and then filter for reviews, so I will probably be using these links regularly considering they do exactly that. The restriction on sources from the last 5 years also removes temptations for people with MEDDATE issues. Lesion (talk) 12:36, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm glad things are advancing here (tip of the hat to Blue Rasberry's reasoned post above), but anyone who thinks "last five years" works in many/most cases perhaps hasn't had the pleasure of dealing with student editors on obscure stubs like klazomania. As rasberry points out, we'll need to see the consequences of this template in practice, and we will likely see it once the next university term starts On the articles I edit, the links are not helpful. As another example of the drive for automation (where our infobox forces us to link to articles with known inaccuracies), I hope editor knowledge and discretion and discussion are not replaced by automation and bots. Editors knowledgeable in given topics know the best sources: if we see issues as a result of these lists, I hope we will adjust (although in my experience, once something automated like an infobox is installed, it is difficult to gain consensus to remove them no matter the issues and inaccuracies). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 12:49, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I think this template is useful (sorry Sandy!) as it does what MEDRS advises wrt a PubMed search for recent reviews on the subject. If the students I've run across had used this, they'd have got off to a better start. The Trip results for Asperger returns a case study as the first result so something's not quite right there. Although the template might be lost within the other talk page template clutter, it is something we could point newbies at to help them with their first sourcing queries. I don't see the bot addition of this template as nearly as bad as the bot-automated edits of article text. The problem doesn't seem to be in the queries the links execute (which are the sort of queries we recommend). Human brain is required to review the query results. Sandy, if you were advising someone to read the literature for TS, isn't the suggested PubMed search a good place to begin? -- Colin°^Talk 13:09, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

To Sandy: for me, MEDDATE is probably the most flexibly interpreted aspect of MEDRS. Agree last five years is sometimes difficult, but rarely impossible, related to the nature of the subject and how much research interest there has been in it. I will not remove a secondary source that is not too far outside 5 yrs old if it is doing a good job and I can't be bothered/can't find a more modern source. I would move that MEDDATE becomes more of an ideal target rather than an absolute inflexible rule, and maybe increase to 10 years to help on the topics with fewer reliable sources ... but I've seen how hard it is to get any changes to MEDRS. When you mention inaccuracies in infoboxes, do you mean links like emedicine? As I understand it, not all fields in the infobox have to be populated... can just remove a particular link and leave an explanation on the talk page as to your reasoning. "Editors knowledgeable in given topics know the best sources" whilst sounds perfectly logical, to me has hints of article ownership. Highlighting sourcing policy on the talk page for anyone who visits that page is a good thing... as pointed out above, better a well meaning editor uses these links than google.

To Colin: PubMed marks "a case report and review of the literature" as a review. Also occasionally it will not mark a review paper as a review. This is more issues with PubMed, or how journals supply metadata about their publications I think. Lesion (talk) 13:21, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes, but that doesn't seem to be the case here. The link Case study of man with Asperger syndrome highlights impact of late diagnosis and lack of intervention on risk of offending doesn't seem to work but this seem to be the same thing. Which is a blog post regarding this paper: Asperger syndrome and arson: a case study. So a blog about a case study. No review in sight. Colin°^Talk 13:54, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Weird... hopefully things like that won't be too common... Lesion (talk) 14:04, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

The site in question also states "In addition to the case study, the authors also briefly summarise the literature in relation to ASD and offending. From this review and the reflection on the case study, they conclude that late diagnosis and consequent lack of intervention can increase the risk of offending" But would still say not a great source. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 14:23, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

@Colin: No need for apologies-- the editors I befriend are typically those who aren't afraid of disagreement :) :) Yes, when I viewed the first links, there were many inaccuracies, errors, primary sources-- unaware if all have been corrected yet. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:29, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

@Lesion: By inaccuracies in infoboxes, I am referring mostly to Medline, although there are others. When infoboxes are forced upon articles, at least we should retain the editorial discretion to remove parameters that contain known inaccuracies in individual instances (in line with our WP:EL guideline-- why should that guideline not apply to infoboxes?), but that is often hard to do. I could give a list of everything wrong here. The concern is that automation and automatic editing is replacing knowledge, discussion, and discretion, and that has been a factor in infoboxes, use of automated tools, numerous other concerns across Wikipedia.

On the five years, in the topic area I edit, it is often necessary to go much older than that to find a review.

On the issue you raise of "own", we routinely weigh the quality of sources (impact factor of the journal, known biases and criticism of authors or obscure journals, and many other factors). We shouldn't replace discussion, discretion and knowledge with automation. We will see how this works in practice once the new university term starts. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:34, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

When I click on the TRIP link for autism I get NICE followed by 14 Cochrane reviews all from the last 3 years, AHRQ, DARE and than more Cochrane reviews. Yes there is an error in the Asperger's search. Nothing is perfect. The rest of the sources provided look fairly decent though. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 13:32, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

We could have a year parameter within the template so that people can stipulate how many years they wish it to go back. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 13:48, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

You need a longer signature, James, with "* Doc James is not responsible for erroneous query results on external websites" :-) -- Colin°^Talk 13:57, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

=D Lesion (talk) 14:04, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

The usefulness of these links will depend upon the topic. Pick a big issue and you will get lots of good stuff, but pick something obscure and you might not get anything at all due to the filters. Continuing the example above, the first pubmed link yields only 4 hits. Re. the 5 yr limit, might be good include a link with no date restriction, agree, but would be good to link "in the last 5 years" to MEDDATE maybe? Or too many wikilinks already ... To further address the concerns, maybe tweak the wording "Here are links to possibly useful sources of information about" to "Here are some automatically generated links to sources that may be useful" or something. Lesion (talk) 14:04, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Feel free to adjust yes. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 14:24, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Another thought, instead of having the link to search results with free full text, is to link to the resource requests page, if people are paywalled out of the best sources this is a good link for them to know about. Wikipedia:WikiProject Resource Exchange/Resource Request. Lesion (talk) 15:26, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

In the last 10 days there have been 82 referrals from these links to TRIP. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 16:21, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Back to basics - discussion of simple infoboxes

(tangent from above discussion) Nothing wrong, imo, with a minimalist infobox like this: angular cheilitis. ICD-10 and 9 codes only. Of course, in this example there are no other fields included simply because no-one has included then rather than there being any identified inaccuracy in the links. Lesion (talk) 15:29, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

There's loads wrong with that infobox. And I've raised this before at WPMED. 99.99999% of our readers couldn't give a **** about ICD or MESH codes and will not benefit from following the links to them or to eMedicine, etc, which nearly all fail our EL policy. And all this irrelevant crap is at the top of the page as important as the lead sentence and lead image. I'd be happy with a lead captioned image and move everything else to somewhere collapsed at the bottom of the page. Colin°^Talk 14:30, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

(after ec) Ditto-- there are mountains of problems in the infobox links forced upon us, they usually fail EL guidelines, but when I've attempted to get them removed in the past, some editors have argued they are useful in spite of the inaccurate info. (Frustration over this kind of brainless automation that impacts article quality has boiled over for me to this issue of Sources by Bot over Brains, which is also a current issue in an ArbCom case-- that technically minded editors are prevailing over those who actually know sources and build content is likely to be the last straw for me in here ... I take great care with accuracy and nuance in articles, only to find my work undermined by technical issues like faulty infoboxes and now an automated search which may return dubious results depending on the article and would be better employed by real editors rather than bot.) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:55, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Being encyclopedic is not [always/necessarily] the same as writing what readers want? As to the placement, I think infoboxes tend to go in the lead on most wikipedia pages. Perhaps you are describing an encyclopedia wide issue more than something confined to this wikiproject? E.g. pages on chemicals are particularly bad for this kind of thing, Potassium chloride. The links to emedicine etc could be moved to the EL section where arguably they belong, and where ELNO would apply to them as well (and therefore lead to their not being listed at all) ... I've not thought of this before and it seems wrong, but that is probably just because I'm used to seeing that stuff in the infobox. Infobox doesn't really bother me, it's pretty iconic of most wikipedia pages and gives a professional look again imo... Lesion (talk) 14:51, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Perhaps ??? LOL ... for sure ... please see WP:RFAR-- infoboxes have been the source of dissension and editors being chased out of here for years, and have finally boiled over to an arb case-- where curiously, classical music editors are being targeted, while some haven't even noticed that many of us medical editors hate them as well for even more serious reasons. Sorry we have gotten off on an infobox tangent here, but it is the same issue-- are we editing by brain or by bot in here? The technical-minded editors (who don't typically build content) have been successful in forcing their views upon those who do build content, do know sources, and do recognize problems that occur because of automated and automatic editing, via things like automatic links in infoboxes. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:00, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

That insanely long infobox on Potassium chloride gave me the idea that we could make the ICD codes into a collapsible section in the infobox? Lesion (talk) 14:53, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

please don't-- that just masks the problem. Some editors (@Eric Corbett:) have tried to compromise with intransigent technical-minded editors by allowing collapsible sections in infoboxes, but collapsible text is contraindicated by WP:MOS for accessibility and mirror reasons. It's not a good practice to hide something that is not useful-- it's better to eliminate it. The compromise of collapsing infobox info was forced upon some articles as a compromise, but it just masks the problems-- another problem being that infobox info is often uncited, often WP:UNDUE, and often inaccurate. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:04, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Just throwing ideas around. It didn't occur to me before that infoboxes were a source of problems. Sure I noticed emedicine gave some weird info on one occasion. So, I sense that some people would want the infobox reduced to an image and a caption, with no following ICD codes etc or ELs. Since the title of the infobox is mostly the same as the title of the page, may as well scrap that too... then you are left with just an image and a caption ... so basically there would be reason to have an infobox at all, and instead just have an image embedded in the lead.

I agree that in some cases the ELs in the infobox might be inappropriate and fail ELNO... and maybe they should be in the EL section if they are included at all.

I disagree that ICD codes should go entirely. This is an attempt at an international standard and we should give this info to be encyclopedic. Potentially they could be moved somewhere else in the page, but I think a collapsible section in the infobox is a valid option. Don't see why mirror sites should discourage this (I thought we didn't like mirrors anyway?). Lesion (talk) 15:26, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I would imagine an infobox to contain information in the line of that listed on Template:Infobox medical condition, i.e. short bits of information about the subject of the article. External links should indeed go under external links (personally I found those links to be very useful when most wikipedia articles were little more than stubs, nowadays it is rare for them to provide much more information than wikipedia itself, especially in the case of medlineplus). --WS (talk) 15:33, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I am generally in favor of the infobox we have for diseases even though most were created before I arrived. Emedicine is sometimes useful and easily accessible even though it has issues. Pubmed is not always right but is easy to read. ICD codes help structure content as does MeSH. It is not like we have huges amount of content in these boxes. I do not think attempting to summarize the article in a infobox is either a good idea or possible. Most conditions have many causes, treatments and preventions. These are all nuanced discussions that are not properly summarized in a couple of words. Numbers and links fit well in boxes prose does not. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 15:42, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

The MeSH and ICD codes often verify the names of the condition in question.Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 15:47, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

(edit conflict) :FWIW, I'm another of the small minority of users who likes to be able to consult ICD and MeSH from a standardized place in the article. I'd argue that: we make articles for the widest possible range of users; the information is genuinely encyclopedic; it doesn't take up much space. Quite where in the page it should appear is another matter. Personally, I share many of the concerns expressed above about compulsory infobox entries based on unnecessary [5] metadata priorities over content and presentation. 86.161.251.139 (talk) 15:53, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

A few quick thoughts:

• WP:External links does apply to links in infoboxes.
• Emedicine (and Medline) links were moved to the infobox a few years ago on the grounds that they were wanted in most articles, and that this was an efficient place to stick them. The location is especially helpful if it means that the article need not contain a spam-bait section labeled ==External links== at all. If they aren't wanted in particular articles, the correct solution is complete removal, not moving to the ==External links== section. I would expect that they aren't wanted now for most well-developed articles, and that they are wanted for most stub- and start-class articles.
• Some of our readers are specifically looking for ICD codes. I've seen them requested on talk pages when they weren't present. Also, it's handy for some of our translation efforts.
• Collapsing two lines in an infobox (the ICD-9 and ICD-10 codes) isn't going to save you much space, but it is going to create WP:ACCESS problems for readers with disabilities. The "compromise" of collapsing infoboxes is IMO a bad and discriminatory compromise. Either have one or don't, but don't have one that only some users are able to view. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:56, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
  • I mostly agree with WhatamI, and point out that the MedlinePlus article on TS is *awful* [6] and made worse by the fact that many letters have been written to the NIH (or NIMH? I frequently mix them up) advising of the inaccuracies which have stood for ... I dunno ... maybe ten years ? I think most of our infobox issues could be solved by allowing editor discretion in infobox links and avoiding automation. If links in an infobox aren't adding content beyond what is already in the article, or breach ELNO, or have known inaccuracies, editors should be able to come to consensus to delete those links. In the past, consensus overruled whenever we attempted this. The problem with infoboxes isn't the box per se, but when editor discretion, discussion and consensus is disallowed in the interest of standardization and automation. I don't mind the ICD codes, but I sure do mind linking to articles with known and easily demonstrable inaccuracies after I've carefully and with nuance added correct text to an article (no, tics are not uncontrollable, no credible TS researcher would use that terminology; no GTS did not first describe Tourette's; the "gene has not been found?", no credible researcher doubts that TS will be found to be polygenic, and on and on ... how dumbed down does the writing have to be? It is dumbed down to the point of inaccuracy.) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:38, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
    • I don't recall seeing any bots adding Medline or Emedicine links. Have you got a diff handy? If so, we might want to have A Talk with a bot operator. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:16, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I think what was suggested was that simply because there are fields in the template then editors may feel obliged to fill them regardless of the qualities of the EL. Not so much automation but "automatic" editing by living editors. I've never seen a bot fill out an infobox either, but I could be wrong. Lesion (talk) 21:52, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Pretty sure that there are bots populating {{Infobox City}} and its kin from online gazetteers. Conversely, Wikidata is systematically harvesting data from infobox parameters. If there is bad data likely to go in, it may be better to populate it with a hidden comment such as <!-- Please leave this parameter blank, per talk page discussion of 32 August 2099 --> in order to discourage bots and humans from thoughtlessly filling in a problematic value.LeadSongDog come howl! 22:25, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

All, I'm not (yet) an active member of this community, but I feel compelled to chime in for a couple of reasons. First, I lead a small team that maintains User:ProteinBoxBot, a bot for maintaining infoboxes on gene and protein pages ({{GNF_Protein_box}}), and second, I recently proposed starting a similar initiative for disease infoboxes. I'm very much in favor of clearly indicating corresponding identifiers (ICD, MeSH, etc.) because it unambiguously establishes what topic the article refers to. (To take an extreme example from our gene/protein work, 9 different genes have at one time or another been referred to as "PAP", including MRPS30, PAPOLA, and PDAP1, so noting the exact gene and protein identifiers is important.) However, our bot definitely respects {{nobots}}, and I would expect that any other bots working on disease infoboxes should as well? Is this a solution that has been tried for cases where humans want to override the general rule? Cheers, Andrew Su (talk) 22:56, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm not sure that you'd want a general nobots as the solution, since the anti-vandalism bots might respect it inappropriately. But the more relevant point is, the links that are problematic don't seem like the links that any bot would ever be adding. ICD or MeSH codes work in all languages and provide basic data about the subject. An eMedicine article is just an online article from a more or less decent English-language website. Adding that by bot would be akin to using a bot to add external links from some charity's website. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:07, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Got it, on that point you'll get no disagreement from me. Of the ones currently listed as parameters for {{Infobox disease}}, I would not object to dropping eMedicine, DiseasesDB, and GeneReviews. I'd be open to being convinced otherwise, but those are links that I don't recognize as being authoritative sources... Cheers, Andrew Su (talk) 00:13, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Add medlineplus to that list as well; emedicine and genereviews could be appropriate for the external links sections in many cases, diseasesdb and medlineplus I think could go away completely (Would be nice to have a bot migrating all the id's from the infoboxes to wikidata, so all hard work on adding these links is not lost, whether it is decided to keep them or not). --WS (talk) 07:19, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

I think we need to be careful to not allow these differences of opinions regarding infoboxes to over-shadow the much larger issue facing WP:MED. Here we are more than 12 years out and less than 1% of all medical articles have passed peer review (196 out of 26,350). The number of new GAs/FAs in the last 6 months is 4 or 5 with a couple of them only tangentially related to medicine. A number of previous GAs/FAs, while they retain the title, have fallen out of date and additionally would no longer pass current criteria due to extensive primary sourcing. While readership is amazing and growing I would not call the quality of our content a rousing success. The number of people actively editing medical content remains small and efforts to recruit have as of yet had limited positive impact (with certain efforts having a negative one). Anyway chronic obstructive pulmonary disease is poor quality so back to work... Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 01:43, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

We just have to hope that Wikidata will take away a lot of maintenance work from the editors thereby freeing up their time for actual article work. A lot of things like categories and templates could be managed globally and are actually pretty time consuming to keep consistent and up to date. The VisualEditor will hopefully also attract more editors. I actually think that not having to look for interlanguage-links has freed up about 15 minutes of my time I spend on Wikipedia per week. --Tobias1984 (talk) 07:54, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

I guess the overriding question is what do we want these boxes to contain: 1) a summary of key features of the disease in point form 2) information pertaining to classification and a couple of links to sources. We could also have both but that would be too much IMO. I support choice number two. Would be happy to see a RfC created on issue if other wish. Our fellow French Wikipedians are having the same discussion here [7] Attempting to get consistecy acress languages is not something I am going to attempth though. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 09:03, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

I think WAID's point is important: "The location is especially helpful if it means that the article need not contain a spam-bait section labeled ==External links== at all." However, it could be argued that an article is incomplete if it does not have an EL section? What about a new template which lists DiseaseDB, emedicine, etc links inside the EL section? If they are wanted and don't fail ELNO that is...

Per James' point above I would think choice (1) would be more ideal, but a more minimalist choice than suggested by Wouterstomp. I think an infobox could consist of: A title, an image, a caption, ICD code, and a descriptive surgical sieve term (although I can see a few arguments developing, so may need more than one term). -- Lesion

See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Medicine/Archive 24#Helpfulness of data in infobox where we discussed this at length. Also last week's Signpost Infoboxes: time for a fresh look?. I've noted in the earlier discussion that the classifications by ICD are often completely useless to a normal reader and the codes are of course just random numbers. If the lead paragraph hasn't informed the reader about the article subject, then it isn't doing its job. That some editors find these codes useful tells you everything about why they are there. We are forgetting our readers. I'm not convinced there is anything about a disease that (a) is general enough to be in an info box and (b) not better handled by the lead paragraphs if it is that important for the reader. I suggest the codes go in a box in the "Classification" section of the article, or at the end if there isn't one. The external links to eMedicine/etc nearly all fail WP:EL and can be deleted. I agree with James that sometimes they provide a plain English and reasonable accurate resource for readers: but Google finds them too and nobody but nobody is going to follow links called "neuro/386 derm/438 ped/2796 radio/723". It is not our job to link to these sites and we do a bad job of it. I do agree there are more important things to spend hours debating. Let's just delete them all and move on :-). -- Colin°^Talk 09:48, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

How about if we add DMOZ to the infobox than we can get rid of the EL section all together per "we are not a collection of ELs". We could also get rid of emedicine and ADAM at the same time. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 09:54, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Why do people recommend DMOZ ever? It is just another user-generate list of external links with all the issues that entails. It is pretty dead too. We should focus on providing content ourselves. The professional medical organisations provide links and can control their quality much better than we can or DMOZ does. -- Colin°^Talk 12:01, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

DMOZ gives us someplace to send people who want to do external links. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 12:12, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

If we're not having a problem with excessive links in an article, them we don't use DMOZ. There are often better options, like adding one or two good links ourselves.

Colin, I think you're too focused on the well-developed articles that you frequent. If our article is a stub or even start-class, then an Emedicine link is not only fully compliant with the EL guideline, but usually a welcome addition. We have 20,000 articles in that assessment status. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:15, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

WP:EL is a long policy but I can't find any text that says our view on what is a good link is dependent on how well-developed the article is. Indeed, it makes it quite clear that our judgement is based on "what the article would contain if it became a featured article". The problem with the infobox link vs an explicit external link is that judgement and commonsense are not applied -- they are added simply because the template has a parameter -- and also that the link text is meaningless codes rather than something the reader would understand they want to click on. -- Colin°^Talk 11:58, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Deleting them after Wikidata has gathered the codes would be an option (Wikidata is all about authority control). But I agree with Andrew that identifiers are important also in Wikipedia, but in my opinion they could also go to the bottom of the page similar to the VIAF and other codes (e.g. bottom of Anders Celsius). Are there any studies about what average people look for in a medicine-related infobox? It would be good if a decision could be made based on data rather than argument. --Tobias1984 (talk) 10:04, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

I would not have an issue with creating a box to put them in, in the section on classification which IMO should occur under diagnosis generally. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 11:01, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Catching up, multiple ... yes, delete all mentioned from infobox, but that includes Medline, which is awful.

Could someone please give me a clue stick-- what is "Wikidata" referring to in these discussions? Found, Wikidata, another WMF venture, hopefully better planned than the new notifications system or the new Visual editor, but not likely ... probably behind all the current problems driving poor editor behavior on issues like infoboxes. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:12, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

However, it could be argued that an article is incomplete if it does not have an EL section? What about a new template which lists DiseaseDB, emedicine, etc links inside the EL section? If they are wanted and don't fail ELNO that is... — Preceding unsigned comment added by Lesion (talk • contribs)

It can NOT be argued that an article is incomplete if it does not have an EL section-- quite the opposite. The absence of an EL section in a Featured or Good article is desirable, as it indicates the article is comprehensive and there is nothing left for an EL to say about it. Stubs may have ELs, but we gradually hope to migrate articles away from them. Please do NOT create templates of ELs-- they are notorious for causing problems, and the presence of absence of ELs is a function of how well developed the article is.

On DMOZ, I am one of the editors who has long advocated inclusion because it gives us a place to send the insistent and persistent who want to create link farms-- we can tell them DMOZ already contains all of that claptrap. Eliminating DMOZ results in increased editing for those of us ... who do all the work in here ... because we have to deal with more editors wanting to add useless links. If consensus is to eliminate DMOZ, I won't strongly object, but it has served a purpose in my editing. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:35, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

@Tobias1984: No idea how you would define an "average reader" or whether the concept would be helpful. We do write for a broad range of general readers, some of whom we know to be health professionals. 86.161.251.139 (talk) 13:45, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

@SandyGeorgia: Wikidata has been running for quite some time now. The fact that you just discovered it means that it is doing something right. It stays in the background and currently only manages the interwiki-links (which were a disaster in the pre-Wikidata times, but still have some issues left). I don't think that Wikidata is driving any kind of editor behavior. Quite to the contrary it has given all the people focused on data a place to add information outside of the Wikipedia infoboxes. If this project decides to get rid of e.g. the MESH-codes then nobody will be unhappy because their favorite bit of information is stored on Wikidata with a ton of information that will never appear in any Wikipedia. Not having to deal with that data tsunami will free up time from other editors to write better articles. So the whole project is actually to the benefit of those two types of editors. --Tobias1984 (talk) 16:21, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

MeSH terms change... Would Wikidata be able to update appropriately? 86.161.251.139 (talk) 09:24, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Hi 86.161.251.139! Updating wouldn't be a problem. We can also store different versions if that is something people want. We store for example ICD-9 and ICD-10 separately, but only the most recent revision. We could even go so far and store revisions separately if somebody could make a strong case that that data is relevant. --Tobias1984 (talk) 09:46, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Hi Tobias1984, thanks for the reply. If Wikidata really could update MeSH terms regularly, as changes are introduced [8], that would be great IMO. (Regarding MeSH term histories, I don't have an opinion on this: the MeSH browser lists previous indexing and the NLM has started to provide detailed information for recent years [9].)

IMO, up-to-date MeSH links are genuinely useful on Wikipedia pages. In reality, we're not writing just for a profilable "average" user, but for a wide range of general users, many of whom who come to Wikipedia as an orientative first port of call. These include, school and university students, doctors with their patients, and a wide variety of professional people, ranging from biochemists to economists, and from translators to statisticians, etc etc... For some of these people, ready access to the term in the MeSH browser straight from a Wikipedia page may feel natural and convenient. And the MeSH (and ICD) terms also provide independent information about how the topic of the page is classified. [@Colin:] In my view, that's genuinely useful encyclopedic information. 86.161.251.139 (talk) 11:12, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm not advocating banning ICD and MESH codes, but they simply can't be justified as of "lead section" importance. As I commented in the previous discussion, the ICD classification of some diseases (like Tuberous sclerosis) is negative information: the reader is worse-off from reading "Phakomatoses, not elsewhere classified" than if they'd just read our article text. Reality is complex and very few things lend themselves well to a hierarchical classification system. -- Colin°^Talk 12:07, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

A compromise would be to make sections of the infobox collapsible. A section called "Identifiers" or "External Links" could be hidden by default and looking at the codes would just require one mouse click. I also think that the way they are presented now is not really benficial. Most other infoboxes have a couple of pieces of information apart from external identifiers. The diseases infobox is a real exception to that rule. --Tobias1984 (talk) 12:25, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

As others have observed, this is all part of a wider ongoing debate about infoboxes (eg [10]). IMO, it would be far better for WP metadata to be independently harvestable, so that infoboxes can be there for readers rather than bots. (And I agree with Colin that MeSH/ICD info should be readily accessible options rather than the main course.) 86.161.251.139 (talk) 13:12, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

@Tobias1984: And, as already pointed out several times on this page, collapsible text breaches MOS and accessibility. It was tried in some cases simply and only because no other compromise with intransigent technical-minded editors was possible (the subject of an active arb case); we should not have to stoop to the level of hiding text in infoboxes that shouldn't be there to begin with. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:14, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Re. EL, I disagree. I take the long view. Eventually there will be a category of media on commons to link to, learning materials on wikiversity, etc. I point out we have templates to link to these in the EL section already. Just because some EL are bad, doesn't mean they are all undesirable...

Re. ICD, I also disagree that we should loose these just because most people will not know what they are let alone find them useful. There is so little international standardization in medicine, I think we should support efforts like this, even thought they have some problems. Editors are also readers, and even if a minority of readers use ICD links or want them in there, I think this is reason enough to keep them. Lesion (talk) 13:48, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

On EL, if you disagree, that would have to be taken up at WP:EL or WP:LAYOUT. Here on WP:MED, we should conform to existing guidelines. Wikiversity is an external link (of dubious reliability) and it is not necessarily included on well-developed articles, nor should it be, nor will it be in every case. Again, please do not create more problems with automated/automatic editing by creating useless templates, that are almost always used incorrectly or abusively. (Actually, I do like ICD codes as well ... ) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:54, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

I understand what you are saying, and what is reflected in the policy about EL, that there is no reason to have EL which provides what the article is already providing, and therefore well developed articles are likely to need less EL, but I think it does not reflect consensus to suggest that the perfect article would not have any EL at all. A FA is great, but there are things it doesn't cover, by virtue of being a wikipedia article and FA status, such as extended media related to the topic or "how to" learning materials. I would add to this desirable list of potential ELs something that is directed specifically at patients rather than readers of encyclopedias. Lesion (talk) 14:04, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Aside for the record: WP:EL is not a policy. I hope everyone participating in these discussions is aware of the distinctions. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:16, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

re layout, last time I checked (fairly recently), the 2 example templates I pasted here are supposed to go in an EL section... they are auto right aligned to allow them to sit comfortably around a bulleted EL list on the left. Lesion (talk) 14:06, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Please see WP:NOT, specifically WP:NOTHOW. (I am not aware of any FA off the top of my head that has no ELs, but most certainly minimization of useless Els DOES reflect current practice.) WP:LAYOUT says where to put ELs; WP:EL covers what to include. When sister links are included, they go in ELs. That doesn't mean they should always or necessarily be included on every article. To say that they are "supposed to go in an EL section" is a misunderstanding of our guidelines. Many of our "sister" (sexism alert) links contain info that is SO bad that they will automatically fail ELNO, and should be shot on sight. I'm reminded of the time Slp1 (talk · contribs) and I were dealing with a persistent POV pusher on the article stuttering. When he couldn't get POV and promotional, commercial, COI material into that article, he moved it over to a sister link, where it stood, and then tried to link it back to the Stuttering article with a "sister" link. "Sister" links are external links, and when their (typically horrible) information fails to meet our EL guideline, they should be shot on sight. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:22, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

That was rather my point, wikipedia is not a how to manual, which is partly why wikiversity was created, and why there is a template available to link there. I'm not suggesting that we should put these links automatically in every article ... like I said to take a long view ... eventually (and ideally imo) more articles would have learning materials available (and of higher quality) to link to. Anyway we are going off on a tangent. My point was that (1) it is not necessarily a goal to eliminate all ELs, they should be given a fair assessment for their quality and not deleted to get rid of the whole EL section, and (2) templates containing ELs already exist, and are intended where appropriate to go in the EL section, where I suggested emedicine links could be moved from the infobox, into a EL template with fields identical to those which would be removed from the infobox. Why not include some hidden text as part of this template which states directs to EL policy and states that not all these fields have to be filled. E.g. the corresponding article on emedicine has aspects which are inaccurate and a consensus develops to not include it. It is a valid suggestion, and I think would alleviate some of the issues people are raising about infoboxes. Lesion (talk) 17:10, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Because in practice, all that will do is move the infobox problem to a template. That "not all fields have to be filled" will be ignored by the intransigent, bot-happy, technical-minded editors who don't know, understand, or engage the content issues. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:20, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

I have not generally found this to be a problem at medicine-related articles. If you see a Medline link that you think is worthless, then you remove it and mention the reason on the talk page, and 90% of the time, that's the end of it. It may be more hassle at a heavily watched page or on a controversial subject, but in my experience, 90% of the time people don't care when an external link is removed with any plausible-sounding reason.

As for the ICD codes, some of our readers want those numbers. They don't want "the links" necessarily (although providing the link is the fastest and easiest way to make the numbers verifiable), but people do actually ask for those code numbers when they're not present. We need to keep them because they are content that our readers (not editors that you consider second-class) actually want. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:37, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

WhatamIdoing, we are discussing info boxes in the lead, not whether to abolish ICD codes altogether. We are in this mess because info boxes have become a dumping ground for data points and because they are in the lead. It wouldn't be nearly so much of an issue if info boxes sat at the bottom of the article, though the external links issue remains. Colin°^Talk 17:39, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

WhatAmI, that you have not "generally" found it to be a problem doesn't help the "specific" situation that I tried to delete inaccurate links from the infobox on TS and was overruled by consensus. I have tried again, now that there is more awareness, and am happy to see that there is now a different consensus evolving and a better understanding of the issues than before. Again, moving the same problem to a template elsewhere doesn't remove the problem: there is no reason to be linking, for example, to that extremely inferior medline TS article anywhere. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:58, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

While I agree a tiny number of readers find ICD codes useful, if we didn't have them and somebody suggested adding them, would anyone really think the lead was the place? It is the opposite of the right place for codes of interest to very few readers. Our WP:EL policy is quite clear that external sites must exceed "Featured Article" standards of comprehensiveness and reliability. If any of these sites in our infobox meet that (and many don't) then they deserve to be linked properly by name, not some obscure code no reader would guess to click on. I feel the DMOZ response is just to make someone go away and be a problem to somebody else. If you actually look at the site, you'd never think of sending a reader there. Colin°^Talk 14:45, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

DMOZ is crap; for that reason, it's exactly the kind of place to send the typical editor trying to use our ELs for advocacy :) :) I'm not strongly attached to any position wrt DMOZ or ICD codes; I am strongly against adding more useless templates of ELs or including by default anything in the infobox. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:17, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

This matter has been discussed at WT:MED previously. I am not convinced that ICD and other technical codes are of any value to a general encyclopedia, but Doc James insists that he finds them useful. These codes certainly don't need to be in/near the lead section. I would be happy to see them removed from articles, or as a compromise moved down to an "External links" section. Axl ¤ [Talk] 21:34, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

I have added very few ICDs as most are already there. So others must find them useful to. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 00:09, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

People add the ICDs (and other codes and external links) because the infobox has parameters for them. No other reason needed. To assume that those adding them also "find them useful" is not valid. This is the main problem with info boxe templates from an editor-point-of-view: it encourages the unthinking accumulation of stuff. And the main problem from a reader-point-of-view is that it is in the lead and screws up the layout of the article when long. Colin°^Talk 07:35, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

No, people add the ICDs because actual people want those numbers. I'm not "assuming" that people find them useful; I'm telling you that I have read and responded to actual, direct requests from real people to please provide those numbers when they were not already present. I personally don't need those numbers, and you apparently don't need those numbers, but some of our readers need them enough to figure out how to ask for them. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:06, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

I made a comment further up but it seem to have got lost. WP:EL does not permit mediocre external links as long as the article is crap too. All external links on all articles have to meet or exceed the quality we'd expect of a featured article on the topic. And the links we do add are hidden in a code like ""neuro/386 derm/438 ped/2796 radio/723"". Absolutely nobody is going to click on those links. Especially not after they clicked on the ICD ones above and got negative information. So really it is time to get the broom and sweep them away and move the category codes out of the lead. Colin°^Talk 07:35, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Here is your reply:

• Emedicine is not generally considered to be a mediocre link.
• The label on a link is not what determines the quality of the link. If this bothers you, it can be changed in the template.
• To understand how the community actually interprets ELNO #1, you will have to read the archives for the guideline. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:06, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

1. So what. Doesn't change the fact that it should only be added if it is a fantastic link, and infoboxes encourage brainless addition of all links possible. 2. No it can't because a proper link would take up more room than the info box can give. 3. I don't believe you wrote that. That's quite an unacceptable situation for such a clearly worded and unambiguous guideline point. I found an archive comment of yours where you claim IAR is invoked on crappy articles. So I suspect this is a wee bit more like WhatamIdoing's opinion than community opinion, as otherwise it might be written into the guideline. I do accept, however, that you have vastly more experience than me. I think that it is more like CBA than IAR than makes people not remove such links.

What I find incredibly frustrating is this project has spent thousands of words arguing for the presence of utter nonsense like "ICD-10 K13.0 ICD-9 528.5, 686.8 MeSH D002613" in the prime position on our medical articles. Of the thousands of people who read our articles every day, what percentage do we think find value in these hieroglyphics or follow the links? I'm willing to bet that to two decimal places it rounds to 0. Until wikiprojects get real with the nerdy data only they love and start focusing on readers needs, infoboxes will continue to be a problem. Colin°^Talk 19:37, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Colin, I'm going to suggest that you click here for the list of the most common contributors to that guideline. This will do the same for its talk page. This will do the same for ELN. After you've looked at those, then perhaps we'll continue this conversation about the usual way that ELNO #1 gets applied. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:33, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

If in order to understand a law one has to read the committee minutes of the lawyers who drafted it, then it is a badly drafted law. And if you think that hanging about the talk pages of our policy and guidelines gives you an accurate impression of Wikipedia and its community, then you are mistaken. I've seen before where you comment that you or I have mostly written some guideline or other as if that settles the argument. It is an argument from authority. If you want people to understand what the community has decided about EL policy, make sure the EL text is accurately worded to reflect that community decision. The EL aspect of this isn't really the most interesting one to me. Emedicine could be all brilliant prose and it wouldn't change my point. Infoboxes cause unthinking external links and codes to be added in the prime position of the article. And those links are done in a way that absolutely guarantees that nobody will even think to click on them. And if they did click on the, the first few are two obscure categorisation pages that for nearly all our readers was a waste of their time. Let's have people read our articles, not send them off somewhere else as the very first thing we do. Colin°^Talk 11:11, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

I have been unable to get a consensus to make changes in the past. The too-strongly worded line is very convenient for experienced editors when they encounter a newbie. EL does not exist primarily to tell regular editors what to do. EL exists primarily as a weapon against spammers and fanboys.

But now let us discuss this particular website: Emedicine articles almost always comply with the strict letter of this poorly phrased "law". Desirable links provide "a unique resource beyond what the article would contain if it became a featured article". An FA should not contain a detailed explication of differential diagnosis. An FA should not contain information about doses of drugs. Emedicine articles almost always contain both of these things. Therefore, Emedicine articles meet ELNO by providing "a unique resource beyond what the article would contain if it became a featured article". WhatamIdoing (talk) 14:41, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

Wrt WP:EL reason to exist, this is an unhelpful opinion but explains your responses above. Let's move on. You make a good case for emedicine appearing as an external link with a good-quality hyperlink text at the end of our articles in the appropriate section (though it is a US-focused website aimed at healthcare professionals, so not without its problems). It doesn't make the case for it being the prime position in the lead of the article or for us to hide this "unique resource" behind the cryptic "neuro/415" link. Perhaps that's a code like ICD. Oh, wait, I'm not a healthcare professional so I don't know what ICD is either. We've just got a box full of random numbers and letters. Let's click on eight of them. One of them probably meets WP:EL much of the time. Medline Plus might make a great link for the Simple English Wikipedia but not here and is also US-focussed. The others are websites providing very little information at all and only really of interest to healthcare professionals. And if we haven't categorised the disease in the opening sentence or two, then we've failed. Colin°^Talk 19:59, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

Is your definition of "prime position" something like "thing I automatically ignore"? I don't usually read infoboxes, beyond glancing at the picture (if any) and its caption, unless I'm specifically looking for some detail that is well-suited for display in that format. If I am searching for that kind of detail, then I don't really want to go digging through the whole article for it. I don't believe that I'm unusual among editors in this regard. Do you find yourself reading infoboxes?

Perhaps rather than telling us what you don't want in the infobox, why don't you tell us what you do want to see in that "prime position"? WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:32, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Infoboxes - any consensus for changes?

So, as I see it there are few Qs that ppl are raising here. Would be good to move towards a clear consensus on each issue:

1. Should ICD links be kept?
2. Should ICD links stay in the infobox if they are kept? (if no please state where)
3. Should MeSH links be kept?
4. Should MeSH links stay in the infobox if they are kept? (if no please state where)
5. Does EL policy apply to the EL in the infobox?
6. Should the ELs stay in the infobox? (if no please state where)
7. Should anything else be added to the infobox?

My opinions on these issues are:

1. Yes - seems most people here want to keep ICD links
2. Yes - for want of anywhere better to put them
3. Yes - I think some people find them useful, and it is encyclopedic to incude them, same as for ICD codes
4. Yes - for want of anywhere better to put them
5. Yes - If an EL fails the EL policy (by consensus), it should not be included, i.e. they do not necessarily need to be populated just because there is a space for them.
6. No - I say move them to the EL section
7. Potentially Probably not - but only if EL get removed and there would be more space. I do not support a brief summary of the disease, per James' comment it is not so easy to summarize the etiology of a disease into a few words. Would also require a massive effort, first to alter the infobox disease template with new fields ad second to update infoboxes for every page. I don't see a bot being able to do this so it would be by hand. A simple surgical sieve term has less effort involved, but would still require a lot of work. I ask myself is it worth it? Would anyone be willing to do this? Agree that editors' time would be better spent improving content. Lesion (talk) 18:28, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

• Think this (7.) would be a huge blunder. It would inevitably lead to a host of issues (cf WP:CLASSICAL etc). As Lesion says etiology, pathogenesis etc are often unclear, brief descriptions simplistic etc, etc. Whatever their failings, an advantage of the current infoboxes is their standardization (and "opt-in" entries). 86.161.251.139 (talk) 19:02, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

True, the advantage of keeping the infoboxes as they are is that we don't have to do anything. It's a very valid reason imo. Lesion (talk) 11:11, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Mine:

1. Don't care.
2. Don't care.
3. No MeSH in the infobox: again, in the case of TS, the link has contained inaccurate info for as long as I have been on Wikipedia.
4. In the case of TS, it belongs nowhere-- it is unhelpful and inaccurate.
5. EL is not a policy, it is a guideline, and it applies everywhere, so yes.
6. No, but if some/any links are kept as possible parameters, editor discretion, discussion and consensus should apply to which ELs are in the infobox-- nothing should be automatic, nothing should be added via automated tools. A given link/brand may be accurate for one condition and not another. Further, the question is formed incompletely: inaccurate links shouldn't be added anywhere (neither the infobox nor the EL section-- the process of consensus applies everywhere).
7. No.

SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:38, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Keep the ICD/MESH codes and their links but in a new template box ("Disease categories" or something like that). This can go in the External links section. Remove all other external links from info box as they encourage mindless addition rather than thoughtful policy-based inclusion of relevant links. There never was any key data of lead-importance in the info box disease so it can just be deleted and replaced with a captioned image. This change could be done by a bot initially -- the category code stuff is just moving things around. The other external links would really benefit from being replaced by meaningful names rather the code. This could be simply the name of the external web site and the article title but would probably be better done by scraping the web page title -- something that would need a fairly intelligent bot. I agree there is no point in editors doing this mass change by hand. We could, though, deprecate Infobox disease and create the new one, as a step in the right direction. Colin°^Talk 20:29, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

I like the idea of a classifications" template box. MeSH is useful for PubMed searches (not for the definitions themselves, per Sandy's TS objection above). The key info is imo: 1) the actual heading (and entry terms), and 2) how it fits into the tree. Query: Why not blue-link the MeSH heading itself rather than the ID/tree number? I could also see an argument for linking to the NCBI browser with the PubMed search builder [11] rather than the browser we use now [12] (though I'm not you can do that with an ID). 86.161.251.139 (talk) 22:18, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

I don't recall seeing Sandy complain about MeSH. Just to make sure we're all on the same page, this is MedlinePlus and this is MeSH. Sandy's TS complaints appear to focus on the MedlinePlus patient-oriented page, not on the MeSH category tree for PubMed search terms. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:18, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Sorry if that wasn't clear. Sandy mentioned MeSH here: [13]. I agree that the MeSH descriptions/definitions are often imprecise, but the whole point of MeSH is that it's a controlled vocabulary (of descriptors) for use in PubMed searches etc. Linking to Entrez [14] rather than the MeSH browser [15] would seem to make sense to me, but I don't know if that would be technically feasible. 86.161.251.139 (talk) 15:46, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

yes, I did mention Mesh ... sorry, I'm having a hard time keeping up here ... busy IRL. The MeSH article on TS still includes the "significant distress or impairment" qualifier from DSM-IV (cited to a 1994 source), which was removed long ago in DSM-IV-TR. That inaccuracy forced me to have to add text to the Diagnosis section with the corrected information, that otherwise would not have been necessary (or would have been better placed in History of Tourette syndrome, which Colin and I are going to write someday when we have a free moment). For gosh sakes, how many years does it take for MeSH to update info? PS, I do now have DSM-V and will be updating the entire suite of motor disorders (an article we don't even have yet!) hopefully within the month.) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:27, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

That's one reason why, imo, they'd be better located outside the infobox, in an alternative "template box", per Colin's suggestion [16]. 86.161.251.139 (talk) 16:32, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Mine:

• Should ICD links be kept?
• Should ICD links stay in the infobox if they are kept?

Personally don't mind if they are kept or not, probably some readers will find them useful; so I would say keep them but at the end of the article.

• Should MeSH links be kept?
• Should MeSH links stay in the infobox if they are kept?

Same as for ICD's

• Does EL policy apply to the EL in the infobox?

Yes; medlineplus and diseasesdb should probably be removed altogether; whereas emedicine, omim and genereviews potentially include details beyond what would be provided by a wikipedia article.

• Should the ELs stay in the infobox?

No, should go in the external links section

• Should anything else be added to the infobox?

I would find it useful to include basic facts (prevalence or incidence; treatment: surgical/medical; main symptoms, etc.) Would need a lot of thought to get this right, and might be something we could achieve using wikidata in the long run.

--WS (talk) 10:58, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

How would you do this? Put the ICD code in plain text in the infobox, and then repeat the same information, but this time with the link, under ==External links==? That sounds to me like the worst possible solution. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:18, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

No, delete them from the infobox, sorry if that was unclear.--WS (talk) 16:00, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

1. Should ICD links be kept? Yes
2. Should ICD links stay in the infobox if they are kept? Yes
3. Should MeSH links be kept? Don't care
4. Should MeSH links stay in the infobox if they are kept? Yes
5. Does EL policy apply to the EL in the infobox? Yes—see WP:ELPOINTS #2
6. Should the ELs stay in the infobox? Yes—see WP:ELPOINTS #2
7. Should anything else be added to the infobox? Yes—the medical specialty (or specialties) most closely connected to the disease. This has been discussed previously but no one got around to implementing it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:11, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

I am of the same opinion as WAID generally. Am happy to keep MeSH but we could also remove it and use it as a ref to support the names of the condition in question. The reason why the medical specially has not been added yet is we do not have a good source and many pertain to a number of specialties. There however is usually one or two main specialties though. This change is also probably fairly low on the priority list. I could see including the "prevalence" as there is good data from WHO for more than a 1000 conditions but not the others mentioned by WS. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 15:49, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Could I get you physicians to think outside of the disease model? Pleeeeeeese ... try to imagine the edit wars that will break out if you try to add something like prevalence to an article like autism. This Is A Very Bad Idea ... and encapsulates everything that is already wrong with infoboxes that has ended up at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Infoboxes. You cannot summarize nuanced or controversial issues in an infobox! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:55, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Agree it would be disastrous to put controvertible (or simplistic) information in the infobox. @James: I think we need to remember that MeSH is an indexing system that is relevant for bibliographic searches. 86.161.251.139 (talk) 16:19, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Re. previous consensus to include the medical specialty in the infobox-- I think I remember this, but not sure... The fact that no-one has done anything is compelling-- it might just be too difficult. Any constructive addition to the infobox would need to be very carefully thought out and have willing volunteers to do the work. Adding the specialty-- how useful is this? Firstly many diseases are multidisciplinary (e.g. diabetes), so was this decision to put only the main specialty involved (potential for arguments?) and secondly, the talk page is already tagged with the wikiproject e.g. neurology/dermatology etc. I know this is not quite the same thing as putting the specialty in the infobox, but I think we should be weighing the potential benefits against the amount of work involved, when editors might better spend their efforts building content... Lesion (talk) 16:52, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Hooray (for the final sentiment expressed :) :) By the way, because of time constraints, I unwatched Marfan syndrome over a year ago. In trying to figgerout who's who in here among editors I've not met before, I see you've been holding down the fort over at Marfan. Thanks for work in the trenches !!! (For years, we dealt with the unsourced addition of Michael Phelps there.) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:05, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

I think that a prevalence item would be useful for identifying rare diseases, but otherwise it doesn't seem important to me. The answer needn't be numbers; you could say |prevalence=Rare disease or |prevalence=common (e.g., common cold) or even |prevalence=Most common form of cancer (e.g., non-melanoma skin cancer). You can summarize complicated things in infoboxes: IMO the only sensible entry at Autism (where I personally would leave it blank) would be |prevalence=Disputed.

Lesion, the only reason nobody's added the parameter is because most of us aren't admins and don't know how to program templates. For most diseases, it's not at all difficult to identify the primary specialty: infectious diseases, cancers, heart diseases, lung diseases, kidney diseases... There are actually very few where the disease truly requires a multidisciplinary approach involving more than two specialties. A patient with diabetes might see many healthcare providers, but fundamentally that disease "belongs to" the endocrinologists. The problem isn't figuring out the specialty for most diseases; the slowdown that Doc James mentioned is figuring out a source that could be processed systematically for thousands of articles at once, rather than individual editors adding the information to one or two articles whenever they wanted to. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:48, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

I object in the strongest possible terms to any of these suggested additions to the infobox (prevalence, specialties, etc). They are nothing but an invitation for trouble, of the same type that led to the current arb case. I can just imagine when, for example, someone tries to add chiropractic as a treating specialty. Or acupuncturists. Or what would we do about psychologists being added to every disease imaginable, since they fancy that talk therapy works for anything? We can't assume that infobox parameters are or will be handled reasonably by reasonable people and based on reliable sources: they aren't. That is exactly why we now have an arb case. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:05, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

It sounds like you're beyond the ability to AGF where infoboxes are concerned. WhatamIdoing (talk) 14:44, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm not reading that at all, WhatamIdoing, but rather the voice of experience. Even the simple rare/common attempt at categorising prevalence fails when one considers that this is the International English Wikipedia, not the US Wikipedia. So how does someone deal with a disease that is very common in much of the world but extremely rare for many of our readers: by writing prose. "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong". These boxes work for the atomic weight of elements, but the attributes of diseases and treatments are often more complex than that. Colin°^Talk 15:54, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

Really agree with that (prevalence figures, by definition, depend on the population within which they're estimated). 86.161.251.139 (talk) 16:29, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

I agree that complicated things are complicated.

Sandy says "We can't assume that infobox parameters are or will be handled reasonably by reasonable people". That's the opposite of AGF. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:35, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

They may be "handled unreasonably by reasonable people". In the distant past, I've added fields to infoboxes templates because they are there. That was stupid and unthinking of me. And to deny the existence of unreasonable people, or the particular attraction of infoboxes for such people, is simply to deny reality. It is claimed above "WP:EL exists primarily as a weapon against spammers and fanboys" - it seems many of our guidelines are concerned with unreasonable people. Are all the people who contribute to that guideline also "beyond the ability to AGF"? Of course not. So let's just be practical about this. I'd be interested to know which "medical specialty" tuberous sclerosis fits into, or how having yet another field of interest only to physicians is improving our infobox. -- Colin°^Talk 11:07, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Infobox parameters that are open to debate tend to be honey-traps for controversial gf edits, polarized discussions and, regrettably, edit-warring. A drain on our human resources... 86.161.251.139 (talk) 09:14, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Saying it twice doesn't make it any more factual. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 10:36, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Colin, the answer to your question about Tuberous sclerosis is in the ICD code: Phakomatoses are central nervous system disorders that have dermatological components. Therefore the primary specialist to follow a patient with TS will be a neurologist, and if you wanted to be more complete, you could add a dermatologist. Whether one needs, for example, a nephrologist depends on the individual case. You could, alternatively, say that it is a multidisciplinary disease, on the grounds that multiple body systems could be involved.

I do not understand why you say that this information is only of interest to physicians. In my mind, the primary purpose of this field is to answer the very much patient-oriented question, "What kind of doctor should I see, if I want to consult a specialist for this condition?" WhatamIdoing (talk) 14:58, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

I am not comfortable with the idea that we are here to guide patients to physicians. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and not a whole lot of other things. Per our terms, "the content we host is for general informational purposes only, so if you need expert advice for a particular question (such as medical, legal, or financial issues), you should seek the help of a licensed or qualified professional." Telling patients who to consult isn't our role. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:27, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

The ICD code is no help whatsoever. The term "phakomatoses" is from the 1920s and pre-dates both genetics and our understanding that TSC is a multi-organ disorder of extremely varied penetrance and severity. That this outdated term is is used in ICD10 says more about those inventing hierarchical categorisation systems than it does about the disease (they need to find a name for the node on the arbitrary tree they have created). I don't know how healthcare works in the US, but in the UK one can't simply turn up at a consultant's door saying "Wikipedia says you are the specialist I need". What kind of doctor should I see: a GP. It is a gross oversimplification to put TSC in any speciality. The first specialist the parents of an unborn child might see is pre-natal cardiology. And the first speciality a thirty-year-old female with previously undiagnosed TSC might encounter is pulmonology (if that's the right word). The question really is why are we trying to over-simplify something that is complex. The answer is to find something brief enough to fit in a little white box up the top-right of our article. That's not a good answer. Colin°^Talk 15:59, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Agreed most people go through gatekeepers in primary care before they see a specialist, and this weakens the argument that the specialty is useful info. Still potentially encyclopedic though... What about a surgical sieve term, does no-one like this idea? Similar implementation problems with any constructive change to infoboxes... arguments about how to classify things (already starting here?) ... need to change the template ... need to program a bot to help fill out the new template fields.

Having said this, I like idea of a classification template with ICD and MeSH, this would take these "codes" out of the top of the article when most people will not be interested in them. Also support moving EL out of infobox to EL section, potentially in a template or just an old fashioned bullet list. So far the only thing everyone has agreed upon is that EL policy extends to EL in the infobox, and since this was already part of policy, there is nothing to change based upon that individual consensus. Lesion (talk) 16:33, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

I agree that we can't have it both ways: either it's useful for non-physicians or it's not. If I had a family member with an odd disease, I'd probably want to learn more about it and I would probably want to know whether or not the GP was doing reasonable things. A Wikipedia article is a lousy way to make a medical decision, but it's a great way to learn basic information about a disease, like whether or not TS is basically considered a neurological disease. Learning that might help me understand why what looks to me like a skin disease resulted in a referral to a neurologist rather than a dermatologist, for example. This is basic information, not medical advice. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:13, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

There is also a proposal at wikidata to add a medical discipline property: Wikidata:wikidata:Property_proposal/Term#medical_discipline. Would be good to coordinate between the two, so the data could be reused in the infoboxes. --WS (talk) 15:17, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

@Wouterstomp:, that link goes nowhere? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:46, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, fixed now; needed a second wikidata:. --WS (talk) 15:54, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

I forgot to ask at the beginning of this thread: is there any reason we are keeping ICD-9 codes? Lesion (talk) 13:57, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

ICD-9 codes are still used for some purposes (see [17]). 86.161.251.139 (talk) 15:57, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Splitting it up

Proposed split	Current use
WikiProject Medicine WikiProject Medicine	WikiProject Medicine

Here's a quick mockup of what we'd get if we split the box into two. The second box would presumably go under ==Classification==, a section that is (1) about how the disease is subdivided (e.g., subtypes of leukemia in the article Leukemia), not about how the disease relates to other diseases, (2) normally the first section, and thus immediately underneath the existing infobox, and (3) not present in a majority of disease-related articles. Given that there's no place to put it in most articles and it takes up more screen real estate, I'm not very excited about this option, but I can't say that I really care much one way or the other. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:20, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

the suggestion was to put a potential separate classification template "at the bottom of the page" (EL section?) rather than in the classification section. Assume the same objections to these codes being in a prominent position will still be raised against it being in the classification section. Moving the ELs out of the infobox would leave just an image and a caption, arguably no need for an infobox at all. Getting rid of the infoboxes entirely I do not think reflects consensus, meaning that we need to keep at least some content. Unless there are constructive additions (potentially things like specialty involved, surgical sieve term) then both EL and ICD/MeSH codes surely can't be removed? Lesion (talk) 10:36, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes I think these classification codes should go at the bottom along with some of our other grouping templates and Commons links and the like. The argument for that (beyond the fact they are just random letters to most people and so don't belong up top) is that we put wiki categories there too. So one may hopefully see some correspondence between the two. Potentially, given the room there, one could consider spelling out the category hierarchy words rather than just showing the terse code. Then at least it would provide some information, even if I feel these categories are rather arbitrary bureaucratic constructs. And yes the thing in the top-right of the article would just be a thumbnail image with caption rather than a collection of external links hidden behind truly random letters and numbers. Hallelujah. Remember that Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Infoboxes says "The use of infoboxes is neither required nor prohibited for any article. Whether to include an infobox, which infobox to include, and which parts of the infobox to use, is determined through discussion and consensus among the editors at each individual article." The info box on the mock-up above contains no information (except the image and caption, which don't require an infobox). See Wikipedia:Disinfoboxes. -- Colin°^Talk 11:01, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Respectfully, that's just an essay. I don't think there is any consensus to remove infoboxes entirely from medical pages. I potentially support removing ICD/MeSH and/or other EL out of the infobox. If I had to choose to move out ICD/MeSH or the ELs, I would leave the ICD and the MeSH codes, I think they are more encyclopedic. Lesion (talk) 11:19, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Agree that MeSH/ICD links would be better placed at the foot of the page. Regarding Colin's point about spelling them out, I feel that could be good for MeSH, where the heading itself provides a PubMed entry term. By contrast, it seems both impractical and undesirable for the multiple ICD codes (see, for example, Cancer). 86.161.251.139 (talk) 11:56, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

IMO Wikiprojects are probably the last sort of people who should have final say about what goes in an infobox or whether an article needs one at all. Our guideline on the subject makes no mention of projects, just editors on articles. By definition, the members of a wikiproject form a special-interest group that makes it hard for them to appreciate how irrelevant their special interests are to 99% of the actual readers. The railway project think that entry/exit figures for the last five years, to five significant figures, with deltas to four significant figures, is of key vital infobox importance. But they probably look at our box and say that at least theirs has some information in it. I agree that this project doesn't seem keen to make any changes. -- Colin°^Talk 12:39, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

I am happy with simply leaving them as they are. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 15:29, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Proposed template at bottom

For what it is worth, here's a crude mock up of the bottom of Tuberous sclerosis. It includes the already present navigation templates and categories. Note how it fits nicely here :-) I've shown all external links for comparison with above, without judgement as to whether they are suitable.

External links

• Medscape Reference
  • Tuberous Sclerosis
  • Genetics of Tuberous Sclerosis
  • Dermatologic Manifestations of Tuberous Sclerosis
  • Tuberous Sclerosis Imaging
• MedlinePlus: Tuberous sclerosis
• OMIM: #191100 TUBEROUS SCLEROSIS 1; TSC1 and #613254 TUBEROUS SCLEROSIS 2; TSC2
• Diseases Database: Tuberous sclerosis information

V·T·E	Diseases of the skin and appendages by morphology	[ show ]

V·T·E	Phakomatosis (Q85, 759.5–759.6)	[ show ]

V·T·E	Deficiencies of intracellular signaling peptides and proteins	[ show ]

Scheme	Code	Category
ICD-9	759.5	Congenital Anomalies → Other and unspecified congenital anomalies → → Tuberous sclerosis
ICD-10	Q85.1	Congenital malformations, deformations and chromosomal abnormalities → Phakomatoses, not elsewhere classified → → Tuberous sclerosis
MESH	D014402	Tuberous sclerosis

Categories: Genes on chromosome 9   Genes on chromosome 16   Autosomal dominant disorders   Genodermatoses   Rare diseases

Colin°^Talk 12:39, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

It does look nice, but how much work would be involved per page? Can a bot do all these tasks unaided? Remember how many pages there are. What has been done is expanding the ICD tree, but apart from this it is moving content around that we already had ... ignoring for a moment whether this is desirable to move or not, I am thinking of effort vs benefits here Lesion (talk) 13:16, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes, using a bot would be the only viable way of doing this and this should be no problem to do this way. --WS (talk) 15:13, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Colin, it looks good, but bear with me as I'm thinking aloud. Most folks (hopefully) know that Wikipedia is 99% garbage, and some use it only for a reference site to locate other sources. Even I do that for searching medical info, unless I can see an article is FA-- I go straight to the bottom to look for sources. I'm wondering if this will just encourage those who go straight to the bottom to explore the faulty MeSH, Medline etc articles which, in the case of TS at least, are inaccurate. In the case of TS, most of those links do not belong in the article, period. Do we have consensus at least here that we don't *have* to use anything, regardless of where we put it? Because my efforts to remove bad links in the past have been overruled here. I'm afraid your proposed template will give them even a more "official" air of accuracy. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:10, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

So far everyone agrees that EL policy applies to the EL currently in the infobox (correct me if I am wrong...has been a long discussion and I have been in and out of it). I think on a case by case basis, according to consensus, any given EL is included or not included, and this decision should be based on EL policy rather than simply blindly wanting to fill out the fields in the infobox. Whether EL policy applies to ICD / MeSH links is another matter ... you could argue that they are EL links they are actually links, but as someone said somewhere above, this link is the easiest way to verify the code is correct. I would want to include them routinely regardless of their potential problems in any single case, otherwise not include on any page. I think ICD/MeSH should stay in all cases, they are encyclopedic ... but I am open to the idea of their location being moved, I just question the benefits for the amount of work involved. Lesion (talk) 13:26, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

And that is the same logic (re MeSH) that has forced me to keep inaccurate info in the TS article for as long as I've been on Wiki, although MeSH can't be bothered to fix info that is about 15 years wrong. Then if we are forced to keep it, let's add it some hidden code or text somewhere, so our readers don't have to read inaccuracies. One must not have significant distress or impairment to be diagnosed with TS, and many people with TS have no impairment and are not bothered by their tics-- this was addressed over a decade ago, but MeSH is still wrong. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:31, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

What Wikiprojects decide is not gospel (even when they think it is) and of no greater weight than per-article editor consensus. The guideline on infoboxes (and I'd include any such box regardless of location) makes it clear this is for each article to decide on a field-by-field basis. So if the consensus is that TS MESH category is not just unhelpful but wrong or misleading, I think you have a case for excluding it. Possibly best done by commenting out the wikitext so that any good-faith wikignome that comes along to add it gets the message. I wouldn't call the ICD/MESH links "external links". They are codes/categories with in-place hyperlink references which I think we all invoke IAR to combine. There is an argument we should accept those categories even if we disagree with them. There's a limit to how much of this imperfect world we are allowed to fix on Wikipedia :-) Colin°^Talk 13:49, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

This is MeSH [18] ... something to do with how PubMed searches for synonyms of the keywords you enter in a search ...someone explained this diffrence somewhere above, I'm not the best person to ask, didn't know what MeSH was before this conversation, just about was aware of ICD before I came to wikipedia ... but these are things that an encyclopedia should concern itself with. Do you mean Medlineplus when you are talking about inaccurate info? (e.g. [19]). MeSH is just a list of terms, I don't see how it can be drastically wrong... whereas a Medline plus is a patient advice type enclopedia, with v few references. I can see how MedlinPlus could contain questionable and undesirable info as an EL, but I don't really consider MeSH to be an EL, it's more part of the classification. Lesion (talk) 13:54, 23 July 2013 (UTC) Just saw above where you specifically criticized this example of a MeSH link. Lesion (talk) 13:59, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

MeSH and ICD are really quite different. From a practical standpoint, the controlled vocabulary of the Medical Subject Headings indexing system [20] is a useful tool for PubMed searches [21], and are especially convenient when making specific ("efficient") searches on particular topics. While the alpha-numeric codes are only of organizational significance, the MeSH headings themselves (and the synonymous PubMed entry terms) really are useful. On the other hand, the alpha-numeric ICD codes actually are of some relevance both to patients [22] and professional (epidemiologists etc). That's one reason why I feel it's a good idea to link to MeSH entries via the heading and to ICD via the codes
For example (formatting apart):

• MeSH term: Cancer
• ICD-10: C00—C97

(Also, you'd scarcely want to have a template for tabulating 98 ICD-10 codes plus another similar bunch of ICD-9...) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.161.251.139 (talk) 15:40, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

86.161.251.139 (talk) 15:35, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Looks good, would support using this template. --WS (talk) 15:29, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

If we leave the content in the infobox than the template is not needed. It is not like our infoboxes are overly long thus I see no need. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 15:37, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

The terseness of our info box is the problem, as well as the issue of external links already covered. Our infobox is unhelpful for nearly all our readers. Proper external links, each justified per WP:EL, is much more useful and belongs at the end. And a bigger wider box gives us a chance to make the categorisation codes provide some information rather than meaningless codes. Colin°^Talk 10:17, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Even if MeSH remains in the infobox, per James, I feel the meaningless MeSH codes might readily be substituted by a bot so as to link to the actual heading - eg Leukemia, hairy cell. As I've argued elsewhere, I also feel it might be more helpful to link to Entrez (eg Leukemia, hairy cell) rather than the MeSH browser we currently use. That's because Entrez pages for MeSH terms incorporate the PubMed search builder tool [23], letting you use the term directly in ways that the MeSH browser doesn't. 86.161.251.139 (talk) 16:29, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

I would much rather see all the Emedicine stuff on a single line. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:02, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Once removed from the constraints of the infobox, with its meaningless terse code, people can format the external link how they like. Colin°^Talk 10:17, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Infoboxes: Moving data to Wikidata

Independent of the outcome of this discussion I think it is important that the data is copied to Wikidata first. The various codes ensure that the interwiki-links are set right, that duplicate articles can be flagged, that duplicate codes can be flagged, etc. In addition we are starting this: links between genes/proteins, diseases, and drugs. So please give us just one or two more months to acquire the data. So everyone can check on the progress I made this table which I promise to update once a week: d:Wikidata:Medicine_task_force#Data_aquisition_progress. --Tobias1984 (talk) 08:27, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

There is no clear consensus to change anything at this point. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 09:56, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes, strongly support this. In the long run, I would imagine wikidata to provide a much better interface for accessing these data, e.g. as a tab on a wikipedia article or something similar and preference settings for if you want to see infoboxes at all or not. In the short run, it also makes it easier to move any parameters outside of the infobox, you could set up a template such that if you add it, it automatically takes the value from wikidata (e.g. you could add {{ICD_box}} to the end of the article without having to specify the codes there). --WS (talk) 11:08, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Alzheimer research article

I happened to see Wikipedia:Articles for creation/Alzheimer's Disease and Prions - can someone save it? - it has been there since 2012. XOttawahitech (talk) 14:48, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Should probably be deleted. There are statements like "Prions have been discovered to be extremely deadly, resulting in diseases such as Parkinson's Disease and Huntington's Disease.[11][10]" supported by a primary research mouse model [24] and a paper on yeart [25]. Last time I checked yeast neither get Parksison's nor Huntingtons. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 03:20, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for responding Doc James. Could you please clarify your comments – are you saying that:

• The article is poorly written and does not describe the research accurately?

or that:

• The research itself is flawed?

The reason I brought this up here is that as it stands this is the only Alzheimer research-related article I can find on wikipedia. See Category:Medical research. Thanks for any feedback. XOttawahitech (talk) 15:11, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

The first. What about Alzheimer's_disease#Research_directions and Alzheimer's_disease_clinical_research? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 16:05, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks Doc James, I have added both of your suggestions to Category:Medical research. As far as Wikipedia:Articles for creation/Alzheimer's Disease and Prions is concerned, since you say it is poorly written why should it be deleted instead of improved? XOttawahitech (talk) 15:17, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

Would be easier to start from scratch IMO. Could probably be summarized in a couple of sentences. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 15:31, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

Sorry to say I'd have to second that. 86.161.251.139 (talk) 16:34, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

The AFC should be abandoned, we have Alzheimer's disease clinical research (which may be a mess, but whatever), write the correct text there. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:31, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

That article was actually published in mainspace as a student project, then months later the user requested deletion. When I noticed that the article was deleted in mainspace I asked why to the admin and they replied here). Student #67 on the course page. Biosthmors (talk) 13:51, 23 July 2013 (UTC) And Biochemistry of Alzheimer's disease exists, FYI, Ottawahitech. Biosthmors (talk) 13:53, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Marking articles with open access icon

A small version of this icon could appear in the citation for references which are open access

How does WP:MED feel about marking citations with an icon which indicates whether the source referenced is open access or only viewable by those with subscriptions? The rest of this post gives background to that question and nothing more.

The Cochrane Collaboration is an organization which publishes excellent reviews which would be great for this board to recommend to anyone who wants a source with which to develop articles. It is my opinion that Cochrane is widely respected and gives conservative, non-controversial information backed by evidence. Cochrane's publications are expensive, but they have offered to give free subscriptions to Wikipedians who sign up at WP:COCHRANE. One controversy about this and about medicine in general is that health content is not accessible by everyone; only people with subscriptions may read this.

User:Ocaasi is managing the Cochrane project as part of a Wikimedia Fellowship - see The Wikipedia Library for details on the fellowship. For transparency in this Cochrane relationship, he has proposed that people accepting the free subscription also agree to tag any Cochrane publications which they cite with Template:Subscription required. This is an entirely viable and good response to get information into Wikipedia while also being mindful that few users would have access to read Cochrane articles or any subscription health articles. Here is how it would look to cite a subscription paper.

Dalip, Daniel Hasan, Raquel Lara Santos, Diogo Rennó Oliveira, Valéria Freitas Amaral, Marcos André Gonçalves, Raquel Oliveira Prates, Raquel C.M. Minardi, and Jussara Marques de Almeida (2011). GreenWiki: A tool to support users' assessment of the quality of Wikipedia articles. In Proceeding of the 11th annual international ACM/IEEE joint conference on Digital libraries (JCDL '11), 469. New York, NY, USA: ACM Press. DOI (subscription required).

However - User:Daniel Mietchen since at least 2012 has been advocating for users to have the option to more readily identify which references are by subscription and which are open access. Daniel has proposed that the most popular open access icon - an orange lock designed by PLOS but not their trademark - be that icon. This icon has been tested for months at meta:Research:Newsletter. It looks as such:

Publications that are either self-archived in an open access repository or published in an open access journal will be marked with an open access icon next to the download link, e.g.:

Laniado, David, Riccardo Tasso, Y. Volkovich, and Andreas Kaltenbrunner. When the Wikipedians talk: network and tree structure of Wikipedia discussion pages. In Proceedings of the Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM '11), 177-184, 2011. PDF .

Publications that are not open access (i.e. behind a paywall or tied to institutional subscriptions) will be marked with a closed access icon:

Dalip, Daniel Hasan, Raquel Lara Santos, Diogo Rennó Oliveira, Valéria Freitas Amaral, Marcos André Gonçalves, Raquel Oliveira Prates, Raquel C.M. Minardi, and Jussara Marques de Almeida (2011). GreenWiki: A tool to support users' assessment of the quality of Wikipedia articles. In Proceeding of the 11th annual international ACM/IEEE joint conference on Digital libraries (JCDL '11), 469. New York, NY, USA: ACM Press. DOI .

I was thinking that user:Ocaasi's Cochrane project should ask users to consider using Daniel's open access icon system. The advantage of Daniel's proposal is that a discreet icon indicating open or closeness is more quickly understandable and visual appealing than text which reads, "subscription required". Also, I think that by introducing this as part of the Cochrane project, the new practice of using this tagging system in templates could be introduced to an audience who already is interested in working with subscription academic journals, and who might already be sympathetic to community desires to identify what content is open and what is restricted.

What does this board think?

1. To what extent is it useful to give any notice that reading a referenced work requires a subscription?
2. To what extent is the open access icon useful as compared to the currently available text template which appends the words "subscription required"?
3. The icon could be added with its own template, or it could be integrated into the regular template with a yes/no field. If it were available, how often would people here use it?
4. How does this board feel about sharing sources on Wikipedia which most people cannot read for lack of a subscription?
5. It is my opinion that Cochrane provides high quality information of great interest to Wikipedians and which cannot be found elsewhere, and I do not think that is debatable. But I will ask anyway - what are this board's thoughts on using Cochrane information to develop Wikipedia? Perhaps post comments on the talk page of WP:COCHRANE.

Thanks for your attention. Blue Rasberry (talk) 16:28, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes support the addition of the open and closed access symbols. Should be in the template. Is there an automated tool that could do this? The question of sharing sources is completely different than the icon one. Our use of sources must comply with the law. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 16:52, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Those questions have been hashed over many times at WT:FAC and in the various citation templates. Basically, we do not require that sources be available online. In cases of sources of equal value, we would try to pick the freely available text, but when superior sources are not freely available online, we prefer them. To that end, if a source is already available, current practice is to link to the free full text in the article title. If the source is not freely available, we only link to the abstract via the DOI or PMID, but not in the article title. So, we currently already indicate which text is free and which is not, in practice. In other words, we already do everything we should do, and adding another parameter isn't needed (nor should we potentially mislead anyone to the idea that free full text is necessarily superior or desired, although sometimes it is). I wouldn't use this because it is redundant and just creating extra work; we already do everything we need to do, and adding another parameter to chunk up text and take editor time isn't necessary. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:55, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

I don't see how this "link the title if and only if the full text is freely available" rule is viable. There's nothing stopping new editors or even veteran editors from breaking it through lack of awareness. And they clearly are: I just randomly checked five of the identified Top importance, FA-class WP:MED articles, and at most one consistently followed the rule. Even if all Wikipedia articles followed it consistently, I don't see how readers would be aware of it. The icons are clear, concise, and intuitive. I can't imagine the icons being more work than the title-linking rule, as the rule would require editors to regularly trawl through existing reference lists to check for compliance. The icons could be added once, and then the job's done. Adrian J. Hunter^{(talk•contribs)} 06:28, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Welcome to Wikipedia: there is nothing to stop anybody from anything (WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS isn't a good argument, and exceptions to good editing are much more the exception than the norm).

On your assertion about "five of the identified Top importance, FA-class WP:MED articles", I can't take that at face value. Could you please list them? When were they promoted? Were they promoted by me? Have they deteriorated since promotion? We most certainly regularly and routinely follow the Wikiwide convention of linking when free text is available, not linking when it is not, and providing a link to the abstract via PMID or DOI. (See the Diberri template format filler.) I don't know where this straw man about (subscription required) even came in to the argument.

Further, this "rule" is not a rule specific to medical articles; it is best practice for all articles. We link text when available, the absence of a blue link means it's not available. That some folks may be doing otherwise (OTHERSTUFFEXISTS) isn't a reason to codify bad practice.

The icon will be equally meaningless to most readers, similar to the way we once promoted the use of a PDF icon, and I routinely had to fix those in every FAC nomination-- no one used them, and all they did was clutter up text with an extra parameter that no one cared about, understood, or used. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:35, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

I just checked every second article in this list, yielding Bacteria (promoted Dec 2003), Influenza (Nov 2006), Major depressive disorder (Dec 2008), Multiple sclerosis (Oct 2005), and Schizophrenia (Aug 2003); only Multiple sclerosis appeared compliant. But my main point is that even if all articles followed the rule, a reader could peruse Wikipedia for years without ever realising the significance of whether the title is linked. Heck, I've been editing for seven years and I'd never heard of this rule, which is not documented in Wikipedia:Citing sources, Wikipedia:Inline citation, Help:Referencing for beginners, Wikipedia:Citation templates, or Help:Footnotes. I think the lock symbols are intuitive, but any reader who doesn't understand them will be no worse off than under the current system, and should only need to mouseover one of them for an explanation. Adrian J. Hunter^{(talk•contribs)} 08:03, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

I looked into this, and found a can of worms on numerous fronts. Not wanting to divert this discussion, and not having time right this moment to address all of this, I will later start a new section here to examine the long-standing and growing problem of what is covered in way too many citation guideline pages, including our own at MEDMOS (which I just reviewed because of this section). (Mention of current practice in medical articles is buried in those pages, but not very effectively by the way and then contradicted in other pages!) More later, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:30, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

This is a good idea. Whilst we were already sort of doing this by linking to the free full text if it was available and linking to the DOI/PMID if it was paywalled ... consider the fact that the readers might not immediately understand this "secret code". The little graphic makes this immediately obvious and offers improvement over the current appearance. I don't think we should be put off by the work involved, after all I assume one, possibly many bots will be carrying out this task... Lesion (talk) 20:21, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

It is not a "secret" code-- it is the way sources are routinely listed on any kind of article. If there's a blue link, it goes to text; if there's not, it doesn't. The little graphic will be no more obvious or useful to our editors or readers than the older PDF icon was. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:35, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

It's a bit more complicated. At Wikipedia:WikiProject Open Access/Signalling OA-ness, I have listed the options to signal compliance with the Budapest Open Access Initiative's definition of open access (basically, CC BY, without any embargo). The orange lock – while originally intended to signal CC BY – has frequently been used to signal "free to read" (i.e. open access in the broader sense), including in the examples Lane cited above. So there are at least three levels of openness that the signal will have to be able to convey:

1. Free to read and to reuse
2. Free to read but not to reuse
3. Paywalled

As for defining reuse, perhaps we could concentrate on cases where reuse is possible on Wikimedia projects, so that editors can then see at a glance which references might be worth a look for illustrations and other materials that could help improve the respective Wikipedia articles. This would mean signaling compatibility with CC BY-SA, which is strictly speaking not BOAI compatible, but given that almost no scholarly journal articles have been published under CC BY-SA so far, the difference to signaling compatibility with CC BY would be negligible in practice.

In terms of automation, a list like this one could be used to implement license signaling on a per-publisher basis, but this only works if everything from that publisher is licensed the same way (or at least, compatibly), which clearly is not widely the case. License signalling on a per-article basis is not yet available but on the horizon – CrossRef are working on it, and it is likely to become a component of the DOI bot once it is ported to Wikimedia Labs. For things that are paywalled at the publisher's site but may be available for free from elsewhere, automation would probably involve crawling the Web like Google Scholar does. -- Daniel Mietchen (talk) 20:42, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

If it's going to be implemented automatically, then it really needs to be done on a per article basis. How else can the large quantity of ones be dealt with, that become open to read after an embargo? Hildabast (talk) 10:24, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Arbitrary OT break: Talking of Cochrane...

Oops, missed a question:

It is my opinion that Cochrane provides high quality information of great interest to Wikipedians and which cannot be found elsewhere, and I do not think that is debatable. Blue Rasberry (talk) 16:28, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

I don't have full access to Cochrane, but from what I know, yes, this is debateable in the case of Tourette syndrome. I've seen no reason to believe that Cochrane has superior information on TS. In fact, based on this, I would say Cochrane is inferior (a review authored by the main proponent of and author of the original studies, conclusions at odds with some other independent authors on the topic???) I've just glanced at everything Cochrane has on TS and the content is inferior. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:10, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

See PMID 22747638. IMO it's not a question of "inferior"/"superior", but rather the role of expert judgement calls in EBM. Paraphrasing: According to a recent Cochrane review on XXX, definite conclusions cannot be drawn, because of lack of sufficiently reliable data. Notwithstanding, many experts think XXX is recommendable in XYZ circumstances. In such cases we think XXX should be taken into consideration. #Role of expert opinion? 86.161.251.139 (talk) 19:37, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Another example of the "superior" Cochrane reviews can be found at Talk:Ketogenic diet. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:35, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

...an example of an "ideal source talk" ?! ;-) —86.161.251.139 (talk) 17:30, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Actually, it's not a good example, because that conversation was not finished - it's still on my list to get back to - and on the scale of quality, it's not an example of a really bad review. There are however many very bad systematic reviews, just as there are very bad articles of any study type. Being Cochrane is no guarantee that they're not bad or even egregious. But it's been said in this discussion that the highest quality articles were not likely to be open access articles, and that's demonstrably false. I suspect it's a hangover from the very early days of OA publishing - or it doesn't take into account the ones that will be free to read after a year (which includes new/updated Cochrane reviews from now on). But take the journal PLOS Medicine (COI - I'm an editor there, and I have a couple of articles about systematic reviews there). This is arguably the top - or certainly near the top - of the medical journal quality tree now. The fact that research funded by major funders like Wellcome Trust, NIH, MRC, NHMRC, CIHR all have to be available in a public access version at least after an embargo makes it patently clear that while it can't be said that being free to read is any guarantee of high quality, the argument that it's likely that an OA article is not the best of a given group is not sustainable. The odds are either even (likely) - or somewhat tilted in favor of free to read being likely to be better. Hildabast (talk) 10:37, 19 July 2013 (UTC) Oops - corrected Hildabast (talk) 10:41, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

I cannot decipher what 86's cryptic comment of 17:30 means, but to my other concerns expressed elsewhere on this page, it is not at all an example of typical talk page discussions, wrt the problems we most frequently encounter on Wikipedia and which take most of our time. A more typical scenario of what chews up a lot of editing time can be seen by following all of the links here, which I suggest that involved (and new) MED participants do in terms of understanding my "pie in the sky" concerns relative to other issues that are taking editor time here. In other words, this is a plea for relatively new editors to be aware of how limited the number of experienced WP:MED editors are, and how much work they need to do just to keep out really bad stuff here, much less be able to find time to add new/good content. "First do no harm", please.

Also, in that particular discussion and series of edits, please note this discussion of citing sources at MEDMOS (please do not add your own opinions or engage in overanalysis of studies in what often becomes an attempt to discredit sources rather than just state conclusions). [26]

But it's been said in this discussion that the highest quality articles were not likely to be open access articles, and that's demonstrably false. Hildabast (talk) 10:41, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Could you please point out where that was said? I'm unable to find any statement of that nature and it is helpful to clarify so as to avoid misunderstanding, inadvertent or otherwise. Thanks in advance, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:25, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Sure, it was this statement "It is my experience that the highest quality sources aren't typically freely available." If I misunderstood it, then I'm happy to just let this go. Regardless of what this statement meant, the only point I'm trying to make is that certainly for review content, it is possible now to state a preference towards free to view, because odds are, there is one. It's such a big trend, that in many areas of health, considerably more than half are free to view, and they are the higher quality ones. That can be different in different disease areas, that's true, but across the board now, the trend is towards public agencies having paid for them (or done them, in the case of health technology assessment agencies), and with the exception of Cochrane, that means free to view (even if only after an embargo period). The trend is major and it's been happening fast. Hildabast (talk) 20:52, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks-- I now see the source of the misunderstanding and have amended my original post (which was vaguely worded) to clarify. It is my experience referred specifically to the area I most edit (tic disorders, and other sometimes comorbid conditions), where the highest quality reviews are not Cochrane. Regards, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:14, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Arbitrary break: what to do?

• At this point, we have the opposite possibility: tagging non-free content by tagging such sources with {{subscription required}}. However, I don't think it's used much. And for this exact reason I would only be in favor of such tags if this could be automated. Otherwise it becomes haphazard and risks to be more confusing than anything else. One more concern that I have is that an icon for OA articles would somehow get to be interpreted as that such sources are somehow superior, which is not necessarily the case. --Randykitty (talk) 16:58, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes unless it is done automated and with a single edit I would oppose as well. The last thing I need is to see them being updated one by one. And more confusion and more people being distracted from writing content. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 00:47, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm seeing a lot of talk of automation and bots on this page, and a lot of it from people I have never seen actually building content and editing articles and engaging the more typical editing situations we deal with day in and day out here. I'm worried about the direction this WikiProject is headed; there seem to be a lot of editors with ideas about automation, bots, automated source listing, benefits of certain types of sources, but declining recognition of day-to-day issues of editing. It all looks very pie in the sky from my editing experience. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 02:04, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

After having writing as much medical content here on Wikipedia as anyone, I do not see bots as a pie in the sky, just as one potential tool to help make minor very specific changes. Yes the real work is writing the content and we need more people doing it. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 13:54, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

I am not referring only to automated editing wrt "pie in the sky" (although certainly some editors here may not have had the pleasure of dealing with intransigent bot operators or technical-minded editors determined to impose their views on articles in spite of content deterioration); I am referring also to an absence of knowledge about what issues we seriously face in here, and the most important issues relative to where we should be spending our time. Icons to indicate free access would be a lovely idea if we weren't spending most of our time dealing with POV pushers and university students with a grade-school level command of prose and research and plagiarism who wouldn't know, won't read, and couldn't care less about whether a source meets or not MEDRS, and is free or not. I am using "pie in the sky" to reference some of the rose-colored statements about where we might end up in the "long run" on Wikipedia: in fact, on Wikipedia, most of our time is not spent in discussions like this with well-meaning, professional editors who understand sources, but rather dealing with trolls, POV-pushers, ill-equipped, and others demonstrating "frank psychopathology". I understand some here are optimistic that some of these proposals will advance the ball wrt the real problems, but I am frustratingly finding that our time could perhaps be better spent in focusing on some of our more serious concerns. "First do no harm" has been stuck in my brain since reading Talk:Ketogenic diet. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:45, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Personally, I don't think "subscription required" is an ok option at all: firstly because it's not true - you can pay for a single article, you don't have to buy a whole subscription. Very few publishers don't have pay per view these days. Secondly, the whole thing of pointing people to publishers' websites with "subscription required" is a marketing approach - it is suggesting/implying subscribing an action, and it's sending people to a commercial environment in which a variety of sales pitches are happening, including seeking to channel people's next article to look at within that stable. Thirdly, it may deter people from clicking at all, thinking there is no free content to be seen, and that's not true. There is at least an abstract. I really agree with what SandyGeorgia's saying about quality and appropriateness of content being important: and there is no reason to assume that the Cochrane brand is going to be good quality or better quality than one of the open access systematic review communities. Indeed, on sheer numerical grounds at all, the best and most recent systematic review to answer any random question is unlikely to be a review from any one single "brand" or community - although there are some topic area exceptions where that's not true and most decent systematic reviews will be from Cochrane. Hildabast (talk) 02:41, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Actually, I personally go a different way. All other things being even close to equal, I'll cite the open access option, both for readers to be able to see if they want more information and to increase the number of people who are able to call me on it if I've made a mistake or twisted something. That being the case, for me, by definition a non-open access group can't be in a preferred position if there are other groups that are at least comparable. The open access systematic reviewing community is large and worthy of support. Hildabast (talk) 02:50, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

I find myself in agreement with Hildabast. First, subscription required isn't widely used in our medical citation format, and that is a red herring. And yes, all other things being equal, we prefer freely available sources to those that are not. It is my experience (corrected to clarify: with Tourette syndrome SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:14, 19 July 2013 (UTC)) that the highest quality sources aren't typically freely available. When they are, I prefer them. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:35, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

The purpose of references is to direct readers to where our article text is drawn from. Whether that source text is available for reuse under CC BY is irrelevant to that purpose. So if this icon is used by some people/sites to indicate truly free-content material then using it for merely free-to-read material would cause confusion. WP:MEDMOS has long advocated what Sandy describes: we hyperlink the article title if the source is available for free. Our citation format typically includes other hyperlinks from the DOI or PMID which readers can use to find the paper or abstract even when not free. While not all editors may be aware of this convention, it isn't a "secret code" as far as our readers are concerned. Hyperlinking the article title is a huge clue to the reader that this might be worth clicking. Whereas people with subscription journal access will generally understand the DOI link's purpose. Speaking as someone without ready journal access, following a link to a paper only to find out it is paywalled is like a slap in the face. $40 for a few sheets of paper is not an option for anyone but the super rich with money to burn. So I very much appreciate efforts by editors to distinguish the two when they can.

There are maintenance problems with the whole thing no matter how it is presented to readers. I can see an advantage to the citation template having a flag "Free to read" which could be rendered in whatever way the community agree, or even per reader preferences if Wikipedia ever got that smart. Sometimes papers are non-free to begin with but become free after a period of time. The PubMed database has a flag to indicate free papers but in my experience is it wildly inaccurate other than for journals that are always free or where there's a PubMedCentral copy. Colin°^Talk 12:32, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm also worried about the maintenance problem. Anything in Blood is free after a year, and more journals make things free after five years. If you tag a new Blood article as {{subscription required}}, you'll have to remove it once it's a year old. I don't mind offering templates for people who want to use them voluntarily, but I wouldn't want to waste my time on this. WhatamIdoing (talk) 14:59, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

"The purpose of references is to direct readers to where our article text is drawn from." Sure, but in the absence of a "Further reading" list under the sources, users will naturally tend to turn to the references to scan for "further reading", whether on the sourced information or the topic as a whole. 86.161.251.139 (talk) 13:25, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

I agree -- my point was their ability to read further (whether to check the sources, or to learn more) is in no way controlled by whether there's a CC BY licence on the source. Free to read is free to read, even if it is all-rights-reserved. Colin°^Talk 17:36, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Morgellons at the Dispute Resolution Noticeboard

At the Dispute Resolution Noticeboard there is a dispute about sources available to describe Morgellons, a disease in which people believe they have parasites in cases when doctors can detect no parasites. See Wikipedia:DRN#Morgellons.

Also, some of you may be interested in seeing the redesign of the Dispute Resolution Noticeboard. User:Steven Zhang has had a big part in this redesign, as well as creating the board initially and using that space as a hub to direct to all other dispute resolution processes. If anyone has not seen the changes then now could be a good time. I feel that this board is a much better resource now and it would be a great place to share problems should any come up which require general community support and not people interested in medical topics specifically. Blue Rasberry (talk) 13:25, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Ya know, with this new notifications system, I saw this post...fwiw I've just completed another redesign of DRN (sub paging and updates to code. Other changes are happening right now, but once these are completed my attention will be shifting to resolving the open disputes). Kind regards, Steven Zhang ^{Help resolve disputes!} 13:29, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

• FYI, the PubMed string
  morgellons disease[mh] OR morgellon* AND (Review[ptyp] OR review[tw])
  currently retrieves 10 potential MEDRS, including 8 6 not retrieved by the talk page bot (which uses "delusional parasitosis" as its main search term).
  See:
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=morgellons+disease[mh]+OR+morgellon*+AND+%28Review[ptyp]+OR+review[tw]%29
  Disclaimer: I did this search blind to the dispute.
  86.161.251.139 (talk) 14:13, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Looking for data

I am trying to figure out two values:

1. How many edits occur to medical articles in X amount of time. We used to have this page [27] but it no longer works. And we have this page but it seems to only list articles beginning with A [28]
2. Second value I am trying to figure out is how many people are active in this project and has this value changed over time? We have this list here [29] but it does not say how many have edited in the last 3 months (would love to have a bot to figure this out). We also have this catagory which lists 453 users [30] but same issue we have no idea how many article (once again maybe a bot)... Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 12:12, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

On the second, that list is fairly useless (so is the category, since some editors don't clutter their userpages which such). I took my name off that list years ago, when I got too busy at FAC, and never re-added it. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:03, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes realize that it is not perfect. Neither is the number of edits to medical articles as one is not sure how much represents vandalism and the fixing of such. I am sure the numbers of editors is less than many image. This might be additional justification to be careful with the education program as there is not a free army of teachers aids to "mark" the students work. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 15:37, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Any where I'm involved, WP:EDITCOUNTITIS comes in to play, since it typically takes me four edits to make one post :) :) If your goal is to get a handle on how many active editors are doing most of the work on medical articles, I don't think any automated tool or list can give you that, but I agree that the number is far less than most people realize, most of us know who those editors are (you, for instance), we are not enough to keep up with basics, and certainly not enough to be taking up time with "pie in the sky" notions. That is my concern about the direction this talk page has taken. I got the new DSM about a week ago, and instead of updating an entire suite of articles as planned, I've spent a lot of time here on things that in the long-run are not going to make a dent in the 95% of articles on Wikipedia that are horrible and won't be fixed with icons and lists of sources and such. Sorry to be a pessimist, but I'd like to see more engagement of problematic issues "in the trenches" before discussions/decisions that take time away from the precious few resources we have in here. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:50, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

1. It is often possible to revive stuff that died on the Toolserver if you find a technically minded person. If you want accurate numbers, then you probably want to sort through the main medicine-related categories to find articles that haven't been properly tagged for WPMED first. A list can be generated automatically.
2. Active WPMEDers and active editors in medicine-related articles are not the same. Many editors work solo. If you want WPMED folks specifically, then I'd use the page histories for WPMED pages as a source of editors' names. Again, you probably want someone who can sit down with a database dump and process all of this automatically for you. If you don't have any friends who can do this, then asking for help at VPT or BOTREQ (a home for tech folks, although it wouldn't require a bot) might be your best option. You could also try the Meta pages about the Toolserver transition as another possible source of help. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:55, 20 July 2013 (UTC)
   1. We used to have a page that listed every new edit made to Wikiproject medicine. Does anyone know if it still exists or how to return it to life? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 15:03, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

You mean this?: [31] --WS (talk) 10:34, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

Category:Ailments of unknown etiology

Category:Ailments of unknown etiology

This is the first time I've noticed this category. Thoughts:

1. Is it worth renaming it to something that sounds more encyclopedic? e.g. "Idiopathic disorders" or something?
2. I'm strongly suspicious that this category contains only a tiny fraction of the articles it should technically include... but hey, at least we included the important ones like Dancing Plague of 1518. =D Lesion (talk) 17:06, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Ataque de nervios

A real doozy, and a tribute to Wikipedia. Claimed to be in the DSM (really?), largely sourced to non-reliable sources, and so full of copyvio that it will take a major effort to clean up. Too bad we can't just shoot these kinds of articles on sight-- I don't have time to fix it. Found it by checking the contribs of the typical student edits I see on Latah, another doosie that takes more time than it's worth. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:37, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

Shouldn't culture-bound syndromes also be of interest to WP:ANTHRO? For example, Jumping Frenchmen of Maine, Dancing mania... 86.161.251.139 (talk) 10:22, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

Perhaps, but I'm not sure they'd be of much help. Can anyone who has a full copy of the DSM let me know if ataque de nervios is classified there as stated in the article? The source does not verify the text. That article needs to be massively cleaned out because of copyvio, etc. Same editors at Latah and others, breaking references, adding unsourced text, adding non-MEDRS sources, all have similar userpages, so I will take it to WP:ENB, since I don't have time to do anything else for now. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:37, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

I don't have the DSM-5 to hand, but it is listed in the DSM-IV as a dissassociative disorder NOS.[32][33]Slp1 (talk) 13:51, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Dunno, but it was listed independently [34] in Culture-bound_syndromes#DSM-IV_list_of_culture-bound_syndromes. 86.161.251.139 (talk) 13:53, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

OK, did my homework, filed at ENB, found the university involved, lots of articles impacted, don't have time to do any more today. Thanks Slp1 and 86 ... I may get around to cleaning up 'Ataque' if I have time ... copyvio an issue there. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:38, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

Well, that took all morning ... found the course syllabus, what next? [35] SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:48, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

Hmm... "Culture-bound syndromes rarely found in Western society are explored..."

I notice Medical anthropology has yet to receive a rating on the importance scale by WikiProject Anthropology. I'll notify the project of this thread at WT:ANTHRO. (Btw, here's a draft that hasn't seen the light of day of another culture-bound syndrome listed in DSM-IV: [36]... notable topic tho')
86.161.251.139 (talk) 15:05, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

Beyond irritated to know that a Wikipedia sysop is behind this. These very bad articles have been hitting my watchlist for several terms, and until yesterday, it didn't occur to me that student edits-- much less overseen by an admin-- were behind this. What a waste of my time. I get the most obscure, bizarre, and wondrous wiki experiences via articles that claim a relationship to Tourette's ... I hope someone else will deal with this, because this is just beyond frustrating. Doczilla gets free volunteer TAs, and I get a timesink on my watchlist. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:12, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

Seriously, no wonder so many of us give up in here. Doczilla SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:57, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes I have just trimmed more than 30,000 bits of text from sudden infant death syndrome. Before I got involved there did not appear to be a conspiracy theory that we had left out. Every blog got to weight in along with every 1960s primary source. Sigh. Pubmed and emedicine are often better than the garbage we have :-( Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 15:18, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

But was there an admin behind the poor editing in that case? This comes back to my concerns about "pie in the sky" addition of things like icons to articles. What we need is an army of editors to shoot poor text on sight, remove the tons of very bad info we have in every article-- we are so far from being in a place where an open access icon means anything. We have boatloads of garbage in here, and I doubt that a few of us will ever be able to address even 5% of it. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:29, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes excellent points. Havn't look that close to see if an admin was involved at SIDS but I do not think so. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 15:32, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

Problems with class editing Wikipedia

This content was formerly at the head of the section titled - "Ataque de nervios". Blue Rasberry (talk) 19:31, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

---

A professor and admin, user:Doczilla, hosted a class at a university in which students were encouraged to edit Wikipedia. Some months later, some Wikipedians asserted that the content which students added was low quality and copyright violations.

A complaint was made on the education noticeboard here - Wikipedia:Education_noticeboard#Attention_needed_on_several_articles_and_users. The class syllabus is here; this is unorthodox as participants in the program are encouraged to have an on-wiki syllabus.

It is my opinion that this professor did everything in good faith and as in so many other cases at even the best schools, some students seemed unable to practice report writing with competence. Wikipedia:Competence is required. Blue Rasberry (talk) 14:33, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Blue Rasberry, I am becoming uncomfortable with your refactoring of talk page edits here, and you taking on a role of providing something attempting to look like an "official" summary, while jumping the line.[37] Please refrain from refactoring posts and jumping the line to add your summaries after the fact to what was a developing situation when the first post was written ... feel free to add your conclusions at the bottom of the section. The role you've taken on here is adding to a budding feeling that this WikiProject is increasingly part of an off-Wiki venture, with editors who are paid for their time valued above volunteers' contributions and concerns, and I don't think that's what you intend. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:55, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Also, you are adding links to talk pages that will disappear by the time the sections archive: permalink. Since you seem to be building records, may as well make them permanent. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:47, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

I moved my summary from the head to a subsection. I hope that this addresses that concern of yours. I am not intending to have a overriding voice, but rather want to make the conversations immediately accessible to people who do not know the backstory. I find that most discussions become inaccessible after they reach a certain length, especially when they co-exist on multiple boards or in multiple places, and when the nature of the problem is not known until after some research. I am moving this discussion so that it will not be "jumping the line". I will address some of your other concerns on your talk page and you can bring them back here in their own sections, if you like. Blue Rasberry (talk) 19:31, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

I have changed the section header (yet again) because Doczilla's classes do not appear to have been affiliated with the Wikipedia:Wikipedia Education Program. I think perhaps this form of curating talk page threads is best avoided. Choess (talk) 02:03, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Request for help from AfC

There is a draft article at AFC that needs a lot of help - Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Kowarski Syndrome. The subject appears to be legitimate but the article is quite far from acceptable. Basically the writer needs a mentor, preferably someone familiar with WP article standards, MEDMOS, and the subject or at least the subject area - genetic disorders. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 18:48, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

There are some secondary sources at google books. [38] Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 20:53, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

the submitter of the article, who is the eponymous researcher of this syndrome, has requested further assistance to get his article accepted at #en-wikipedia-help ^connect. I think the questions remaining to be answered are for me:

1. is the Bioinactive growth hormone syndrome sufficiently well known enough to justify an article?
2. if the syndrome is well known enough, is it most well known as 'kowarski syndrome' or bioinactive growth hormone or similar?

I have searched biomed central/highwire and similar but find only limited results and don't have the expertise in this field to know if appropriate, so I have advised the submitter it would be better for someone experienced in this area to make the call about accepting the article into mainspace - can anyone assist? Best regards --_nonsense ferret 14:52, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Pornography-induced erectile dysfunction

The Pornography-induced erectile dysfunction article was created the previous hour. The topic doesn't look as though it is notable enough for a stand-alone article, and rather looks like it should be regulated to the Erectile dysfunction article...with WP:MEDRS-compliant sources of course. Flyer22 (talk) 19:05, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

Merge to ED, if there's a decent source, otherwise send to AFD. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:10, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

Clearly, the term "erectile dysfunction does NOT imply "that these men [sic] have a problem in their penises". Robinson & Wilson fails MEDRS. Imo, AfD it. 86.161.251.139 (talk) 20:35, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

And I guess you'd be hard pushed to find recent MEDRS, at least on PubMed... See:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=%28erectile+dysfunction[mh]+OR+erectile+dysfunction[tw]+OR+impoten*%29+AND+%28erotica[mh]+OR+porn*%29+AND+%28review[ptyp]+OR+review[tw]%29
86.161.251.139 (talk) 21:30, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

Discussion at Talk:Pornography-induced_erectile_dysfunction#Delete_or_merge?. 86.161.251.139 (talk) 22:12, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

Discussion at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Pornography-induced erectile dysfunction. --MelanieN (talk) 20:52, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Claimed paradigm shift in primary cause of American mortality

Can [39] be confirmed with WP:MEDRSs?

“ ... I trained for many years with other prominent physicians labelled “opinion makers.” Bombarded with scientific literature, continually attending education seminars, we opinion makers insisted heart disease resulted from the simple fact of elevated blood cholesterol. The only accepted therapy was prescribing medications to lower cholesterol and a diet that severely restricted fat intake. The latter of course we insisted would lower cholesterol and heart disease. Deviations from these recommendations were considered heresy and could quite possibly result in malpractice....

These recommendations are no longer scientifically or morally defensible. The discovery a few years ago that inflammation in the artery wall is the real cause of heart disease is slowly leading to a paradigm shift in how heart disease and other chronic ailments will be treated. The long-established dietary recommendations have created epidemics of obesity and diabetes, the consequences of which dwarf any historical plague in terms of mortality, human suffering and dire economic consequences....

the recommended mainstream diet that is low in fat and high in polyunsaturated fats and carbohydrates ... creates chronic inflammation leading to heart disease, stroke, diabetes and obesity.... What are the biggest culprits of chronic inflammation? Quite simply, they are the overload of simple, highly processed carbohydrates (sugar, flourand all the products made from them) and the excess consumption of omega-6 vegetable oils like soybean, corn and sunflower that are found in many processed foods.... Foods loaded with sugars and simple carbohydrates, or processed with omega-6 oils for long shelf life have been the mainstay of the American diet for six decades. These foods have been slowly poisoning everyone....

When we consume simple carbohydrates such as sugar, blood sugar rises rapidly. In response, your pancreas secretes insulin whose primary purpose is to drive sugar into each cell where it is stored for energy. If the cell is full and does not need glucose, it is rejected to avoid extra sugar gumming up the works. When your full cells reject the extra glucose, blood sugar rises producing more insulin and the glucose converts to stored fat.... Extra sugar molecules attach to a variety of proteins that in turn injure the blood vessel wall. This repeated injury to the blood vessel wall sets off inflammation....

While omega-6’s are essential -they are part of every cell membrane controlling what goes in and out of the cell – they must be in the correct balance with omega-3’s. If the balance shifts by consuming excessive omega-6, the cell membrane produces chemicals called cytokines that directly cause inflammation. Today’s mainstream American diet has produced an extreme imbalance of these two fats. The ratio of imbalance ranges from 15:1 to as high as 30:1 in favor of omega-6. That’s a tremendous amount of cytokines causing inflammation. In today’s food environment, a 3:1 ratio would be optimal and healthy....

There is but one answer to quieting inflammation, and that is returning to foods closer to their natural state. To build muscle, eat more protein. Choose carbohydrates that are very complex such as colorful fruits and vegetables. Cut down on or eliminate inflammation- causing omega-6 fats like corn and soybean oil and the processed foods that are made from them.... Instead, use olive oil or butter from grass-fed beef.... choose whole foods your grandmother served and not those your mom turned to as grocery store aisles filled with manufactured foods.

--Dr. Dwight Lundell is the past Chief of Staff and Chief of Surgery at Banner Heart Hospital, Mesa, AZ.... Recently Dr. Lundell left surgery to focus on the nutritional treatment of heart disease. He is the founder of Healthy Humans Foundation that promotes human health with a focus on helping large corporations promote wellness. He is also the author of The Cure for Heart Disease and The Great Cholesterol Lie.

”

If so, and if this really represents a paradigm shift, which articles need to be updated? PMID 19110085 is a 2009 review which seems to support the blood sugar aspect. PMID 22363018 and PMID 23010698 are 2012 reviews which may support the fatty acid aspect. EllenCT (talk) 19:25, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

Like most self-published materials that proclaim "paradigm shifts", this can be ignored. As the full text of your second source states, "there is at this time no universal belief or high-level evidence that n-6 promote CAD", n-6 being an alternate nomenclature for omega-6 fatty acids. That's where things currently stand; it's an intriguing theory lacking supporting evidence. The whole piece is rather deceptive, since the "doctors say cholesterol, not inflammation" premise ignores a well-known inflammatory source which is not ignored by doctors: smoking. The relative role of inflammation is undetermined, and is not wholly dependent upon ω-6.Novangelis (talk) 20:29, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

Definitely not a reliable source for anything other than this persons opinion and that opinion is not notable. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 20:50, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

Thank you both. I also found PMID 23538939, a review from 2013 which seems to indicate that Lundell's blood sugar assertions may also be uncertain. However, I started looking at this because of the brand-new population overview review at http://jama.jamanetwork.com/data/Journals/JAMA/0/joi130037.pdf which states that high blood sugar is the fifth most significant risk factor in the US. Is it considered such for the same reasons that Lundell suggests? EllenCT (talk) 22:58, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

It's more complex. While glycosylation of proteins is a prominent factor in cardiovascular disease, it does not explain the the association with cancer well. For example, insulin resistance means higher Insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1).[40] Diabetes affects numerous systems by a variety of mechanisms.Novangelis (talk) 23:34, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

Primary research

We have a user repeatedly adding primary research to the article on hepatitis C as per here [41] Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 22:22, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks - I just commented on that talk page. Egregious (though good-faith) WP:SYNTH. -- Scray (talk) 23:32, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

User:DrMicro is persisting in their attempts to add content using primary sources which do not mention the topic of the article in question. Wondering if further people could comment / watch the article in question. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 00:17, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

An education edit

What does one do with something like this with statements like "One study demonstrated that after 4-5 years of deferasirox treatment the mean LIC levels of patients decreased from 17.4 ± 10.5 to 9.6 ± 8.0 mg Fe/g."? [42] Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 02:42, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

Have moved it to a subpage. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 02:56, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

That statement is inappropriately detailed for a general encyclopedia. If the reference is a suitable secondary source, it would be reasonable to say something like "Deferasirox reduces the liver iron concentration". Axl ¤ [Talk] 21:02, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

User discussion moved

Dolfrog (talk · contribs) has raised concerns about Jmh649 (talk · contribs)'s editing/summary style, and I moved the discussion over there. Involved editors have been notified. -- Scray (talk) 05:15, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

Cardioplegia

I can see there is something wrong in the Cardioplegia entry. It's the following paragraph, which is incomplete in at least two points; it is perhaps the remnant of an unfinished edit:

"and then cold cardioplegia is given into the heart through the aortic root. Blood supply to the heart arises from the aorta root through coronary arteries. is in diastole thus ensuring that the heart does not use up the valuable energy stores (ATP- adenosine triphosphate) . Blood is commonly added to this solution in varying amounts from 0-100%. Blood acts a buffer and also supplies nutrients to the heart during ischemia."

However, I am not knowledgeable enough to fix it. Can anybody here do it?

Andreas Carter (talk) 11:51, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

Google books is a simple way to find references for this sort of content. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 11:54, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

The complaint, however, is that parts of sentences are missing. See the third "sentence", which begins with with the word "is". WhatamIdoing (talk) 14:49, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes, precisely, the first sentence starts with a lowercase "and", and the third one with a lowercase "is". I wouldn't know where to move these snippets. One possibility would be to delete the paragraph altogether, but I prefer to leave this choice to someone who understands the matter at hand. Andreas Carter (talk) 18:35, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

Reverse triiodothyronine

In early June, a new editor created a very long, and I think well-written, article on the hormone reverse triiodothyronine in his sandbox. I was concerned that he might be writing it to promote a non-standard view of the importance of this thyroid hormone, relative to two others, and told him so. But I know no endocrinology. I hope that someone with knowledge of this field can have a look at it, and guide him as appropriate. Maproom (talk) 16:02, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

Wow, 336 references! Anyway, the editor has been working with two experienced Wikipedians, so I think he or she is getting plenty of good advice. Looie496 (talk) 16:12, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

I have invited the editor to move the work into article space. Axl ¤ [Talk] 21:16, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

Ah, many / most of the refs are primary sources from the 1970s. It is not in a generally accessible style or wording. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 23:32, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

That many old primary sources, and the overcitation, and the inaccessible prose, are all suggestive of WP:SYNTH. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 10:46, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

My attitude is that the principle of avoiding primary sources should really only be applied to articles about large topics that are aimed at a general audience. I believe that articles on subtopics (for example, causes of Parkinson's disease), or articles about highly technical things, ought to be able to use primary sources as needed. In short, the more "in the weeds" the topic, the more freely it ought to be able to use primary sources. I'm not asserting that this article strikes the right balance (not having read it), but I do think there is a balance to be struck. Looie496 (talk) 15:01, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

I agree with Sandy that this article is poor. If the use of primary sources was the only issue maybe but this article requires huge amounts of clean up. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 14:53, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Suggest merging cretinism into congenital hypothyroidism

I'd like to suggest merging cretinism into congenital hypothyroidism. Discuss here. Klortho (talk) 16:14, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

The cretinism article starts "Cretinism is ... due to untreated congenital deficiency". But it later says "Cretinism arises from a diet deficient in iodine". Unless you accept the first definition, merging them would be a mistake. Maproom (talk) 18:07, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

Please discuss here. Klortho (talk) 23:30, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

You know you are going to enjoy reworking an article

when one of the ref names is just "Candida". Lesion (talk) 20:35, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

[43]? AndyTheGrump (talk) 23:56, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

=D =D =D Lesion (talk) 10:22, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Allegheny County Medical Examiner

Hi all, this newly created article has been nominated for deletion, given that it serves a major metro area (Pittsburgh) and has had 2 recent very notable experts as ME I thought it should be created. Please share your thoughts here: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Allegheny County Medical Examiner and constructive additions to the article are always welcomed. Thanks in advance! ^{Market St.⧏} _{⧐ Diamond Way} 05:10, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Why all the caps in the name of the article? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 03:00, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Perhaps it's the job title. Proper names should be capitalized. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:47, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

HepB vaccine article

I was researching the hepB vaccine and came across two Wikipedia articles that contradicted each other. This one states that Dr. Maurice Hilleman created the first HepB vaccine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepatitis_B_vaccine This one states that Dr. Baruch Blumberg created the first HepB vaccine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Samuel_Blumberg I am not a medical expert and I have no idea how to resolve this.71.108.32.224 (talk) 06:04, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Posttraumatic stress disorder

I was hoping an editor or two familiar with WP:MEDRS would be able to give an opinion on whether sources for the inclusion of material requiring service dogs as treatment are appropriate. Talk page has some details. Thanks. Yobol (talk) 19:23, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. Unfortunately, one of the two references has nothing to do with the topic, and the other, while a review, on the particular topic in question only found a cross-sectional study of 9 people that cannot prove anything. I'll address it on the talk page. Hildabast (talk) 01:52, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

User:32cllou

User is attempting to replace the conclusions of a 2011 review with one from 2006 as per here [44]with a review from 2006. Thoughts? As it is an active area of research I consider the 2011 review more uptodate. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 01:24, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

I had not been able to find supporting text/information promoting fish (Jmh649's cited reduction of cancer risk due to fish consumption) from Jmh649's reference. He has now provided that supporting text.

There is no scientific doubt that eating fish also means consuming many chemicals and metals known to promote cancer, as noted in the "~old" 2006 Am. Cancer Society Guidelines (which are regularly updated IF there's new info).

As for new data, note that consumption of fish and mussels recently also yields significant human exposure to radiation [[45]][[46]], which is known to initiate and promote cancer.32cllou (talk) 05:12, 24 July 2013 (UTC)32cllou (talk) 05:22, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

PS, my concern was prompted by the reports showing the radiation plume from Japan has grown and strengthened tremendously since the nuclear meltdowns. Fish bioaccumulate, of particular risk importance, polonium-210.32cllou (talk) 05:31, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

Proposed addition to MEDRS

I proposed an addition to MEDRS on how to determine a journal is probably not reliable [47]. Comments welcome. Yobol (talk) 12:09, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

This is based on an assumption that non-MEDLINE-indexed journals that meet PubMed's criteria are of lower quality, and that's not the case. Because of a variety of constraints, it can take years to get into MEDLINE, and the constraints aren't necessarily about quality. They're not rejects: it's just one of the alternate routes into PubMed. Same for PubMed Health - the systematic reviews that come in as full text through our system are not poorer quality, they're just not necessarily published in journals (such as NICE reviews). I do know that a lot of people have an interest in perpetuating negative assessments of open access publishing, but that doesn't make their claims justified. There are many journals that are MEDLINE-indexed that would come lower down on measures of quality than some PMC journals, and vice versa. But a journal that falls really below the line would not ordinarily get through either system. "Predatory" ones don't get into either. This has much in common with commercial encyclopedia publishers finding reasons to badmouth WP. Hildabast (talk) 15:40, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

I like your addition (second revision) in general and approve of helping editors discern reliable from unreliable journals. But I would add that MEDLINE is just one major indexing service. There are other major indexing services that are also indicators of reliable, high quality journals: Scopus, Science Citation Index, and Social Sciences Citation Index, for example. Thanks, --Mark viking (talk) 15:54, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

If additional indexing services are going to be used as indicators of quality, it would be helpful to have links that show on what basis they assess quality of journals they index. Hildabast (talk) 16:00, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

I know these indexing services from consensus positions in academic journal AfDs; they are mentioned in the article WP:NJournals on journal notability guidelines. Scopus has this page on content selection. Science Citation Index has this page on content selection, which also applies to the Social Sciences Citation Index. --Mark viking (talk) 17:00, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

I think the last sentence of that is the most important (or at least the most useful). When I have doubts about a source, the first thing I do is to look in Google Scholar at how often it has been cited, and who has cited it. Bad sources generally don't get cited by anybody except their authors. Looie496 (talk) 19:04, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

It would be optimal to keep this discussion together, in one place, which would be the link above (to the talk page of the guideline in question) ... I'm seeing info repeated here and there. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:28, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

Perspectives

Hilda raises the bar high! In several ways... Which is really exciting, imo. At the same time, I think we're all aware here that we need to find solutions that work (as MEDRS largely has, despite limitations) within our particular community editing environment where guidelines are used not only to provide a positive guide but also as a mechanism to defend against misguided additions. In practice, to keep the bar at a reasonably acceptable level. And all this without discouraging potential contributors to this project where (as in others) the decline in numbers of committed editors is such an obvious concern.

The reasons commercial enc publishers are able to badmouth WP clearly don't depend only on the theoretical limitations of our guidelines (example). We just don't have the human resources (or even individual library facilities) to cover everything that needs doing... let alone to achieve levels of best EBM practice which can feel painfully elusive. I'm tempted to ask whether a different approach is also required, beyond guideline mechanisms. Involving closer collaboration? Including perhaps more radical collaboration with (and within) NIH/NLM. For example... just off the top of my head... maybe online help desks providing academic librarian services ranging from non-free pdfs to evidence-based responses on literature searches and review quality. Obviously not primarily staffed by Hilda! Just saying... 86.161.251.139 (talk) 18:22, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks - I think! ;) But my main purpose in this discussion was exactly that - some of the ways we are trying to meet that need at a macro-level, is by selecting out good quality information that people can access, is through OA stuff in PMC Journals, and via Bookshelf & PubMed Health - including things like the NICE guidelines. Yet, MEDRS is arguing that it is not good quality unless it is MEDLINE-indexed. It won't be on Scopus or anything else, either, necessarily. So this advice is systematically rejecting high quality content that is ideal for Wikipedians. We can't provide the kind of service that you mention, because it would be against the licensing terms we have to adhere to. But we make it available through resources like PMC / Bookshelf / PubMed Health. At PubMed Health, we're literally curating. Hence things like NCI's evidence-based PDQs, NICE being there and so on. In the US, there's a national network of NLM libraries where you can get that support, though. And librarians everywhere are always worth asking for access to medical journal articles. They often have access to some or can get them. Hildabast (talk) 16:44, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

I doubt anyone could present a case for compiling clinical guidelines, say, on the basis of journal reputation... My understanding is that the MEDRS approach to the provision of medical information derives directly from Wikipedia's broader approach to its "encyclopedic" remit: in short, a verification strategy of identifying sources that are potentially reliable, applying good editorial judgement, and addressing discrepancies, viewpoint questions and other issues by reaching informed consensus in talk page discussions. Obviously, quite different from the world of systematic review... And necessarily so, given WP's volunteer community basis.
So, yes, I certainly do appreciate the potential to Wikipedia of initiatives such as PDQ [48], PubMed Health etc. I also feel that we need to be looking for ways (both in our guidelines, and perhaps outside the box too) to make quality medical editing here straightforward and even attractive. Whereas WP has little difficulty in attracting informed contributions on popular culture, areas such as medical editing seems to rely on the patience of a small population of regulars. 86.161.251.139 (talk) 14:56, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

Doc James (Jmh649)

I worry that Jmh649 is misleading Wikipedia/Cancer [[49]] to say eating fish reduces the risk of getting cancer. He also purposely omits known risk factors (processed meats, and fried or charbroiled foods).

Collapsed extended content-related detail to avoid duplication with Talk:Cancer

In general, much of the observed "benefit" may be a substitution effect; thus substitution of red and processed meats for fish may reduce cancer risk[[50]], and how you cook the meat or fish is very important (fish is less likely to be BBQ'd or fried). Finally, the the reference that may support the 2011 review statement that fish is beneficial is vague, and is based on dated observational cohort studies. I say dated (old) because the concentrations of environmental pollutants has increased over time, and is significantly higher now than when the data for those studies was collected. From the reference [[51]] you will find the following quote: "Limit consumption of processed and red meats. • Choose fish, poultry, or beans as an alternative to beef, pork, and lamb. • When you eat meat, select lean cuts and eat smaller portions. • Prepare meat by baking, broiling, or poaching rather than by frying or charbroiling." Here are several recent peer reviewed journal published studies finding increased risk (or known risk factors) of cancer from eating fish. [[52]] [[53]] [[54]] Jmh649 writes above that "User:32cllou...is attempting to replace the conclusions of a 2011 review with one from 2006 as per here [55]with a review from 2006. Thoughts? As it is an active area of research I consider the 2011 review more uptodate." Note that the Am Cancer Society Guidelines are updated as soon as new data is available. Here is the text I think most reflects the facts and review references (includes avoid processed meats, fried, or charboiled and removes fish): Dietary recommendations for cancer prevention typically include an emphasis on consumption of vegetables, fruits, and whole grains, and an avoidance of red meat, processed meats, fried or charboiled foods, animal fats, and refined carbohydrates.

Please comment, or join in Cancer Talk[[56]].32cllou (talk) 19:51, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

I have collapsed the extended content-related detail that is duplicated at Talk:Cancer so that we do not have this content discussion in two places at once. 32cllou appears to be notifying WP:MEDICINE of a content dispute at Talk:Cancer and inviting editors to join. I think this notification is a good idea and hope other editors do join the conversation there. Zad68 20:03, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes further input would be helpful. User keeps making changes without consensus. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 23:47, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Anatomy latin redirects

Hi, I've been meking use of a lot of the anatomy articles lately and I was wondering if it would be possible to organise a bot run to create redirects to all the articles with latin equivalents in their infoboxes from their latin names? --U5K0'sTalk_{Make WikiLove not WikiWar} 13:24, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Hi U5K0, that should certainly be possible, saving you a lot of work. The most important thing would be to have a reliable and comprehensive source for the Latin names. The Latin interlanguage links could be of use, but I don't know if they are present in enough articles. If you have a list of Latin and English equivalents that could be of help. --WS (talk) 14:45, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

This has been proposed similarly in the past here -

• Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Medicine/Archive_31#Questions_about_categorising_redirects

and at other times people have talked about Latin names for articles.

• Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Medicine/Archive_30#Redirects_from_Latin_terminology
• Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Medicine/Archive_13#Head-louse_infestation
• Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Medicine/Archive_35#Renaming_skin_diseases
• Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Medicine/Archive_32#I_did_a_title_error

I do feel that people searching for Latin terms should be able to find the right articles. I am not sure how this should be done. Blue Rasberry (talk) 19:35, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

NicoBloc

NicoBloc (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) seems spammy, is this product notable? -- 76.65.128.222 (talk) 22:51, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes should be deleted as spam. Have posted for deletion. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 23:19, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Symptom stub needs template

• Orofacial pain -- this stub needs a template, but which?

• Template:Digestive system and abdomen symptoms and signs -- tempted to put it in this template, would be OK for the "oro" stuff, but the face is not really part of the digestive system...
• Template:Symptoms involving head and neck -- sounded better from the title, but it is virtually filled with neurologic terms. We have about 4 links stuck in the "other" section, but apart from that the template is about brain rather than head and neck generally. I note that epistaxis and post nasal drip are also on Template:Respiratory system symptoms and signs (I recently moved the latter there). Does anyone have any objections to me starting to put H&N signs and symptoms into this template, or is it intended to stay as mostly brain? Lesion (talk) 00:36, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

Sourcing question

Hi! I'm new to the medical side of editing and was directed here with a sourcing question. I'm working on Birt-Hogg-Dubé syndrome and was told by Zad68 that I should avoid MedScape as a source. However, the information I got from there is either too new to have been included in a review (late 2012) or only talked about obliquely in a review. Since the information is just two sentences, would I be better off citing it to the primary source, citing it to MedScape, or removing it? Sorry if I'm not making sense - I'm still learning all the ins and outs of MEDMOS and MEDRS. Thanks in advance for the advice. Best, Keilana|^{Parlez ici} 21:28, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes I remember conversations like this one and there were concerns that Medscape wasn't reliable. It's not a resource I choose to use but I'm curious what others might have to say about it... Zad68

If the disputed content is only 2 sentences, what is wrong with the oblique mention in the review? Oblique mention sounds like it might only be a few sentence too? Another option is to look at the papers which cite the primary source, some of those may be suitable to support the same content... Lesion (talk) 21:36, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

As an aside, "Birt–Hogg–Dubé" should use endashes, not hyphens, per WP:DASH. Axl ¤ [Talk] 21:48, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

Oops I didn't know that! I thought it was the other way around, sorry Keilana. Zad68 22:02, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

But, sometimes it's OK to use short dash in article titles, as in Drug-induced lichenoid reaction, correct? Lesion (talk) 22:23, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

I would discourage you from using the term "short dash". The term "Drug-induced lichenoid reaction" uses a hyphen. There are a few types of dash of various lengths. The hyphen is not normally considered to be a type of dash.

When the title of a medical syndrome is derived from the names of two or more people, the names are joined with endashes. When one word is used to modify the second, such as a noun modifying a verb, a hyphen is used.

Article titles should always be consistent with article text. Ideally, there should be redirects from potential titles that have misused dashes/hyphens. I have moved this article to the correct title. Axl ¤ [Talk] 09:57, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

The most important point is this: if you don't get it right the first time, someone can fix it later. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:49, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

My apologies, dashes confuse me. Keilana|^{Parlez ici} 16:44, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

• My impression is that Medscape doesn't pass MEDRS muster (I don't think they're MEDLINE-listed or rigorously peer-reviewed), but the articles are often simply republished from a reliable source (a peer-reviewed journal). When that is the case, the journal citation is at the top of the article. -- Scray (talk) 01:15, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

Hmm, okay, would it be acceptable to cite a primary source in this case or should I just remove the information entirely? Keilana|^{Parlez ici} 02:33, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

What is the contentious text and reference? Axl ¤ [Talk] 10:04, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

Medscape is a reliable source for some kinds of statements. Just about anything is a reliable source for some kinds of statements. These are the two statements:

mTOR functions in pulmonary angiogenesis and protein synthesis; loss of these functions may be the cause of pulmonary cysts in Birt-Hogg-Dubé patients.

Smokers with Birt-Hogg-Dubé have more severe pulmonary symptoms than non-smokers.

That last item looks to me a bit like saying the sky is WP:BLUE: smokers have more severe pulmonary symptoms than non-smokers in every disease. So I'd be inclined to accept that with any source at all. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:49, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for the input! Keilana|^{Parlez ici} 16:44, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm not so comfortable with using Medscape for discussing causes (the first quote) ... if it is not covered in any review, consider WP:RECENTISM and WP:NOTNEWS. Agree with WhatAmI on the second statement (not sure it is even needed, sorta d'oh). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:17, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

Hmm, okay, I'll keep an eye out for a review but until I find one I've taken it out. Thanks for the input! Keilana|^{Parlez ici} 19:43, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

You didn't give me the reference so I just tried looking at the website. It looks like registration is required so I haven't read any of its articles. The home page looks like it is mainly a medical news website with a small part allocated to medical journals. If the first statement is from the medical news section (i.e. not a peer-reviewed secondary source), it is not appropriate for Wikipedia. With the second statement, while I agree that smokers tend to have more severe pulmonary symptoms than non-smokers, I am not convinced that it is self-evident. Would all readers arriving at the page know that? Could the pro-smoking lobby challenge the statement? If the statement is indeed so obvious, it should be easy to support with a suitable reference. Axl ¤ [Talk] 19:50, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

• I'm going to repeat my previously stated opinion that for obscure or technical topics with a small literature, it's generally okay to use primary sources if no recent review is available. This should be done cautiously, particularly if there is any chance that the material can be seen as contentious. The main reason for using reviews is to avoid "cherry-picking", and that can't easily happen when the literature is small -- there aren't enough cherries. Looie496 (talk) 14:56, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Using primary sources to build an article is not desirable...if there are no secondary sources at all, topic is not notable, if there are only one or two secondary sources, this should give us an indication of the weight we should give the topic, and arguably should not use primary sources to expand the article beyond what content the secondary sources can support, as this would be undue weight. I feel there is no requirement to use primary sources in either case. Lesion (talk) 15:22, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

On rare occasion I've cited a primary source, but only in conjunction with a secondary source that references it, using the primary source to fill in some bit of detail that wasn't covered in the secondary. I can't think of a good reason to cite an "orphaned" primary source (unsupported by a secondary source that cites it) basically for the reasons Lesion laid out. Zad68 00:43, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Looie496, I respectfully disagree. While the prevention of cherry-picking is certainly a good reason to avoid primary sources, it is not the only reason. Primary source information is more likely than secondary source information to be subsequently refuted. Most importantly, Wikipedia is a general encyclopedia, not a medical textbook or a review of the literature. As such, if a statement cannot be supported by a secondary source, it is probably not important enough to be included in Wikipedia's medical articles.

In the case of orphan diseases, I believe that all such legitimate diseases would have secondary sources about them—in specialist textbooks if nowhere else. (Even many illegitimate diseases such as Morgellons have secondary sources.) Axl ¤ [Talk] 09:14, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

There is a big difference between "using primary sources to build an article" and "using primary sources to add a detail to an article primarily based on secondary sources". Out readers expect certain basic facts, like prognosis, symptoms, and treatment. These are not always interesting to every author of medical texts or review articles. The fact that the reviews in front of you don't choose to mention prognosis, or only give it one or two words in passing, does not mean that you should ignore this.

Additionally, this is a collaborative project. If someone adds an apparently accurate and uncontested fact and cites a decent primary source—one that is strong enough to support the weight of the claim, even if it's not the platonic ideal of a medical source—your options are really either to upgrade the source yourself or to leave it alone. We don't benefit from removing accurate, relevant, appropriate, encyclopedic facts simply because the stuff under the little blue number isn't perfect. The references list is not an end unto itself. We promote reliance on secondary sources because we want accurate, relevant, appropriate, encyclopedic facts, not because we want a list of references unsullied by primary sources. If we can get accurate, relevant, appropriate, encyclopedic facts with the occasional primary source included, then that's okay. WhatamIdoing (talk) 14:56, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Am so glad to "hear" what you say on this, WAID. It's the most sensible explanation yet, thanks. --Hordaland (talk) 15:54, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

"Out readers expect certain basic facts, like prognosis, symptoms, and treatment. These are not always interesting to every author of medical texts or review articles." Medical textbooks always describe those features. Review articles may take a more focussed approach.

"The fact that the reviews in front of you don't choose to mention prognosis, or only give it one or two words in passing, does not mean that you should ignore this." I agree. It means that you need to find another source.

"If we can get accurate, relevant, appropriate, encyclopedic facts with the occasional primary source included, then that's okay." On what basis do you decide that the fact is "accurate, relevant, appropriate and encyclopedic"? If no secondary source states this fact, it is much less likely to fit those criteria. Axl ¤ [Talk] 23:09, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

This is a perennial issue: if and when and how to cite primary sources, particularly in medical articles. There's almost always a proposal at WT:MEDRS arguing that the guidelines against the use of primary sources should be relaxed or enforced more leniently, and at the same time there's almost always a proposal arguing that the guideline should be made tighter and more restrictive against them. MastCell has written a lot on this, in fact in this current discussion on his User Talk he sums it up pretty well, answering a question about when should we know it's OK to use primary sources: The best answer would be "use common sense", but that doesn't fly in this environment. So we've settled for more prescriptive and restrictive guidelines, which is probably the lesser of two evils As a result of my own experience trying to do content development, I've ended up with a view pretty much in line with Axl's. There are times, occasionally, when I run across what looks like a really good and useful primary source, and as much as I'd like to use it, I don't, figuring "It'll be in a review article in six months or a year or so." It'd be great if we all had the same level of competence and common sense as WAID and MastCell, but we don't (I sure don't), and IMHO overall the project is better off with not opening the Pandora's box of primary sources. Zad68 23:55, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

We should be using recent high quality secondary sources which includes some review articles. But this is not a blanket statement that we should or must use / contain the conclusions of all secondary sources for the article to be GA or FA. It is simply a rough guide. Common sense must be used regardless of what policies / rules we create around sourcing. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 01:40, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Axl, I am willing to believe that some medical textbook, somewhere in the world, will have described those basic features. Every medical textbook will not do so for every single medical condition that is mentioned within its pages. Particularly where rare diseases are concerned, sometimes a medical text merely mentions it as a passing example, without elaborating on all the details.

We decide that basic information like a general overview of prognosis, symptoms, and treatment is "relevant, appropriate and encyclopedic" for Disease X because we know that they are "relevant, appropriate and encyclopedic" for every disease. This is no different from saying that the century an old book was published in or the year that a historically important person was born in or died in is "relevant, appropriate and encyclopedic". We don't need a secondary source to prove the relevance of these basic facts for this case, because they are always "relevant, appropriate and encyclopedic".

Accuracy requires having a source that is strong enough to support the claims being made. That source may or may not be a secondary source, depending on the type of claims being made. If your source is strong enough to support your claim, then you don't need another one. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:19, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

DSM-5 article

There's an IP who keeps inappropriately linking to political correctness at the DSM-5 article. See here and here. Flyer22 (talk) 06:24, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

Note: Help came along here. Flyer22 (talk) 10:59, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

Warned user in question. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 19:29, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Life and Death in Assisted Living

PBS will be running Life and Death in Assisted Living on Tuesday July 30th: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/pressroom/frontline-propublica-investigate-assisted-living-in-america/ I am sure the program will have information that is of interest to certain wikiprojects – but which ones? Can anyone help?(I am posting here because this project is listed on the talk page of Assisted living which has not seen any obvious activity since 2011). XOttawahitech (talk) 20:58, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:WikiProject Alternative medicine

and Wikipedia:WikiProject Deaf

and Wikipedia:WikiProject Death

and Wikipedia:WikiProject Disability

and Wikipedia:WikiProject Dyslexia

and Wikipedia:WikiProject First aid

and Wikipedia:WikiProject Genetics

and Wikipedia:WikiProject Health and fitness

and Wikipedia:WikiProject Homeopathy

and Wikipedia:WikiProject Medical genetics

and Wikipedia:WikiProject National Health Service

and Wikipedia:WikiProject National Institutes of Health

and Wikipedia:WikiProject Neurology

and Wikipedia:WikiProject Neuroscience

and Wikipedia:WikiProject Nursing

and Wikipedia:WikiProject Pharmacology

and Wikipedia:WikiProject Psychology

and Wikipedia:WikiProject World's Oldest People.

—Wavelength (talk) 01:10, 28 July 2013 (UTC) and 01:56, 28 July 2013 (UTC) and 14:29, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks Wavelength, I will have my hands full adding this notice to all the above wiki-projects and also to this one which I just discovered. Hope I will not be accused of canvassing(?). XOttawahitech (talk) 18:52, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Pornography-induced erectile dysfunction

I mentioned this article above, at #Pornography-induced erectile dysfunction. As is clear, it's now up for deletion. Flyer22 (talk) 00:20, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Low back pain nominated for GA

FYI, Low back pain is now nominated for GA and looking for a reviewer. Zad68 00:51, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

AHRQ Health Care Innovations Exchange

Hello, I am the Web Content Manager for the AHRQ Health Care Innovations Exchange. I work for Westat, the contractor that manages this project on behalf of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. The site contains more than 800 innovation profiles that describe quality improvement programs that have been successfully implemented at various health care organizations and hospitals throughout the United States. I would like to find out how I can use the collection to enhance articles about specific health care providers and topics such as EHRs, chronic conditions, patient safety, etc. All of the material on the site is public domain. The profiles contain evidence ratings that provide information about the strength of the correlation between programs' results and the implementation of specific innovation programs. The site publishes new profiles every two weeks and updates older profiles annually. I believe there is a lot of worthwhile information here that can be used to enhance Wikipedia articles, including health care stubs. I understand that profiles in the AHRQ Innovations Exchange collection are considered primary sources and that secondary sources are preferred, especially with regard to undue weight. However, each profile in the collection contains a "Context of the Innovation" section which provides historical material that could be useful for articles about hospitals and local health providers. The "Results" section could also provide primary source material that supports major themes in some articles. I would like to use the collection to contribute in a manner that conforms to Wikipedia standards. I am new to Wikipedia but feel there is value in making this government-funded content more available through open source platforms. I would like the community to consider how these resources could be used to update articles. I am eager to meet more people working on this project and learn more about Wikipedia best practice in general. Please contact me on my talk page if you have any suggestions, or I can provide more information. Also, can someone take a look at my edits to the main AHRQ Health Care Innovations Exchange article. I tried to reduce the PR language that someone else had posted and provide category headings that would tell users what type of content they could find on the site. I thought this was a step in the right direction for this article, but my edits got reverted along with edits on other pages. I understand why some of the other reversions took place but do not understand why my edits on this article are not considered beneficial. Thanks FieldsTom (talk) 15:46, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm not the best person to field this question... but I guess, if you haven't already done so, you need to take a look at Wikipedia's conflict of interest guide (full guideline here). 86.161.251.139 (talk) 22:22, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Consistent referencing style

One of the requirements for GA/FA is that an article should have a consistent reference style. Are editors obliged to use the same referencing style of a well established article? And should we do anything about it if they wish not to? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 20:07, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

I do not feel that articles should require consistent reference style. A health article may use template:cite doi which gives one reference style, it may use a technical citation style for any science content, a humanities citation style for cultural aspects of the health condition, a journalist's citation style for other content, and Wikipedia:Cite4Wiki's style for more content. There is no benefit to forcing a single style onto different content. Citations are supposed to serve the reader and editors should not be forced to serve citation formats. Wikipedia:Ignore all rules if the rules are in the way of helping readers and enforce the GA guideline if it seems best for readers. Blue Rasberry (talk) 20:35, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Okay so the date order does not need to be consistent. If some refs are simply bare urls, some use template and some don't this should make no difference? If some contain links to pubmed and other ref do not. All that in your opinion is okay? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 21:03, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

No. All references have to serve the reader and thus must be complete from the point of passing GA. Bare URLs should never pass GA. The ideal URL should contain a URL if it exists along with traditional citation information including author name, date, title, and work. It does not serve the reader to omit URLs when they exist, and for papers archived in PubMed they always exist and should be required. The time and work burden of making proper citations does fall to anyone who wants an article to pass GA. It would be great if anyone who cited articles in PubMed to use Template:Cite PMID to avoid any appearance of a shoddy citation. Blue Rasberry (talk) 21:27, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

This is (perhaps unfortunately) not true. GA requires that material of specified types (and only those specified types) be supported by an inline citation to a (barely) reliable source. It does not require anything about the citations, except that, as a purely practical matter, the reviewer has to be able to figure out what the source is, because otherwise it's not possible for the reviewer to check that the source actually supports the material. "GA" means "meets the specified six criteria". It does not mean that the article is "good" in the opinion of any individual editor or reader. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:34, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

WP:Citing sources says "Wikipedia does not have a single house style, though citations within any given article should follow a consistent style". Bluerasberry's idea of a different citation format for different kinds of subject/source within an article sounds a complete nightmare. Why would anyone do that how would that help any reader or editor? This isn't GA/FA guidelines, it is MOS common to all articles. Simplicity please. The last thing we need is someone edit warring over whether a source is humanities so they can use one citation format over another. Also we only url-link the title if the source is free -- there are url-links for the PMID/DOI that serve for all such indexed articles. It does the reader no favours to follow links to a demand for $30 for three sheets of A4. :-) Colin°^Talk 21:35, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

According to WP:SOURCELINKS: "If the publisher offers a link to the source or its abstract that does not require a payment or a third party's login for access, you may provide the URL for that link." If substantially more useful text is provided than what's available from, say, PubMed I feel it can be worth linking despite the paywall. 86.161.251.139 (talk) 22:08, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Consistent citation formatting is a requirement only for FA status. See Wikipedia:What the Good article criteria are not#.282.29 Factually accurate and verifiable, third bullet from the bottom. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:28, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Kinetic proofreading

I know this article, "Kinetic proofreading" , has been on Wikipedia for awhile, but I am wondering if someone here can check its accuracy. It uses a lot of jargon and is therefore hard to follow. Also, there is no project banner on the talk page. ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 06:36, 30 July 2013 (UTC)