User talk:WhatamIdoing

If you expected a reply on another page and didn't get it, then please feel free to remind me. I've given up on my watchlist. You can also use the magic summoning tool if you remember to link my userpage in the same edit in which you sign the message.

Please add notes to the end of this page. If you notice the page size getting out of control (>100,000 bytes), then please tell me. I'll probably reply here unless you suggest another page for a reply. Thanks, WhatamIdoing

Sourcing help needed

Hi there Waid, I hope all is well with you. I've a sourcing question. Our WP:MEDRS guideline says:

Broadly speaking, reviews may be narrative or systematic (and sometimes both). Narrative reviews often set out to provide a general summary of a topic based on a survey of the literature, which can be useful when outlining a topic.

I left everything Monsanto a few years back when it seemed to be a waste of my time but have recently returned to attempt a few edits. Glyphosate has not been reviewed since 2000 and I'm trying to add something more recent. I used this edit which was rejected with this edit summary: [[1]] Because BMJ calls it an essay I don't know how to translate that to anything that we list in our guidelines for med stuff. What do you think, would this be a narrative review? Gandydancer (talk) 15:47, 11 May 2019 (UTC)

There are a lot of recent review articles about glyphosate, such as PMID 28643882. One of them happens to be PMID 28320775 (click on the part that says "Publication types, MeSH terms, Substances, Grant support" to see where it says that it's a review). It might look familiar.

The edit summary suggests that the main problem is that some editors think the authors are somehow inappropriate. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:59, 11 May 2019 (UTC)

That does indeed seem to be the main problem. But does WP consider them to be inappropriate? How do I figure that out? Also, what about the "essay" question--does WP consider essays a form of narrative review? As for the sites you offer, yes indeed I am aware of them but it is good to see you point them out as well. Gandydancer (talk) 17:31, 11 May 2019 (UTC)

Oh! Followed up on your suggestions. Never mind my questions for now. Gandydancer (talk) 18:08, 11 May 2019 (UTC)

Allopathic medicine

Just in case you don't know this clip - Homeopathic A&E. Narky Blert (talk) 20:43, 14 May 2019 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Original Barnstar
	For your empathy and helpfulness on WP:ELN last week. Schazjmd (talk) 00:12, 22 May 2019 (UTC)

Thank you. What a nice way to start my day. :-) WhatamIdoing (talk) 14:57, 22 May 2019 (UTC)

Thank You

Thanks for your advice. I appreciate it! NPTruth (talk) 19:13, 23 May 2019 (UTC)

You're welcome. I hope that you stick with us. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:10, 23 May 2019 (UTC)

Nomination for merging of Template:Partisan sources

Template:Partisan sources has been nominated for merging with Template:Third-party. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Thank you. wumbolo ^^^ 23:15, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

WP:CEN is now open!

To all interested parties: Now that it has a proper shortcut, the current events noticeboard has now officially opened for discussion!

WP:CEN came about as an idea I explored through a request for comment that closed last March. Recent research has re-opened the debate on Wikipedia's role in a changing faster-paced internet. Questions of WP:NOTNEWS and WP:Recentism are still floating around. That being said, there are still plenty of articles to write and hopefully this noticeboard can positively contribute to that critical process.

Thank you for your participation in the RFC, and I hope to see you at WP:CEN soon! –MJL ‐Talk‐^☖ 19:10, 29 June 2019 (UTC)

Delivered by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) at 19:34, 29 June 2019 (UTC) on behalf of DannyS712 (talk)

WP:INHERITORG and WP:INHERITWEB

Hi,

You added these to the notability guidelines several years ago. Were these additions approved by the community? I've looked through the talk pages archives of the guidelines and WP:VPP and haven't yet found any evidence of that. Is there something I'm missing? The reason I ask is that WP:NOTINHERITED (an essay that predates INHERITORG and INHERITWEB) now makes it clear that it is not a guideline or policy, which could be taken as a contradiction to the notion that the concept is (right?) (In fact, I think I actually described it as a de-facto guideline, but was contradicted). Adam9007 (talk) 17:38, 5 July 2019 (UTC)

Thank you, Adam9007, for your recent updates to ATA. Perhaps that will help some people who are unfamiliar with the page. Of course, the page itself has been marked as an essay since the second edit, back in 2006, but Wikipedia:Nobody reads the directions, even if they're at the top of the same page.

As for those specific changes, I don't remember. I've done quite a lot policy work over the years, including writing what's now called WP:PGBOLD, which tells you how to change policies and guidelines. ;-) Usually, for me, major changes like that are either tightly associated with a specific discussion, or they were preceded by multiple discussions, spread over many months and sometimes over multiple pages. For example, I merged WP:3PARTY and WP:INDY a while ago, and I think that more than a year elapsed between announcing my intention to do so and actually doing it (and I was talking about the possibility on other pages well before that, including WT:V). It is therefore not always easy to find which discussion(s) precipitated an edit, even when those discussions happened.

Far more relevantly than my personal style for policy work, though, is the fact that those edits did reflect, and to the best of my knowledge, still do reflect, the view of the broader community. If they didn't, they would have been reverted some time during the last eight and nine years. There are three basic concepts in those edits, and all three are still sound:

• Notability requires sources. Editors can't just claim that in a just world, there would be lots of great sources for the subject. If a subject is challenged on notability grounds, you have to produce independent sources. If you don't, then the content needs to be merged or removed, because no independent sources means no neutral point of view.
• There's no such thing as an inherently notable subject. "Inherently notable" means that the subject would be exempt from the verifiability rules, which is impossible. Notability is conferred through independent sources, and no independent sources means no notability, no matter what the subject is (although there are some groups of subjects, such as US presidents and planets in our solar system, for which every single subject happens to be notable in practice, because nobody expects a US president to get elected without any sources mentioning it).
• And it's no good saying that some run-of-the-mill business deserves a separate article merely because its website says that George Washington once ate there, or because a celebrity owns it, or the business is otherwise trying to ride someone else's coattails to notability. If you're trying to establish notability for a restaurant (for example), you need proof that of "attention from the world at large" for that restaurant, not attention for someone who once gave it some money.

While I'm on this general subject, I hope you won't mind me ranting at you for a minute. I'm probably preaching to the choir here, but I was looking at the Fallacy fallacy problem earlier (for something completely unrelated), and I think we see this around NOTINHERITED. Just because the restaurant in my example above can't inherit notability from its famous visitor doesn't prove that the restaurant isn't notable. It could be exactly the kind of place that we really want to encourage articles on. "George Washington slept there (and he's notable, so every place he slept is notable, too" is what NOTINHERITED is dealing with. But if you've got independent sources talking about this place, then it still can be a notable place, regardless of whether Washington slept there. It's even okay if those sources are talking about it precisely because George Washington slept there (who knows? Maybe the next tourist fad will be to visit all the places George Washington slept). What matters is the "independent sources are talking about it" part, not the "Washington slept there" part. I think that part is sometimes unclear to people who are trying to quickly look up The Answer™ rather than trying to understand the underlying logic. As with all fallacy fallacies, rejecting the idea that the restaurant could inherit notability from a one-time guest doesn't result in us knowing that it's non-notable. It results in us just not knowing, full stop. The answer about its notability has to come from something else. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:49, 5 July 2019 (UTC)

It's even okay if those sources are talking about it precisely because George Washington slept there Lol, a while ago, I did an analysis of NOTINHERITED and its supposed connexion to A7, and that's basically the point I was trying to make with regards to claims of significance. I made those edits to ATA because, in my experience, NOTINHERITED is notoriously misapplied to speedy deletion and its lower standard of significance/importance too (I thought it needed to be made clear that there's not only a potential for sources, the misapplication ignores WP:ATD too). I've received an awful lot of cack over it, and I think it would be highly ironic (considering that there are a lot of editors who've had a go at me over it) if the 'Notability is not inherited' concept turned out to not be a community-approved guideline after all (much like how WP:Office Actions, despite being labelled as policy since 2006, recently turned out to not be a community-approved policy at all). That's why I really do need to know if there's proper consensus for it (speaking of which, many editors have either implied or outright claimed consensus for NOTINHERITED's application to A7 and significance/importance, but no-one's been able to provide any links... ). Adam9007 (talk) 20:23, 5 July 2019 (UTC)

This sounds like a problem that will be best solved at WT:CSD. Maybe an explanatory footnote in A7? It'd have to be just one or two sentences, since the regulars at CSD almost never support the additions of lengthy text. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:49, 5 July 2019 (UTC)

Well, it's something I thought was solved here, but apparently not... Adam9007 (talk) 02:22, 6 July 2019 (UTC)

Getting it into the CSD policy will ultimately be more effective. Wikipedia:Nobody reads the directions. If it's in the policy, in a couple of years, enough people will have noticed to make a difference. If it's in an explanatory essay, it takes longer. And if it's in the archives of the talk page of the essay... Well, I'm sure that a few of the people who participated in that discussion will remember it, but I wouldn't count on much beyond that. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:02, 6 July 2019 (UTC)

You mean I should start another RfC on it (its relationship with A7)? That one has actually been considered a local consensus. Adam9007 (talk) 22:35, 6 July 2019 (UTC)

I wouldn't start with an RfC. I'd start with a plain old talk-page discussion that basically says, "Hey, anyone mind if I add a footnote that says something like 'A claim of significance could be something like '<Business> is owned by <celebrity>' or '<Business> is the only <thing> in <town>'?" (or whatever brief bit of content you think would be appropriate). WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:07, 6 July 2019 (UTC)

Sourcing conflict

Hi, I would be grateful for some of your involvement regarding a long-running dispute on the article Alexander the Great in the Quran.

The version of the lede that I (and at least Furius too) support is this one. However, this version is being repeatedly reverted for this. The reverters while completely ignoring WP:EXCEPTIONAL, WP:NPOV and WP:ASSERT concerns, only argue against using Muslim scholars as reliable sources for the representation of Muslim opinions.

Can you kindly weigh-in on whether widely famous and respected Muslim scholars such as Syed Abul Ala Maududi and Mufti Muhammad Shafi with widely read and accepted published works should be considered reliable enough for their understanding of the views of their own demography? For, maybe a little too detailed, discussion regarding this, see Talk:Alexander the Great in the Quran#Opinions of "tiny minorities".

Additionally, given the overall POV and weight issues obvious in the lede proposed by the reverters, kindly also give an opinion regarding the overall lede.

-- AhmadF.Cheema (talk) 03:54, 23 July 2019 (UTC)

You should probably take this to WP:RSN, rather than to individual users. It might also help if you explained that your sources are 20th-century people, since the IP is calling them "traditional". An author from centuries ago, no matter how famous, isn't generally ideal.

I wouldn't be surprised if you are running into a cultural problem. A writer who is "famous" in one place can be "unknown" in the next, and when an "unknown" source says something that is unfamiliar or unexpected, then people often assume that the source is wrong or unreliable. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:47, 23 July 2019 (UTC)

Thank you for your time. -- AhmadF.Cheema (talk) 15:59, 24 July 2019 (UTC)

Train Station Notability

Your comment of 16 July sums up the confusion. Does anything now happen in coming to a consensus or is the matter left indefinitely on the back burner? Taking for example the stub page for a rarely used flag stop (comprising only a pole for infrastructure on a line having 3 trains per week each way), what criteria would administrators consider in determining if the page should be eliminated? Is it best just to ignore these stubs, and reluctantly accept that they poorly inform or sometimes blatantly misinform readers? DMBanks1 (talk) 17:41, 25 July 2019 (UTC)

Hello, DMBanks1. Staff don't make content policies, so you want to talk to volunteer-me, not work-me. :-)

If we are lucky, everyone will go back to their normal wiki editing, and the "all train stations are always notable" people will keep in mind that the actual rule is just a bit weaker than that.

If we are not lucky, then we will have to have this fight all over again.

And if your normal wiki philosophy is m:mergism, then I suggest that you consider whether some of the doomed Wikipedia:Permastubs could be merged up into bigger subjects (e.g., "List of stops on Example Line"). Someone quietly improving things doesn't usually get much opposition. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:38, 26 July 2019 (UTC)

Chronic Lyme

"Welcome to Wikipedia. Sometimes article titles are confusing, so I just wanted to make sure that you knew that the Chronic Lyme disease article isn't the same subject as Post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome. The "CLD" article's subject is people who never had a verifiable Lyme infection and probably have fibromyalgia. PTLDS is for people with ongoing problems after treatment for a proven Lyme infection. I know it's confusing, but it's likely that your contribution would have been more appropriate for PTLDS than for the page it ended up on. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:03, 20 August 2019 (UTC)"

I could be misunderstanding your aim here, but this comes off as extremely patronizing and rude. No, I didn't accidentally post to the wrong page. I guess I was foolish in thinking people like you hadn't locked down the two pages already with your outdated and close minded opinion on the subject.

Fauxreal9999 (talk) 02:54, 21 August 2019 (UTC)

Hello, Fauxreal9999,

My point isn't that you don't know what you're talking about. It's that it's not always obvious from the page title what editors have decided to talk about on that page, and it's not really fair to have new editors just guess and then tell them that they're wrong, without explaining why it's not what they're expecting. I'm only assuming that you're not a mind reader. That the English Wikipedia is an over-complicated place and often not friendly to newcomers is something I'm certain about, so there's no assumption there. ;-) WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:08, 21 August 2019 (UTC)

World oil market chronology from 2003

You responded to a question I had about the main template (specifically, I didn't know where to ask it) but you said what I should do about the article. Here is the discussion. If you don't know what to do about the article, I understand, and I'm no expert on how to write about oil, but I somehow ended up with the responsibility and I've done too much work to simply delete my additions. A summary might be nice if I can figure out how, but all the coverage I used as sources was short-term rather than something I can use to summarize an entire year, and it was mostly what appeared to be major events. Looking back, some may not have been that major, but the reasons behind price changes are important and need to go somewhere. For eight years no one told me I was doing anything wrong, after someone said I was doing a good job. Few people made other contributions.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 16:30, 31 August 2019 (UTC)

Hi Vchimpanzee,

I think writing about recent history is hard, because it's hard to find those whole-year type of sources that would make it easy for you. I'm reminded of the general business principle about not making a decision before you need to. Do you need to re-write the article right now? If not, then maybe wait a couple of years, and hope that someone will start publishing more about what happened. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:36, 31 August 2019 (UTC)

If you look at how long it is, that's what's got to happen. I can keep on adding major short-term developments in the shorter articles, which is what was suggested. I'm working on how it might look with shorter summaries, but it's still not looking right.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 17:55, 1 September 2019 (UTC)

Wow, 2013 looks a lot better than some of the other years.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 20:44, 2 September 2019 (UTC)

Help finding breastfeeding paper needed

Hi there Waid, I need a little help with obtaining a paper that is listed in the recent Signpost. I tried to find help from an editor that I know is sympathetic to women's issues, but so far have not found any help...so I turn to you because I know you will not fail me (and I just love you for that ). Rather than explain it allover again I will copy my note at Drmies page:

I need some advise or help. The latest Signpost issue has a section on woman stuff. It contains this study "Breastfeeding, Authority, and Genre: Women's Ethos in Wikipedia and Blogs." I tried to get a copy as it is available on the web and got as far as a note that my request had been sent to the authors, but I never heard back from them (which did not at all surprise me...). I'm the leading editor on our breastfeeding article and I have been for some years, most likely during the time that they did their study, and I'd like to see our work from their eyes. I'm guessing that I will be critical of their findings, but I think I may learn a thing or two as well that may help us to better present women's issues. Any advise on how to get a copy of this study?

Suggestions? Gandydancer (talk) 17:32, 4 September 2019 (UTC)

Did you ask User:HaeB about this? There's a link to the chapter on Google Books, but it only shows a few pages. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:49, 4 September 2019 (UTC)

You are mentioned on page 336, in the context of you preferring information from reliable sources over your own experience. It sounds like the authors believe that this is a failing. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:57, 4 September 2019 (UTC)

Yes I read the pages that were not excluded - and that was enough to piss me off a tad, that is for sure. Why they assume that someone that was interested in gandy dancers and yodeling could not possibly be very knowledgeable about nursing is beyond me. Waid, I have a master's degree in nursing and I worked for many years as a nurse manager at a large hospital. Plus, they ignored the fact that I was the leading or one of the principal editors of several other medical articles for example the New England Compounding Center meningitis outbreak article, several flu articles, childbirth, and perhaps a few others.

And then they get into a discussion that ends with my post about my experience about a decreased desire for sex while I was nursing - and it would not surprise me one bit to find that it is a biological fact to protect the newborn and someone should do a study on it, but until then it is just my experience. Who knows, maybe another woman wanted more sex. Good for a blog, not good for Wikipedia - even though they call it "troubling." Any thoughts on that?

Then they get into the nursing fashions bit. I tried to look that up on the talk page but the click for the old pages is missing. How can I find them? For now, Gandy Gandydancer (talk) 16:26, 5 September 2019 (UTC)

Oh, but who actually wants statistically significant information, or even the views of experienced healthcare professionals? It's obviously far more important to them that you're just a random female with your own individual experiences, and they are apparently untroubled by the idea that any individual's experiences could be anomalous and misrepresented as common, or even that people might tell outright lies. (We have some kind of magical software that can stop dishonest edits, right?) I think that they don't see Wikipedia as an encyclopedia. I think they see it as a sort of societal conversation, not very different from Twitter or chatting with fellow members of the women's musical club before the lady president introduces this month's performer.

The "fashion" discussion appears to have been a quite brief exchange, assuming that they're talking about Talk:Breastfeeding/Archive 3#Breastfeeding Fashion. Add prefix:Talk:Breastfeeding to the end of whatever you typed in the search box, and it'll search only pages whose titles begin with Talk:Breastfeeding (including all of the Talk:Breastfeeding/Archive pages). WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:49, 5 September 2019 (UTC)

Thanks. Incredible how they show that poor Fabiola's ethea (one of their favorite words) was "silenced." If they would have carefully read our sourcing guidelines they would have realized that Parents would work just fine to discuss nursing fashions. IMO the only thing that silenced Fabiola is that she realized that it's easy to ask that something be added to an article, but doing it yourself takes quite a bit of time and energy.

Waid, reading this article adds to my suspicion that a lot of research is just plain crap. I think that a lot of research starts with a preconceived idea and then does "research" to prove they're right.

PS - Reading the talk page, gosh it's been six years! I wonder how the Drmies little jerks are doing? Gandydancer (talk) 18:03, 6 September 2019 (UTC)

I thought it was common knowledge that a nursing woman's desire for sex was lowered? Anyway, my little "jerks"--what can I say. Jerk #2 just had her second period--in second period! We had a good laugh over that. Jerk #3 is 7 and a huge nerf gun fan, so I have to be on my toes ALL THE TIME. (I keep one under my pillow--for the insiders, the Triad is really small and handy, but not accurate.) Drmies (talk) 23:07, 6 September 2019 (UTC)

User:SummerPhDv2.0 was involved in the fashion "discussion". I don't know what the authors of that paper (chapter?) thought should be done. Summer provided practical advice about how not to get reverted. Perhaps they wanted more cheerleading to go with it?

Drmies, we're not after "common" knowledge. We're supposed to be "constructing" it, and the common stuff already exists. Only maybe you're not supposed to be constructing it at all, since this is all lady stuff?

And that reminds me that I'm in the market for a new toolbox. Any advice? The goal is to replace an old-fashioned metal one that weighs about a million pounds, which I'm tired of lifting up and down from a shelf that's slightly above shoulder height. Plastic, fabric, something else? It's for small woodworking-ish tools that I don't use very often, if that affects the recommendations. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:46, 7 September 2019 (UTC)

(Stray comment) The study concludes:

...[Blogs are] culturally saturated spaces that can reinscribe cultural privilege through both implicit and explicit narratives...

It seems not to realise that avoiding this sort of thing is the part of the reason for the Wikipedia policies it decries.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 09:21, 23 September 2019 (UTC).

Hello

Hello WhatamIdoing