Wikipedia talk:Biomedical information

Revert

WAID, I reverted your edit because it would be a major change. An RS has to be appropriate, not just something that an editor has added in good faith. "Appropriate" for biomedical information means MEDRS-compliant. SarahSV ^(talk) 15:50, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

Limits of BURDEN

This page has misrepresented WP:V for several months. We need it to be accurate and to not contradict the actual policies. The actual policy says "The burden to demonstrate verifiability... is satisfied by providing a citation to a reliable source that directly supports the contribution." and goes on to clarify that for the purpose of 'your right to summarily blank other people's contributions', reliable is defined as "any source that he or she [the other editor, not you] believes, in good faith, to be sufficient", which includes sources that editors ultimately, by consensus, agree are not actually reliable for the claim made.

So let me explain the main options, and we'll see whether we can come up with a better way to say this.

What's in the essay	Your options
Medical claim that you believe to be accurate, neutral, and appropriate for this encyclopedia article, but not sourced at all: "Smoking tobacco increases your risk of dying from lung cancer."	You are permitted to blank unsourced content (that's "zero sources whatsoever", not "zero sources that I approve of") under WP:BURDEN, but you probably shouldn't, at least as a first step. Add a {{fact}} tag, or add a good source yourself.
Medical claim that you believe to be accurate, neutral, and appropriate for this encyclopedia article, but sourced weakly: "Smoking tobacco increases your risk of dying from lung cancer.[newspaper article]"	If you want a MEDRS source, then you have to provide it. You are not permitted to say "this is unreliably-sourced content, so I just get to blank it". BURDEN doesn't permit this, full stop. You only get to invoke BURDEN on unsourced material (and material that is so poorly sourced that no reasonable editor would expect the source to be accepted, because we didn't want to leave a door open for trolling).
Medical claim that you believe does not meet the goal of accurate, neutral, and appropriate information for this encyclopedia article, no matter what the source is: "Smoking tobacco cures lung cancer.[ideal MEDRS source]"	Blank it, but say that you're doing it because of WP:UNDUE. It complies with WP:V and BURDEN.

So – yes, you can blank bad content, but you can't blank it because of BURDEN. BURDEN doesn't permit that. Bad content can and should be removed for other reasons. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:57, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

The phrase you're quoting from BURDEN is in a footnote, and it's consistent with this page. It says:

Once an editor has provided any source that he or she believes, in good faith, to be sufficient, then any editor who later removes the material has an obligation to articulate specific problems that would justify its exclusion from Wikipedia (e.g., undue emphasis on a minor point, unencyclopedic content, etc.). All editors are then expected to help achieve consensus, and any problems with the text or sourcing should be fixed before the material is added back.

For biomedical information, a "specific problem that would justify its exclusion from Wikipedia" would be that the source isn't MEDRS compliant. SarahSV ^(talk) 16:23, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

Indeed, obviously so. We should definitely not be trying to swerve around core policy here: MEDRS attracts attacks enough as it is, and we don't want to encourage more by twisting it in odd directions. Alexbrn (talk) 19:56, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

I also agree that it would be best not to make that change. I guess I can see the point that BURDEN itself does not explicitly require MEDRS-level sourcing, so in one way of misunderstanding the intention here, one could say that it is not BURDEN that justifies what this page says. But I do understand BURDEN to require sourcing that is adequate to the content that it supports, so just as we require BLP-level sourcing for BLPs, we can require MEDRS-level sourcing here, and consider the "burden" unmet when the sourcing fails MEDRS. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:59, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

Sarah, I don't think that "the [first] source [supplied by the original editor] isn't MEDRS compliant" is a "specific problem that would justify its exclusion from Wikipedia". This isn't some children's game like Mother, May I?. If you already know that perfectly reliable sources exist for this information, then you must not blank it on grounds of poor sourcing. "Gee, I happen to know that what you added is absolutely factually accurate, neutral, encyclopedic, and appropriate to this particular article, but – ha ha! You "only" cited a highly reputable news source or a lay-oriented book instead of a peer-reviewed review article from a journal that I approve of, so I get to blank it!" would actually be a stupid outcome (and that's what's been written on this page for months). The policy doesn't support that and shouldn't support that, and this page should match the policy. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:00, 26 April 2017 (UTC)

The reason that I disagree with this edit you made is because, in the edit summary, you stated that WP:BURDEN doesn't require reliability, and you added the following: "The WP:BURDEN on the original editor is only to provide only one (1) 'source that he or she [i.e., not you] believes, in good faith, to be sufficient', not to provide an ideal one." But WP:BURDEN does require reliability; it specifically states, "The burden to demonstrate verifiability lies with the editor who adds or restores material, and is satisfied by providing a citation to a reliable source that directly supports the contribution. Attribute all quotations and any material whose verifiability is challenged or likely to be challenged to a reliable, published source using an inline citation." Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 01:20, 26 April 2017 (UTC)

As for a lay-oriented book, I agree that we shouldn't be removing that unless it's actually inaccurate, unreliable and/or outdated. WP:MEDRS does support lay-oriented books. As for news sources, WP:MEDRS does not completely reject news sources, but it does caution against them. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 01:26, 26 April 2017 (UTC)

In terms of fulfilling BURDEN, a reliable source isn't "what the consensus determines is actually reliable". It's "what the original editor [sincerely] believes to be reliable". This means that it's possible to fulfill the BURDEN by providing an unreliable source (and for me to blank your content later on any of several grounds, but not on grounds of BURDEN).

BURDEN simply does not authorize someone to blank good, verifiABLE content just because editor #1 [sincerely] believes that a given source is a reliable, and editor #2 thinks that it's not. (And, of course, you and I both have seen people blank content many times by claiming that books and news sources "aren't MEDRS".) WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:26, 26 April 2017 (UTC)

WAID, the problem with your edit is that it didn't reflect WP:BURDEN. As Flyer says, BURDEN requires that anyone adding or restoring information provide "a citation to a reliable source that directly supports the contribution". Not any source that they believe is okay, but a reliable one, and for biomedical information that's MEDRS. SarahSV ^(talk) 02:32, 26 April 2017 (UTC)

And then the policy goes on to say that once you've supplied a source that you personally believe is reliable, then your BURDEN is fulfilled and now everyone is equally responsible for providing a True™ reliable source. That's the meaning of the bit that begins "All editors are then expected to help": "All editors" means "not just the original one". WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:28, 26 April 2017 (UTC)

WAID, it doesn't say that. You're reading something into it that isn't there. The footnote you're relying on says: "Once an editor has provided any source that he or she believes, in good faith, to be sufficient, then any editor who later removes the material has an obligation to articulate specific problems ... etc." And the material should stay out until that problem is fixed.

So if I see you add "1.1 million died in Auschwitz" sourced to the National Enquirer, I'll either remove it entirely or remove the source and tag it. It sounds about right, but I can't trust it, and the burden is on you to supply an RS. In any event, we're not writing for each other, but for the reader. It's not a question of whether any of us thinks it might be correct, but whether a reader can be satisfied that it's reliably sourced. SarahSV ^(talk) 03:47, 26 April 2017 (UTC)

Do you actually not see the words "All editors are then expected to help" in that policy? Or are you just trying to tell me (i.e., a person heavily involved in creating that footnote) that you don't think I know what I intended it to say? WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:11, 26 April 2017 (UTC)

I don't know what you intended it to say. I know only what it does say. And in any event, it's just a footnote. BURDEN has always required an RS and still does. It would be pointless otherwise. SarahSV ^(talk) 04:14, 26 April 2017 (UTC)

Maybe it will make more sense if we deal in practical terms. Sarah, imagine that (in your excellent judgment) a particular article ought to contain the sentence "Smoking tobacco increases your risk of dying from lung cancer".

Now imagine that someone adds exactly that sentence, and – making a reasonable effort, but not necessarily being familiar with our complex guidelines – that editor adds a citation to a reputable news article. The news article fully supports that sentence.

Is Wikipedia best served by having you blank that sentence and its "unreliable source"? WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:32, 26 April 2017 (UTC)

You've chosen too simple an example. Choose one instead that might be right, but you're not sure, and it will take a while to track down a source. But it's an important medical issue, so you can't just leave it standing in the meantime. SarahSV ^(talk) 03:49, 26 April 2017 (UTC)

How about if someone adds "vaccinations have been shown to produce autism" with a dubious website as reference—a website which they sincerely and enthusiastically believe to be true? Perhaps the ref could be described as a reputable news article that is parroting stuff the journalist received via email. Bad stuff needs to be reverted, not kept until someone finds the perfect reference. Johnuniq (talk) 03:52, 26 April 2017 (UTC)

No, I've chosen exactly the right example for isolating the sourcing issue.

Something that "might be right" could be left standing temporarily; BURDEN recommends {{fact}} tags, and I recommend talk-page discussions. (For example, in such a case, I might leave a note at WT:MED.) Something that's known to be wrong should be removed on grounds other than sourcing (UNDUE, in Johnuniq's example).

But my question stands: If you are absolutely confident that the sole problem with the edit is that someone cited "RS" rather than "MEDRS", then what should you do? WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:07, 26 April 2017 (UTC)

That question doesn't make sense, because what counts as an RS varies depending on the topic. An RS for biomedical info is a MEDRS. SarahSV ^(talk) 04:18, 26 April 2017 (UTC)

Sorry, I meant to add that, with your smoking example, I would quickly add a MEDRS, because it would take seconds to find one. That's why you should choose a more complicated example, where it would take longer. For anything more time-consuming, I would remove the text or at least remove the source and tag it, unless I happened to be in the mood to track down the issue myself. SarahSV ^(talk) 04:26, 26 April 2017 (UTC)

So if I added that uncontestable fact, and I "only" cited a newspaper article or a non-professional-healthcare book to support it, then you would not blank it out of hand for having a bad source, right? Would you approve of someone else blanking it? WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:14, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

The mission of Wikipedia, as defined in WP:NOTEVERYTHING, is to provide the pubic with articles that summarize accepted knowledge. Content that ~might~ summarize MEDRS sources is not something I am comfortable presenting to the public as "accepted knowledge", and in my view Wikipedia is better served by sourcing it, moving it to Talk per WP:PRESERVE or tagging it and then removing it (or moving to talk) if it is not sourced in a reasonable amount of time. We need to aim for the mission as much as possible. Especially for content about health which is extra charged on several levels. Jytdog (talk) 04:29, 26 April 2017 (UTC)

My example isn't dealing with something that "might" be verifiable in MEDRS sources. My example is something that you and I both absolutely know to be the mainstream medical opinion, but it's "only" sourced to a lay source. What do you do with that? WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:14, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

At this point, I think the consensus here is becoming pretty clear, but I'll add that what we have here is something roughly (albeit not 100%) like BLP. If someone edited a BLP page, adding some content for which there are plenty of reliable sources, but also something that falls afoul of BLP, it would be the wrong response to tag it, requesting a better source, or to leave it, while adding another reliable source. The correct response would be to delete it, and BURDEN and the rest of Verifiability really have little to do with that. The BLP policy sets important standards about content, based largely on the goal of not doing harm. In a somewhat similar manner, there is a consensus that content that might lead readers to make medical decisions should also not do harm – and in this case, that means that sources for such content must satisfy MEDRS. And again, the solution to non-MEDRS compliant content is to remove it, rather than to leave it while hoping that better sourcing will emerge. I understand that the concern here is about content that really could be MEDRS-compliant, but just needs a better source. I'm pretty sure that most editors who know that it's good content and who can easily find a MEDRS source would just replace the source – but I don't think that we want to enshrine the idea that if someone does not bother to do that, and simply reverts, that makes them a disruptive editor. I know there is language at WP:V about encouraging a cooperative approach to BURDEN, and that language came out of concerns about editors who revert excessively, but that is also about content in general, not content that falls into special cases such as BLP or MEDRS. --Tryptofish (talk) 00:12, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

Your analogy fails because BLP says nothing of the sort. BLP reserves the immediate-blanking treatment solely for "contentious" content (i.e., a small minority of BLP-related content). I believe that I can state without fear of contradiction that none of us in this discussion consider the connection between smoking tobacco and dying of lung cancer to be the least bit controversial or contentious.

So: I add a sentence saying that smoking tobacco causes lung cancer, and I cite a news article. This is strictly non-contentious content; the equivalent for a BLP statement could live in an article completely unsourced. Would you personally blank that content? Do you think that any editor (assuming that said editor hadn't lived under a rock for the last half-century, and therefore was also aware that smoking tobacco is a health risk) actually should?

(I get what you're saying about not wanting to label an editor as being disruptive. Not everyone knows what I know, and I don't know what everyone else knows. But if we think that this is actually a bad idea, then I also don't want to say that this is a lovely idea that ought to be done at every opportunity, either.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:19, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

About BLP, please note that I had said "something that falls afoul of BLP", so I was indeed referring specifically to contentious content, because that is the kind of content that has the potential to do harm. The short answer to your question to me is that, no, I personally would not have blanked a statement that is so obviously factual as that. The longer answer is that I agree with what Jytdog says just below. What I'm talking about here is medical-related content where there is similarly the potential to do harm, if the content tells the reader something that is not supported by MEDRS sources.

And I am also talking about the reverted edit that started this discussion thread. The existing language that was reverted back to actually says to SOFIXIT in the kind of example you gave here: If WP:MEDRS can be found to support the information, and it is relevant and encyclopedic, then ideally provide a better source yourself. Also, the existing language says that improperly sourced content may be removed, not must be removed. --Tryptofish (talk) 00:15, 28 April 2017 (UTC)

• I am kind of uncomfortable with the line of argument you are making here WAID.

Most fundamentally, RS fleshes out what V means by "reliable source" with regard to everything that isn't Biomedical Information and MEDRS defines what V means by "reliable source" for Biomedical Information. They are parallel guidelines in different domains and refer to each other as such (RS refers to MEDRS and MEDRS refers to RS). This has broad and deep consensus. But in your OP you structure this as though MEDRS is somehow "under" RS. Yikes!

Additionally, if we consider the universe of content that is Biomedical Information, "blue sky" things like your two examples (the one widely accepted and the other widely not) are going to be unhelpful 99% of the time. Most times it is going to something like an editor adding "nausea" to a list of "very common" (>10% of people have them) side effects of a drug, let's say where there is also a list of common (between 1% and 10% of people have them) side effects, without adding a source. This is the kind of thing we see all the time and it doesn't fall into either of those buckets and to be honest most times I just revert per unsourced.

But to answer your question i have sometimes let slide content like "smoking increases the risk of lung cancer" cited to a high quality ref like the NYT. Usually if I am in a hurry trying to get to something that is more pressing. If not I find a MEDRS source. if someone removed it and it was important I would probably stop and FIXIT. If someone removed it and it was mundane I wouldn't care. if two people actually started spending time warring over it I would call them both idiots under my breath and if it was important would just FIXIT. It is just not an interesting or helpful question really. Jytdog (talk) 04:03, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

• Here are a couple of examples from my watchlist crawl today. diff; diff. I just reverted both of those. The first cited to a university press release about publication of a clinical study and the 2nd is a recent, very small clinical trial (at least cited to the actual paper). Jytdog (talk) 06:23, 28 April 2017 (UTC)

So when I look back over this, I see very wide agreement on this point: When you encounter a situation in which "a source has been supplied for apparently accurate, relevant, encyclopedic information", and "you want it to have a better or more appropriate source", then the best practice (chosen from among the multiple "legal" options) is to "provide a better source yourself".

Not one person thought that removing that information was the best option. So why doesn't this page just say what we all agree the best practice is? What potentially bad results are we afraid of, if we first say what the best practice is, instead of first threatening removal? WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:15, 13 September 2018 (UTC)

I think the actual takeaway from the (now long-ago) discussion was that we don't need to change this. I guess the potential bad result depends on just how much that information really is "accurate, relevant, encyclopedic". There can be borderline cases, and we don't want to get into needless arguments with someone who added something that is on the borderline, and then wants to argue that someone who reverted them is being disruptive. I'll turn your question around and ask: what is the problem that you are trying to solve? --Tryptofish (talk) 20:32, 13 September 2018 (UTC)

In the long-term, I'd like to reduce the still all-too-common behavior of blanking a good addition because the source is does not conform to some hypothetical ideal. I want this page to be one less source of reinforcement for lazy patrollers and mindless rule enforcers.

In the short term, I want this page to stop misrepresenting what WP:V says on this point. There is nothing in WP:V about "information not sourced to a WP:MEDRS may be removed". WP:V actually says that the editor need only provide "any source that he or she believes, in good faith, to be sufficient" – not whatever "a MEDRS" is, but "any source" that the initial editor believes is sufficient. IMO there is a material gap between "you have to use a MEDRS" and "you have to use any source that you personally think is sufficient" (even if your first "any source" is followed by someone saying, "Here, please read MEDRS. Do you still think that your first source is truly 'sufficient'?"). WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:53, 17 September 2018 (UTC)

I guess the reference to BURDEN is not really needed here, and we could add something conditional about removal:

Biomedical information not sourced to a WP:MEDRS may be removed in accord with WP:BURDEN which states "Any material lacking a reliable source directly supporting it may be removed and should not be restored without an inline citation to a reliable source", especially if it seems likely that WP:MEDRS do not support it. If WP:MEDRS can be found to support the information, and it is relevant and encyclopedic, then ideally provide a better source yourself. If you cannot find an appropriate source but the material seems accurate, consider adding a {{Medical citation needed}} tag.

I don't think we should go much farther than that. It should be permissible to revert improperly sourced material, and the existing language already does say "ideally" about fixing it yourself. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:25, 18 September 2018 (UTC)

Above, SlimVirgin (SarahSV) and I addressed WhatamIdoing's argument that "WP:V actually says that the editor need only provide 'any source that he or she believes, in good faith, to be sufficient.' " SarahSV noted that WhatamIdoing was referring to the footnote, and then challenged the rest of WhatamIdoing's argument. If it's poor material that is supported by poor sources, no, I don't think that it can or should ideally be removed only if the editor contesting it takes the time to tweak or otherwise improve the material themselves and then re-add it. The WP:ONUS is on the editor wanting to include the contested material. Yes, I support WP:Preserve and have cited it enough times, such as in this case, but material can be preserved on the talk page, and I'm not for stating or implying that we should be letting poor material stand in an article until we fix it ourselves. WP:BURDEN states, "If you think the material is verifiable, you are encouraged to provide an inline citation yourself before considering whether to remove or tag it." The "encouraged to" wording was added following objections (on that policy talk page) to the notion that we should fix it ourselves. As for patrollers, such as myself, yes, we routinely revert large additions of unsourced material. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 23:43, 18 September 2018 (UTC)

I was just offering that as a possible resolution, but I personally don't feel strongly about it, and I certainly wouldn't want to implement it if there is consensus against it. --Tryptofish (talk) 00:03, 19 September 2018 (UTC)

I know that it was just a suggestion. Also, to be clearer on why I feel the way that I do regarding removing material... Some material may not need to be included. It might be irrelevant or WP:Fringe. WP:Preserve is about including appropriate material that should be included. It's not about whether the content is verifiable (although verifiability is an aspect of inclusion). Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 00:10, 19 September 2018 (UTC)

Poor material can be removed without invoking BURDEN.

This is one of the long-term frustrations. We have (usually) newbies adding complete garbage – remember the guy who copied whole sections of virusmyth.com into an article? – and we say "You forgot to add a MEDRS! Go back to the start!" like it's a game of Mother, May I?. Garbage should be removed because it is garbage, without reference to either MEDRS or BURDEN.

The decision tree should look like this:

1. Is this appropriate, encyclopedic information?
   • If no, then kill it now.
   • If yes, then proceed to question 2.
2. Is this appropriate, encyclopedic information already supported by a reliable source?
   • If yes, then see if you can collaborate to improve it.
   • If no, then proceed to question 3.
3. Is this appropriate, encyclopedic information actually verifiable?
   • If no, then kill it now. (Cite MEDRS if you feel like explaining.)
   • If yes, then:
     • Can you add a source? (Best practice for appropriate, encyclopedic material) If you can't, then consider tagging it, so someone else might add a source.
   • If you're uncertain whether this appropriate, encyclopedic material is actually verifiable, then
     • Consider tagging it.
     • Consider removing it under BURDEN.

What we're writing here is a lot closer to "Hey, they didn't get it perfect on the first try, so UNDO!" than what BURDEN says. I'd like to have something closer to the actual policy. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:13, 21 September 2018 (UTC)

• just responding to the OP here. I am absolutely opposed to this. Without reservation. It is already hard to enough to keep spam and fringe-pushing content out of WP. This would drain the time of experienced editors in endless trench warfare.

This has been tested at ANI - see for example here which had this CWOT village pump discussion behind it and a bunch of other stuff here. And that is just one example of many times this sort of behavioral thing has been dealt with by the community, where people demand to retain badly sourced content about biomedical stuff. There is broad and deep consensus that biomedical information must be sourced per MEDRS. Which is a happy thing. Many good things flow from wise policy. We cut off POV pushing, refspamming, company or product advertising, etc at the knees by discussing sourcing. That is what we do here. Focus on sourcing and generating high quality content from them, based on the P&G. Jytdog (talk) 23:52, 21 September 2018 (UTC)

1. I thought we were supposed to be here to 'build an encyclopedia', not to 'do sourcing'. I don't this it's good for people cry MEDRS over advertising. That's what the NOT and NPOV policies are for, and advertising is still advertising, even if you put a systematic review behind it. Do you feel like lodging an objection related to sourcing is the only effective tool in the toolbox? I feel like some people only know how to use a hammer named MEDRS, so they try to address every problem as if it were a nail that's sticking out. I'd like to see people learn to use multiple tools.
2. I would rather remove this section than have it misrepresent what WP:V says on this point. WhatamIdoing (talk) 14:50, 22 September 2018 (UTC)

• Yes we build an encyclopedia by starting with reliable sources and generating content per the P&G. That is how the community has decided we work to generate articles summarizing accepting knowledge, as opposed to being some website full of indiscriminate ... content, that may or may not be accepted knowledge. As i said -- and very clearly -- many good things flow from wise policies and guidelines. I understand you have concerns about how MEDRS is cited in discussions, but with that effort to distort what I wrote, I have nothing more to say here. Please never misrepresent what I write again. Jytdog (talk) 15:11, 22 September 2018 (UTC)
• And that's a silly false dichotomy. Doing sourcing (properly) is how we build an encyclopedia (instead of, say, a blog or a forum or a work of fiction).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:59, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

• It looks to me like we have reached the point where further discussion is not going to actually change anything, and therefore is probably not worth pursuing. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:19, 22 September 2018 (UTC)

Veterinary

"Veterinary medicine: Generally, editors do not enforce a requirement for especially high-quality sources for non-human medicine. However, all the principles can be voluntarily applied to veterinary medicine."

I don't think this is true. It certainly is not true of me, and WP:MEDRS isn't carving out a magical exemption for veterinary medicine. And what this says shouldn't be true, for many of the same reasons that apply to human medicine (in short: serious health consequences, even death, can result from acting on bad "medical advice"). Further, it really doesn't make any sense to say something like "all the principles can be voluntarily applied to veterinary medicine". All that amounts to is "If you try to apply MEDRS, this page indicate other are free to revert-war you to death until you give up and fuck off."  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:57, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

In my experience, editors are far more willing to accept older sources and primary sources for veterinary content (including pets and farm animals). WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:35, 26 January 2021 (UTC)

Disease / pandemic origins

Moved from WP:ANI § Related discussion at Wikipedia talk:Biomedical information

There have been massive running discussions across multiple parts of Wikipedia where people argue whether or not the origins of COVID-19 are biomedical information and therefore fall under WP:MEDRS. Would it be useful to clarify that here in one way or the other - ie. adding the original origins of a disease or pandemic to either the "what is" or "what is not" sections? Obviously any full discussion leading to actually changing the page would require a ton of notifications to all the existing discussions, I'm just curious whether regulars here feel that it would be valuable to pursue - even if the other discussions eventually reach a conclusion on COVID-19, this could easily come up again in other forms, and I think the size and length of discussions, plus the degree of disagreements between experienced editors, shows that it's worth having a clear answer here if possible. To be clear, I'm not (yet) asking which section it should be added to, which is going to require a lot more discussion, just whether it's worth considering adding it at all. --Aquillion (talk) 16:19, 25 January 2021 (UTC)

I'm wary of editing this page (which remember is not a WP:PAG) just in response to the current stramash. Sometimes the origin of a disease is (now) a largely historical matter - see Mary Mallon. This is, however, the second time during the pandemic that the WP:WLish argument has been made that because something happened at some point before today, it is "history" ... so eventually something may be needed to stop that silliness, though I'm not sure what. Maybe we could say that something can be considered history if it has unambiguously historical treatment in RS - appearing in textbooks of medical history, for example? Alexbrn (talk) 16:33, 25 January 2021 (UTC)

Aquillion, I have been quite involved in a few of the discussions on the origins of Covid-19 and on how it may (or may not) constitute biomedical information.

There have been a number of discussions going back many years as to what constitutes biomedical information, and this post from 2015 seems to make it quite clear that a "cause" of a disease should be considered biomedical information, and that's why you'll see a lot of good MEDRS sources describing the origins of HIV/AIDS, Ebola, and SARS.

Where it gets tricky with SARS-COV-2, is that unlike with SARS-COV-1, where the Chinese government cooperated with the international community and apologized for its early slowness, the current Chinese government is being anything but cooperative with the international community, and is tightly controlling any information that comes out of local academia (as described in this AP article). Without a transparent scientific investigation or forensic evidence of some sort, it is impossible for the origins of Covid-19 to be traced, and while scientists may come up with hypotheses weighing the plausibility of different scenarios, they really aren't proof of anything. In the first few months of 2019, the plausibility of a Zoonotic jump from animals to humans at a wet market seemed quite high, but no intermediate host was found, and the Chinese CDC ruled it out (source). Now, other scenarios are being considered, and their plausibility has been given more weight, due in part to a few inconsistencies with a paper (Zhou et al) that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (which was known to be creating chimeric SARS-like coronaviruses as part of its research funded by a USAID program called PREDICT) sent to Nature introducing a virus called RaTG13 (without any mention of a cleavage site), and another a paper (Jiang et al) they also put out introducing a cleavage site of another virus called RmYN02, and some supposedly crazy people are supposing a link between them. So in the dearth of evidence that there is for any scenario, I am not sure how much WP:MEDRS and WP:Biomedical information can apply.

ScrupulousScribe (talk) 02:40, 26 January 2021 (UTC)

As it turned out, there was good MEDRS[1] on the question of the virus' origin. In my understanding the move to de-classify that question as biomedical is because some editors just didn't like what the MEDRS said. Alexbrn (talk) 03:08, 26 January 2021 (UTC)

I have been involved in some of these discussions, so I don't think it would be helpful to repeat any of that here.

What I do want to say, in the vein of remembering that Wikipedia:Policy writing is hard, is that whatever is written should probably make it possible to avoid MEDRS (especially WP:MEDDATE) for uncontroversial claims of prehistoric evolution. Also, I don't think we have had this level of dispute in the past. If you look back, e.g., at Ebola, there were plenty of stories going around, but few editors were bound and determined that Wikipedia state that it was possible that the virus might have been previously present in a particular lab. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:50, 26 January 2021 (UTC)

• @Aquillion: Probably belated reply but I think it was enough time to simply discuss WP:MEDRS/WP:BMI misapplication, abuse and bigotry. I think community who directly or indirectly met biomedical information challenges must opt to making concrete proposals on respective talk pages instead of wasting time on useless discussions which get us nowhere. There is tons of disseminated talks throughout Wikipedia and yet there is no changes. I propose to close this discussion as fruitless.--AXONOV (talk) ⚑ 18:44, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

I propose we expand the section Wikipedia:Biomedical_information#What_is_biomedical_information? to include this: Outbreak investigation. The paragraph could mention that the following are considered biomedical:

• Diagnosis related to outbreaks
• Geographical spread of outbreaks
• Hypothesis of what appears to be causing an outbreak

An implication of this expansion is that some articles need to up their reliable sources to MEDRS level: for example, edits about the geographical spread of a disease should resort to secondary reviews in epidemiological journals, not just a popular press source (e.g. NY Times). In other cases, an edit that proposes to include information on an hypothesis of what appears to be causing an outbreak, should elevate its rigor to MEDRS, specifically epidemiological MEDRS. In the case of COVID-19, what I found odd is that Chinese epidemologists publish so little on the forensic evidence side related to the origin of the virus. Why is that? International epidemiologists also are silent because have no jurisdiction to perform the necessary field work in Hubei. In my opinion, this void of MEDRS either lets the Wikipedia information be too general (despite almost 1.5 years since the start of the pandemic), or encourage editors (myself included) to propose edits based on non-MEDRS RS. Forich (talk) 17:46, 5 May 2021 (UTC)

@Forich: Sorry, but I'm going to oppose proposals of any provisions that might try to project origin of any disease onto a human health somehow. There is no direct implications of any pandemic/disease origin on human health whatsoever. Stop trying to push WP:MEDRS/WP:BMI beyond its legitimate boundaries. Where the viruses/bacteria come from won't influence the ways humans are treated much. WP:MEDRS is well enough in protecting from spreading primary research and speculations. There is no more need to allow to abuse its application further. I'm going to close this discussion if nobody minds.--AXONOV (talk) ⚑ 10:29, 9 May 2021 (UTC)

Thanks, User:Alexander_Davronov. Your judgment is in line with User:Normchou here, User:The Four Deuces here, User:Feynstein here, and User:Aquillion here. Editors who notably are generally opposing this view are User:Thucydides411 here, and User: Alexbrn here.Forich (talk) 12:08, 9 May 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for heads up. Don't get me wrong: I oppose any attempts to make up a general rule that can easily be abused. In fact, WP:MEDRS was abused virtually since the day it was adopted (as my investigation revealed in Wikipedia talk:MEDRS#Intermediate note) so this makes a point.
On the rest: well, there is plenty of policies that govern the way epidemics' origins are handled, namely WP:NOTNEWS, WP:SECONDARY, WP:OR, WP:CONSENSUS etc.. All of them should be carefully applied on case-by-case basis with full respect to WP:RSCONTEXT. No need to pile on guideline or use leap logic to invent instruments preventing others from being bold.
If you are going to make proposals to WP:BMI I encourage you to take it to WP:VPPOL for more general consensus. Cheers. --AXONOV (talk) ⚑ 17:48, 9 May 2021 (UTC)

I am not a doctor or anything, but I am pretty strongly opposed to expanding the scope of a guideline supplement based entirely around winning a specific political argument -- even if it is a political argument that's been getting thrown back and forth for about six months over talk pages, user talk pages, MfDs of userspace essays(!) and just about every noticeboard under the sun. My understanding is that MEDRS exists due to the outsized risk of harm (i.e. actual, physical hazards to people's health) that arise from Wikipedia being used as a reference for treatment of disease.

For example, it would cause someone actual harm if they came away from Wikipedia article thinking that eating bat shit cured strep throat, since eating bat shit is bad for you, and it could end up taking the place of other medical treatments. This doesn't seem to be the case with the origin of a disease: the precautions someone takes to survive, treat, or avoid contracting a disease do not seem affected in any way by where it came from. Certainly, the prevalence and distribution of a disease is relevant -- again, it would pose an actual hazard to someone's health if they thought Belgians were immune to chlamydia, or that you could only get anthrax if you lived in Argentina. However, it does not really matter what the ultimate origin of the infectious agent was. It could very well be the case that antibiotic-resistant Streptococcus was created by medicine, that some random outbreak of anthrax was created in a lab, or that chlamydia was brought to our planet in ancient times by little green men in an attempt to prevent the Ancient Egyptians from launching a space program. None of these things affect what you, the reader, should do about these diseases. While disagreeing about politics has often been bad for people's health, it is not a biomedical issue. jp×g 05:14, 11 May 2021 (UTC)

@JPxG, maybe this sounds idealistic, but I think the reason we wrote MEDRS is because we wanted to help people write high-quality articles. The way to do that is to start with the best sources. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:32, 12 May 2021 (UTC)

If that were the only issue at hand, and there really were no tradeoffs, it would have just been a project-wide revision of WP:RS. It wasn't, because MEDRS introduces a number of cumbersome inconveniences to the process of writing articles that are only justified under extreme circumstances. jp×g 02:02, 16 May 2021 (UTC)

No comment about origin, but I would note that the three bullet points you mention (diagnosis of a disease or condition, geographical distribution of a disease or condition, and causes of a disease or condition) are already unambiguously included in the general case. There isn't any difference just because they happen in the context of an outbreak. The idea that biomedical information must relate to treatment, as suggested in one of the the previous responses, is a misconception - rather, it refers to any information that relates to (or could reasonably be perceived as relating to) human health, as illustrated by the list of examples given on the page. That said, discussing geographical distribution (prevalence) doesn't mean we need to use reviews, as that sort of information can also be cited to the various health agencies that keep track of such things. Sunrise (talk) 05:46, 11 May 2021 (UTC)

@Sunrise: ... it refers to any information that relates to (or could reasonably be perceived as relating to) human health ... And that's why it so disastrous to expand the guideline even more: the bounds are so loose so it virtually explodes into an endless number of disputes every time someone comes up with WP:MEDRS. AXONOV (talk) ⚑ 19:20, 13 May 2021 (UTC)

Conclusions

The question of the origin of an epidemic is currently not explicitely included in WP:BMI. Some editors have reasonably interpreted WP:BMI as either excluding origin because it does not serve as medical advice that can potentially harm readers, or excluding it because it can be seen to belong to the history of the disease (and history is explicitely excluded from BMI). However other editors have reasonably interpreted that the question of origin is included in WP:BMI per being part of "Population data and epidemiology" or indirectly because of the "relates to (or could reasonably be perceived as relating to) human health" part of the definition, which is a broad categorization that indeed could cover origin. Some editors vote on having the question of origin binding on WP:MEDRS because that would provide tools for editors to automatically have very reliable sources, which can come handy at controversial topics where pro-fringe editing happens. This would be an err on the side of having the strongest sources. In my opinion, this is a second-best solution after the best, which is: not err and follow what WP:BMI explicitely says.

The three paths of action that I see come from this discussion are:

1. Agree on disease origin requiring MEDRS-level sourcing + modifying WP:BMI to avoid ambiguity in that regard (fixing the history loophole, and explicitely adding the word origin, so that it is not left as part of epidemiology or "causes" (e.g. causes could mean only the causative agent and exclude all the other details)).
2. Agree on disease origin requiring very good sources but not necessarily MEDRS-level. Details about how the virus enters the cells to cause the disease, or how a virus mutates from ancestor to direct progenitor are BMI and thus require MEDRS. Details about who were the index cases, when did the initial outbreak started, what animal species were found to be the zoonotic source of the spillover, and where was the place of the first infections detected, would require high level RS, not necesarily MEDRS-level. Citing summaries of the origin that encompass both the BMI and non-BMI aspects just listed, would require MEDRS-level, because a reliable scientist is capable of commenting on both aspects, but a reliable journalist is not.
3. Disagree on disease origin requiring any sources other than run-of-the-mill RS + modifying WP:BMI so that it explicitely excludes disease origins other than direct references to the identity of the causative agent (e.g. "COVID-19 is caused by SARS-CoV-2" would be BMI but "SARS-CoV-2 comes from bats" would not). Forich (talk) 05:07, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

That isn't the conclusion. As Sunrise notes, "diagnosis of a disease or condition, geographical distribution of a disease or condition, and causes of a disease or condition" are explicitly covered. As has been noted there are both biomedical and non-biomedical aspects to the question of a disease origin, so lumping the whole concept together is reductive and unhelpful. Whatever, we should not be rewriting PAGs in response to a one-off running controversy. Wrt the "lab leak" origin specifically, other applicable PAGs are WP:FRINGE and WP:EXCEPTIONAL. In general, my experience is always that the way to solve knotty content problems on Wikipedia is to increase source quality. Alexbrn (talk) 06:28, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

Historical content

Adoring nanny I don't understand this[2] reversion. How is this inconsistent with MEDRS? The goal here is to stop some of the "well, it was published last year so it's historical and MEDRS doesn't apply" wikilawyering that has happened over the last few months. Alexbrn (talk) 10:32, 5 May 2021 (UTC)

The opening paragraph of WP:MEDRS starts off as follows. I've omitted the ref:

Wikipedia's articles are not meant to provide medical advice. Nevertheless, they are widely used among those seeking health information. For this reason, all biomedical information must be based on reliable, third-party published secondary sources, and must accurately reflect current knowledge.

I get why we have the above policy as walking into a doctor's office here (USA) generally costs at least a hundred dollars. Therefore, I frequently refer to Wikipedia to decide if I need to see a doctor about this or that. But the origin of Covid, which is where this all came from, has no relevance one way or the other to such decisions.

I would add that I have been a source of what is referred to above as "Wikilawyering". To me it doesn't look that way. One might just as easily look at it the other way around.

Furthermore, It does not make sense to me that recent history would be biomedical information while less-recent history would not. The implication is that the passage of time somehow causes biomedical information to become non-biomedical. That doesn't make sense. Adoring nanny (talk) 10:46, 5 May 2021 (UTC)

Okay, that's fine but that doesn't seem to have any relevance to the edit. The point here is to clarify what "historical" means for medical sources with greater clarity than currently, so that it's clear when WP:MEDRS does not apply. Material that appears in a book such as this for example, is historical. But a paper that was published a few years ago (e.g. PMID:26828006) is still subject to MEDRS because it is relays biological information which is not "historical" just because it's from 2016. Confusion over this has been a bit of a time sink in recent months. How would you propose to clarify the distinction between historical content and content that just happens to be in the past? Alexbrn (talk) 10:59, 5 May 2021 (UTC)

I don't see a problem with the policy as it stands. As the policy says, its purpose is to make sure Wikipedia doesn't give medical misinformation that causes people to make bad decisions. It does that quite effectively. Adoring nanny (talk) 11:52, 5 May 2021 (UTC)

Huh? This is not about the policy: Wikipedia doesn't give medical advice of any kind. This page is a supplement specifically about "biomedical information". One particular purpose of this supplement is to say what is, and what is not "biomedical information". Truly historical information is not biomedical information - so for example you do not need a WP:MEDRS source to explain what doctors did in Renaissance Venice. But we have had problems - one which springs to mind is an editor trying to claim that COVID-19 was widespread in California in 2019, and since this was about "the past", MEDRS did not apply and we could use any source. They did not prevail, of course, but the arguments wasted time. The task at hand is to clarify this guidance to make clear what is, and is not, "historical". Alexbrn (talk) 12:05, 5 May 2021 (UTC)

I wasn't a party to that particular controversy. My take on it is that the assertion "COVID-19 was widespread in California in 2019" is insane, but WP:MEDRS is the wrong way to shoot it down. For example, if one goes to the first paragraph of COVID-19 pandemic in Iran, the sources are the NYT and the New Yorker, which are obviously not WP:MEDRS. Similarly, the first paragraph of COVID-19 pandemic in Italy currently cites eight sources, seven of which are definitely not WP:MEDRS. Adoring nanny (talk) 12:52, 5 May 2021 (UTC)

The task is not to "shoot down" such "insane" ideas about 2019, but to head off the tiresome argument that this supplement actually permits them with its "history" exemption. Hopefully my new attempt to clarify this is prosaic enough to be unobjectionable. Alexbrn (talk) 13:00, 5 May 2021 (UTC)

I don't agree with your new approach, either, for the same reasons as above, but thanks for trying something different. I'm also not much into revert wars, so I'll leave it for now. Adoring nanny (talk) 00:29, 6 May 2021 (UTC)

I think that the main difference between history and medical information is that history is exclusively about the who–what–when–where stuff: Alice Expert said something on this date; Bob Business did something on that date.

But it is a bit more complicated, isn't it? Because "This disease was [properly] diagnosed in this patient" isn't exclusively history or exclusively biomedical. In non-COVID contexts, I think that editors have generally taken these two approaches:

• If it's about an individual ("Chris Celebrity is a cancer survivor"), then it's not biomedical content.
• If it's about something that is completely in the past, then it's not biomedical content. This permits, e.g., primary sources for posthumous diagnoses, for seminal research, and for pre-modern medical practices.

Using these approaches, then the ideal sources might be:

• "Chris Celebrity was diagnosed with COVID-19": any reliable source
• "As of <last month>, COVID-19 cases were declining in Lake Wobegon": MEDRS now, but could be any reliable source at some future point (i.e., when the pandemic begins to feel like it belongs entirely to the past, which may be decades from now).

Does that feel like what you'd expect to see in an article? WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:51, 12 May 2021 (UTC)

RFC: Disease / pandemic origins.

Should this page be updated to unambiguously define disease and pandemic origins as a form of biomedical information? --Aquillion (talk) 20:47, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

Survey

• Support. This falls under the same logic as "population data and epidemiology" (and is debatably already covered by it, but the long-running dispute over it for the past six months shows that we need to update the page to make it unambiguous either way, especially given that experienced editors on both sides have cited this page to support their position.) Claims about a disease's origins touch on medical aspects of what the disease is, how it should be approached, and how to confront or prevent similar outbreaks in the future, all of which fall squarely under both biomedical information and the core purpose of MEDRS. The existing exceptions will of course apply (the existence of beliefs about origins, even unsupported ones, can be covered as beliefs in contexts where those beliefs are due and relevant, and likewise the history of such beliefs can be covered as history in those contexts) but such claims must be treated with appropriate caution and should never be presented as factual in wikivoice without MEDRS sourcing. While this page is only an explanatory supplement and of course cannot decisively settle all recent arguments forever, the frequency with which it is cited by people on both sides shows that clarity here would be valuable. And while some people have raised concerns that this particular debate is only temporary, the reality is that it is likely to occur again whenever a similar issue arises; it is better for us to settle it decisively now so that by next time it can (hopefully) be firmly-established so we don't have to waste time repeatedly re-litigating it. --Aquillion (talk) 20:47, 25 May 2021 (UTC)
• Support. I didn't think this was necessary, but it apparently is. Any update should make clear that active pandemic/epidemics of diseases are covered, but historical pandemics (i.e. those that are completely over and have been for some indeterminate length of time) and ones where origins are clearly known and agreed upon by the large majority of science and medicine, are not covered. Any information about how to prevent future epidemics/pandemics is obviously covered as well. People are arguing that MEDRS is only intended to apply to information that can cause "direct harm" to patients - information about a disease's origin or the origin of a pandemic/epidemic that is ongoing can greatly impact peoples' response to the disease, as well as their willingness to partake in preventative actions and treatments - so obviously we should be extremely careful when discussing origins of diseases. -bɜ:ʳkənhɪmez (User/say hi!) 20:57, 25 May 2021 (UTC)
• Support. Apparently this is the controversy. I have found on wiki and elsewhere, that arguments tend to follow a universal pattern in matters like this. Disagreement begins in broad strokes, but funnels towards the most fundamental point, wherever a slight advantage can be eked out on either side. This, for the lab leak theory, is that point. If the fundamental processes of epidemiology and public health investigation (contact tracing, phylogenetics, causal inference, evolutionary genetics, etc.) are not biomedical information, then I truly wonder what is left in the field of "infectious disease epidemiology." This is what they do. They answer questions like this. Of viral origins, of pandemic origins. We should let those experts do their jobs. It could end up being a lab leak. The evidence says it is more likely to be a zoonotic spillover. But neither case will be solved to the satisfaction of anyone until some actual factual data is gathered. So maybe we should hold off on using wikipedia to wage this culture war, and stop falling prey to the opinion- and politics-driven currents that build faux controversy into manufactured consensus. If there is a conspiracy here, it is that political actors are using sensationalized headlines to pretend there is new evidence where there is not. Let's not let that invade wiki any more than it already has. TL;DR -- Yes, pandemic origins is BMI.--Shibbolethink ^{(♔ ♕)} 21:18, 25 May 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose Certain types of claims about the origin of COVID need to subject to MEDRS, such as claims about virus mutation, due to their technical complexity. Other types of claims simply require regular sourcing standards. This seems to be intended to exclude everything other than WIV and wHO statements on the issue, which would be a travesty. Which views are presented becomes more political under this system, not less political. User:力 (power~enwiki, π, ν) 21:22, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

  力, it's absolutely not designed to do that - peer reviewed primary studies are also acceptable (keeping in mind that they are not preferred), as are the plethora of review articles out there on this sort of topic. -bɜ:ʳkənhɪmez (User/say hi!) 21:37, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

  Except nobody else can do a primary study if they don't have access to the site. And the various silly complaints about "peer review" for the recent letter published in Science leaves me skeptical that review articles will be assessed fairly under this standard. User:力 (power~enwiki, π, ν) 21:42, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

  We are discussing Wikipedia:Biomedical information. Since biomedicine is "medicine based on the application of the principles of the natural sciences and especially biology and biochemistry,"[3] (Merriam-Webster) aka the medicine practiced by modern medical doctors, that excludes scientists outside medical science. MEDRS is about medical information not non-medical information. TFD (talk) 21:54, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

  This is not about one particular instance - this is about the general case. -bɜ:ʳkənhɪmez (User/say hi!) 21:57, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

  "Except nobody else can do a primary study if they don't have access to the site" That is absolutely not true, here are several of a bazillion examples of people doing primary studies into this question without access to the WIV. There are plenty of ways to gather evidence on these two theories that do not include accessing the WIV. Would it be ideal if China opened itself up to this sort of thing? To have qualified independent unbiased investigators look into both the WIV's records, personnel blood samples etc., and then also rural caves in Yunan and elsewhere sampling animals for viruses? Yes, absolutely! But that is not the only way to skin this cat.--Shibbolethink ^{(♔ ♕)} 22:22, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

  力, why should we only accept writings by medical doctors on the origins of the virus and ignore biologists, virologists, epidemiologists, etc., who may have greater knowledge on virus mutation and spread? And why should we weight until they have written peer reviewed papers and weight to see how they are treated in review studies, before reporting what they say? TFD (talk) 21:38, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

  I don't think we should privilege the opinions of people with a medical degree here, and I'm not sure why you think I think that. I don't see that in MEDRS. We do need to wait until sources are written before we can cite them. User:力 (power~enwiki, π, ν) 21:42, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

  MEDRS absolutely would include the writings of the scientists you've listed. BMI includes things written about biomedical info by anyone qualified to write about it who has then published it in a peer-reviewed journal. That probably includes more written by non-physicians than it does physicians, as a vague estimation.--Shibbolethink ^{(♔ ♕)} 22:22, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

• Oppose The clear purpose of Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources (medicine) (MEDRS) is stated in the first sentence: "Wikipedia's articles are not meant to provide medical advice. Nevertheless, they are widely used among those seeking health information.[1] For this reason, all biomedical information must be based on reliable, third-party published secondary sources, and must accurately reflect current knowledge." So in the current pandemic, we wanted to ensure that only the best medical advice was provided in how to avoid getting COVID19, what and how vaccines should be used and what treatements should be used. That's because there was a danger that readers could make decisions that harmed them, such as not taking precautions against the disease, using quack medicines or not getting vaccinated. How and why the virus originated and how public authorities managed or mismanaged the pandemic are not medical information and in fact are a matter of cross-disciplinary studies. Historians writing about the Black Death for example are capable of understanding the relevant medical information about how people can prevent getting the disease, what it does to them and how to treat it. A professor of medicine on the other hand might not be an expert on the social, political and economic background of the 14th century. If we ignore books written by experts and published in the academic press who happen not to be practicing medical doctors we will severely restrict coverage of these topics, which is a violation of weight. TFD (talk) 21:28, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

  If books are available about something it's by that point covered by the "historical information" exception - so that's not really a good argument to make. -bɜ:ʳkənhɪmez (User/say hi!) 21:38, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

  I assume you are referring to Wikipedia:Biomedical information#History. It's not in fact included as an exception (perhaps it should be) and the section cautions, "Subject matter is not considered "history" merely because it is in the past." TFD (talk) 21:43, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

  If that is your only opposition to this, it may be better to support with the caveat (like I did and the person who opened this did) that obviously historical information about an origin (i.e. settled science) is not covered by this. Unfortunately, RfC's have limitations and it's not possible to include every exception in the RfC text. -bɜ:ʳkənhɪmez (User/say hi!) 21:58, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

• Oppose The origin of the pandemic is a historical question, not medical advice, and is something that no reasonable person would construe as medical advice. There is no nexus between the origin of the pandemic (whether it was a lab escape or zoonotic transfer) and medical advice (such as vaccination, masking, social distancing). It is an exact analogue of item 2 under WP:MEDDEF as an example of something that is not biomedical information, The pills were invented by Dr Archibald Foster and released onto the market in 2015. This is not biomedical information, and it only requires ordinary RS. A hypothetical statement like COVID-19 originated in a lab escape would not be biomedical information, and one presented as attributed POV certainly would not Anonymous Sources told Foo Newspaper that COVID-19 originated in a lab escape. The intention of MEDRS is prevent harm from including dubious medical information that might encourage readers to disregard competent medical advice, or that might encourage them to take up alternative medicine. That is not what this is. Geogene (talk) 21:49, 25 May 2021 (UTC)
• Support In my opinion WP:BMI under "Attributes of a disease or condition - how it is caught or transmitted", would cover a disease origin or at least its initial transmission point. The origins of a disease can be used to create future guidance (ex. does distancing/masks need to be done when interacting with some species?) and it would be harmful to allow incorrect information to spread. Jumpytoo Talk 21:56, 25 May 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose TFD really hit the primary point. The reason why we have an exceptionally tight MEDRS standard is specifically because editors were worried that bad medical information would lead readers to harm. This really shouldn't make a huge impact on any article since WEIGHT is still going to favor peer reviewed studies over material published even in strong RSs like NYT, WSJ, NPR etc. The fringe crap is still going to be kept out when put against strong RSs and academic sources. Fringe anti-vax sources are not going to pass even the standard RS bar. Springee (talk) 21:59, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

I can't be so sure about that, as WSJ has published news resources such as this one. If we were to write the article based on WSJ and other RS, we would have the impression that there is substantial disagreement about GBD, while in fact condemnation of GBD was near unanimous. If we tie it to the fact that WSJ has been a soapbox for authors and proponents of GBD, the impression is even stronger, even as the opposite was true. We at least should definitely not source to WP:RSOPINION, as these examples show; and I still would be wary of news coverage, which might be biased, and while reliable on the face (because every detail is truthfully reported), creating false impressions about the situation of the scientific community from the general tone of coverage. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Szmenderowiecki (talk • contribs) 00:36, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

• Support I mean, look, we're talking about epidemiology, zoonosis, genetics and mutation, phylogenetics, etc. These are all biomedical issues. You literally cannot talk about a pandemic and its origins without discussing these things. And it needs to be understood that MEDRS is not in place out of concern for readers' health, because Wikipedia is not intended for medical advice. MEDRS exists because biomedical topics are incredibly difficult and complex, and it is well documented that popular press, even normally reliable sources like the Washington Post or NY Times, frequently get things wrong. It also exists because we cannot teach people to think like medical experts, but we can show people how experts evaluate evidence. Hyperion35 (talk) 22:47, 25 May 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose. I agree with the above comments that the origins of the COVID-19 virus can in no way be construed to be medical advice, which is why the higher MEDRS standards exist. I also agree with the sentiments that at this point the origins of the virus, if it were in some way connected to a lab leak, would most likely only be discoverable by traditional investigative news sources. Rreagan007 (talk) 23:29, 25 May 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose I think we need to go back to the rationale behind MEDRS - that some people get their medical information from Wikipedia, and giving bad information on things like symptoms, and more importantly bad information on treatments, can cause real harm to human health. Even bad information on things like prognosis can cause significant distress. Bad information on the origins of a pandemic could influence public health - most likely through trust/distrust in our institutions and whatnot - but this is at best tangential and no more exceptional than other forms of conspiracy theories, or other forms of government incompetence in relation to public health. Whether, as a matter of fact, a disease originated in a lab, was engineered, or occurred naturally, is unlikely to directly cause readers to make bad choices regarding their health. MEDRS is the wrong requirement for the origins of a disease. We should require the WP:BESTSOURCES, the same as for any WP:EXCEPTIONAL claim, which will often be MEDRS sources, but there is no need to require MEDRS, because this isn't what MEDRS is for. ProcSock (talk) 00:03, 26 May 2021 (UTC)
• Support. The origins of a human disease seems like clear biomedical information to me. I also prefer a broad rather than narrow interpretation of WP:MEDRS, to help keep misinformation out of the encyclopedia. Whenever we have situations where academic journals are saying one thing, and the popular press is saying another, in my opinion the popular press version of events is likely to be some sort of misinformation, and WP:MEDRS is a very important defense against that. I want to know what virologists and epidemiologists think, not what the Republican political machine and their billionaire financiers think. Finally, I agree with Shibbolethink above that epidemiology and public health investigation (contact tracing, phylogenetics, causal inference, evolutionary genetics, etc.) is clearly biomedical information. –Novem Linguae (talk) 00:08, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

I want to know what virologists and epidemiologists think

. Shi Zhengli, the virologist, thinks it was not a leak from her lab. She published it in a review, which is MEDRS. Sorry, but that information is not hierarchically better than top RS, in my opinion. Forich (talk) 04:30, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

Forich, interesting example. Maybe we should discount her papers due to COI. Or maybe we shouldn't because peer review compensates for it. Anyway, I don't really think this invalidates my argument above. For biomedical issues, I prefer an academic consensus to a popular press consensus. If one of the academic voices has COI, there are many other academic voices that will balance it out. –Novem Linguae (talk) 05:40, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

• Support. The discussion made at WP:RSN (thanks for the OP's effort to place it on a wider discussion) made it clear that origins must be placed in either non-biomedical information or biomedical information for clarity. There are a few reasons for which I would like to support it. First, we should be lowering the plank for finding resources only if we are sure that RS will report the information in a scientifically literate way, and ordinary RS have a history of choosing wrong words to convey what was a true message but which becomes false exactly because of the wording (the best illustration of which is here, and that's not only about strictly biomed info). Investigative journalism is good in finding information that might lead to some conclusion, but is lousy at interpreting it, because journalists mostly lack that specialist knowledge. As for MEDRS, they will still publish the info somewhere (and still abundant enough to satisfy the needs of writing our articles), but what is needed is expert commentary to whether this information is credible, and this requires specialist knowledge. Secondly, any credible theory of the origins of the disease will require that scientists evaluate the probability of alternatives (i.e. if lab leak, why not natural origin?), and to discard the latter, knowledge of epidemiology and genetics is a must, and we can't trust this to ordinary RS; that is, corroborating evidence to one theory may still be not enough to outweigh the evidence for another, and I don't think we want WP to give undue weight to evidence (which is, in addition, circumstantial in the discussion that triggered the RfC), and we do want to diminish the temptation of prospective editors of making original research based on journalists' reports and investigations, or choosing such RS as to support their point, which might not reflect consensus. Szmenderowiecki (talk) 00:22, 26 May 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose per the opening paragraph of WP:MEDRS: Wikipedia's articles are not meant to provide medical advice. Nevertheless, they are widely used among those seeking health information. For this reason, all biomedical information must be . . . This clearly says that the reason for WP:MEDRS is to make sure that people won't get bad health information from Wikipedia. But the origin of our lovely pandemic is not going to affect anyone's decision about what to do if they get the virus. Furthermore, in the current case, it is the WP:MEDRS sources that are giving out misinformation by claiming it is highly unlikely that this pandemic was caused by a lab leak, while ignoring the behavioral evidence (behavior of the CCP, that is) that shows the opposite. Adoring nanny (talk) 01:26, 26 May 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose. This page is an explanatory supplement to WP:MEDRS. We need to evaluate this in line with the phrasing currently present at WP:MEDRS. As I stated over at WP:RSN, it's not clear to me that origins of a particular virus actually fall under WP:MEDRS; this would lead to an odd situation where the origin of biological species that do not cause human disease (i.e. tobacco mosaic virus) would have different reliable sourcing requirements regarding its origins as a virus species than would E. Coli regarding its origins as a species of bacteria. The motivation for WP:MEDRS is described within the guideline, which says that Wikipedia's articles are not meant to provide medical advice. Nevertheless, they are widely used among those seeking health information. For this reason, all biomedical information must be based on reliable, third-party published secondary sources, and must accurately reflect current knowledge. In this framework, it doesn't seem to me that origin is itself biomedical information; it certainly intersects with biology, but origin itself doesn't appear to be related to human health per se. The study of the origin of E. Coli as a unique species, for example, doesn't describe any information pertaining to human health, whereas the symptoms of and treatments for infections of E. Coli clearly do. The same logic should apply more generally; biomedical information is information that pertains to human health, not the information that pertains to the origin of a causative agent of disease per se. It's certainly better to use peer-reviewed journals and academic scholarship on the topic than secondary-source analyses published in reliable newspapers (and certainly more than primary-source pieces published in reliable newspapers), and weight should be given in a manner consistent with WP:SCHOLARSHIP. But, I don't think that applying WP:MEDRS here is warranted, as the origin of a disease-causing agent itself doesn't appear to fall within the relevant reliable source guideline's scope. — Mikehawk10 (talk) 02:42, 26 May 2021 (UTC)
  • Mikehawk10, I disagree with this - the origin of a virus or species is not equivalent to the origin of a disease/pandemic as this RfC is asking. I think the RfC question was carefully crafted to be short but clearly state that it's only applicable to the origin of diseases/pandemics in humans - but maybe it's better to clarify it further, as that seems to be your only opposition. -bɜ:ʳkənhɪmez (User/say hi!) 02:48, 26 May 2021 (UTC)
    • @Berchanhimez: Are you asking me to expand upon whether we should apply a different analysis to the origin of a disease than to the origin of the causative agent of a disease? — Mikehawk10 (talk) 02:54, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

      Mikehawk10, yes, because that is the entire question here - your response is about the origin of causative agents, yet the question here is about the origin of disease/pandemic in humans. Not to mention that it's totally fine for you to say you agree with the origin of a pandemic being BMI but not the origin of a disease - that's a valid point - but your argument doesn't have anything to do with the discussion here as it's not about the origin of a disease-causing agent itself at all. -bɜ:ʳkənhɪmez (User/say hi!) 02:59, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

      The notion that my rationale doesn't have anything to do with the discussion here seems a bit odd; the origins of the disease are linked to the origin of the causitive agent, just as the origins of the Tobacco Mosaic Virus are linked to its ability to infect Tobacco plants (and the same goes for human diseases and their causitive agents). In any case, it's clear that WP:MEDRS proceeds from the fact that, as stated above Wikipedia's articles are not meant to provide medical advice. Nevertheless, they are widely used among those seeking health information. Adding a MEDRS restriction on whether Tuberculosis first infected individuals in Africa or in China or in Tuvalu ultimately doesn't seem to be in line with the guidelines's defined scope, as it really isn't linked to health information that people might seek. I agree that it's wise to use peer-reviewed scholarship to describe disease origins; we should always use the highest quality sources available to describe a fact. However, I don't believe that secondary/tertiary medical sources are the only sources competent to describe disease origins or pandemic origins, especially for historical pandemics like the Black death. The RfC proposal is overly broad and, in my reading, doesn't faithfully follow from the rationale for the guidelines set down in WP:MEDRS. — Mikehawk10 (talk) 03:36, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

• Oppose this is "playing politics under the guise of NOT playing politics". Wikiactivists are scrambling to hide away shifting mainstream consensus so they can keep their "conspiracy theory" label alive and well. 2601:602:9200:1310:4065:8EBB:AD8:41E6 (talk) 02:47, 26 May 2021 (UTC)
  • Is there a concrete, policy-based reason that you've made this comment? It's a bit odd to position a !vote solely on the basis of the (perceived) motives of other editors. — Mikehawk10 (talk) 02:56, 26 May 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose because the origin of a virus (i.e. if it had an intermediate host and which host, for example) is not a medical, but a biological question. Remember that the only reason for introducing WP:MEDRS is this: "Wikipedia's articles are not meant to provide medical advice. Nevertheless, they are widely used among those seeking health information...". The origin of a virus (like the exact population of bats) will not affects anyone's medical decisions. People vaccinate regardless to this. Remember that WP:MEDRS prohibits using original peer reviewed scientific publications. Not using such publications for pages on biology will adversely affect the quality of such pages. Let's simply follow WP:Verifiability. My very best wishes (talk) 03:23, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

The information is biomedical - we shouldn't exclude one part of it. And anyway - is there any indication that NYT/WSJ is better at communicating biology than medicine? I pretty much doubt it. Also, see WP:BIOHARD and WP:NOTRI - it explains pretty well why we shouldn't risk using sources other than MEDRS for medical (or biological) claims. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Szmenderowiecki (talk • contribs)

I do agree that WP:BMI should be fixed, but in a different place. It tells: "Biomedical information is information that relates to (or could reasonably be perceived as relating to) human health." What? That would cover all biology, ecology, psychology, sociology, all technology that affects human health (such as car or building construction), etc. Fortunately, the guideline explains below that no, that is not what authors actually mean. My very best wishes (talk) 15:19, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

• Oppose. It's more complicated than lumping everything wrt a pandemic's "origins" under WP:BMI. Some aspects are; some aren't. Alexbrn (talk) 04:01, 26 May 2021 (UTC)
• Support This should have been done years back when we were dealing with the pseudoscience conspiracy nonsense regarding the Zika virus, which had similar stupid claims made about its origins. Pandemics and global disease oubreaks very clearly fall under this and general MEDRS requirements, including regarding origins of diseases under major outbreaks that are so often conspiritized. Anyone claiming otherwise without actual evidence that is properly sourced is pushing pseudoscience and WP:FRINGE nonsense. Silverseren^C 04:34, 26 May 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose - that seems a false definition, although no specific is stated. Defining Biomedical as such simply is not matching the technical field or definitions used by the scientific community, and seems clearly outside the topic area and stated goals this article has long had. Keep it to what the scientific field says. Cheers Markbassett (talk) 05:06, 26 May 2021 (UTC) (edit conflict, reposted below)

  Some origin-related stuff is within the realm of the Biomedical sciences, some isn't. Alexbrn (talk) 05:09, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

  I can see your position that as proposed is too far, it’s more complicated than everything is in or out, mine is more that this is asking for redefining a technical area without any specific proposal or technical RS support. Cheers Markbassett (talk) 05:32, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

• Oppose - that seems a false definition, although nothing specific is stated. Defining Biomedical as such simply seems not matching to the technical field or definitions used by the scientific community, by not providing a medical textbook source. This also seems clearly outside the topic area and stated goals this article has long had. Keep it to what the scientific field says. Cheers Markbassett (talk) 05:17, 26 May 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose Initially I supported the idea of changing WP:BMI so that at least it covers origin unambiguously; I've changed my mind. Here is why: secondary reviews are important in treatment of diseases because primary sources are studies and RCTs with very narrow conditions (internal validity, is the technical term) that NEED extra assesment on their external validity. Meta analysis and systematic reviews fulfill that role. Primary sources on the origin of an epidemic, on the other hand, do not consist of RCT's plagued with external validity concerns. They do not require as much confirmation from independent researchers. This means that experts cited by top RS (e.g. New York Times, Reuters) commenting on primary sources about the origin of an epidemic should be good enough for Wikipedia. If experts disagree, we present both sides with attribution.

What is currently happening is that we have two low-level secondary sources (the 2020 review by the italians, poorly written really, and the 2021 review by Hakim, an obscure Singaporean Indonesian researcher) holding back an entire Hoover-Dam-like of sources giving credence to the lab leak hypothesis. Ah, we also have the WHO official statement which allegedly arrived at the "extremely unlikely" likelihood statement with unexplained criteria, under enormous political pressure from the Chinese counterpart of the Mission.

Imagine for a second what if the the next pandemic originates in the Subsaharan Africa with the local government obfsucating forensic research, and the WHO joint mission taking at face value the word of the African politicians and making it the MEDRS-level truth. Is that our ideal standard? Let's not be naive. Forich (talk) 05:12, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

A good example of why we need the WP:PAGs, otherwise we'd have editors deciding to reject sources because although an article might be published in as reputable journal as Virology, the author is from Singapore so he's "obscure" and it's "low-level"! Alexbrn (talk) 05:19, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

I love how you go from "an entire Hoover-Dam-like of sources" referring to literally a bunch of sources presenting exactly zero evidence for the claim, but trying to use 3 people getting sick out of 300 as an argument and then you just casually dismiss the entire WHO report stating very strongly it being "extremely unlikely". I think the WHO knows more about the criteria and methodology behind the subject than a bunch of news sources trying to make controversy because they don't have actual evidence to write about. Silverseren^C 05:40, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

I am amused that you chose sub-Saharan Africa as a hypothetical. HIV and Ebola both originated in sub-Saharan Africa, and yet somehow we have excellent MEDRS sources regarding their origin. Do MEDRS sources take more time? Yes. Do they take more time in some countries for political or logistical reasons? Of course. But we are not on a deadline here. And I see no reason to use substandard sources based on the excuse that it is just too difficult and time consuming for proper research to be done. Hyperion35 (talk) 13:25, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

And of course there were plenty of conspiracy theories in the earlier days of the HIV crisis about its origin. If Wikipedia has existed then no doubt there'd have been editors pushing the Fort Detrick origin story! (see Operation INFEKTION) They'd be sagely citing their newspaper sources and quoted scientists[4]. Alexbrn (talk) 13:32, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

• Oppose. This isn't a medical issue, and it doesn't affect treatment of the disease which is why we have MEDRS. Furthermore, evaluating the likelihood of a Chinese coverup, or lack thereof, is not a topic primarily for medical experts. This involves social science, statecraft, political science, historians (as time goes by), and so on. It also involves infectious disease experts, but in an interdisciplinary form. MEDRS should be kept for pure medical information: prognosis, symptoms, treatment, causes, and so on. For medical information that can affect readers' health, we need to be very careful. But as careful as we should be, we should not let MEDRS creep into political issues, which is what this US vs. China innuendo is. There may be good reasons to reject the leak hypothesis from Wikipedia, it certainly was considered highly WP:FRINGE in the past. Whether to reject this entirely or mention it in some form should be weighted with NPOV and FRINGE in mind, not MEDRS. MEDRS should be kept for what is purely medical.--Eostrix  (^{🦉 hoot} _hoot🦉) 05:52, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

Just as a note, an RfC that closed in early April found no consensus on whether the lab leak hypothesis was a "minority, but scientific viewpoint" or if it was a "conspiracy theory". — Mikehawk10 (talk) 05:56, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

Given that Dr. Anthony Fauci is now "no longer convinced the Covid-19 pandemic originated naturally", the position of this being fringe is becoming less tenable. It's also nearly impossible to disprove the lab leak hypothesis (how do you disprove a hypothetical coverup?), so this is unlikely to be resolved definitely any time soon.--Eostrix  (^{🦉 hoot} _hoot🦉) 06:42, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

A lab origin can be disproved by finding an intermediate animal host reservoir infected with a near identical SARS-CoV-2 virus (>99% genome relation), which caused the zoonotic event, as required by the natural origin hypothesis, as was done in the case of SARS-CoV-1 and MERS-CoV in less than a year. --Guest2625 (talk) 07:14, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

That would disprove it was "engineered" in the lab, which is not the hypothesis here as far as I understand it. It would not disprove the hypothesis that some members of the animal host reservoir were held in the lab and that the disease "leaked". It is unlikely to be debunked soon.--Eostrix  (^{🦉 hoot} _hoot🦉) 07:39, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

According to CBS News' Senior White House Correspondent, Dr. Fauci tells me that his opinion about the origins of COVID-19 have not changed: He believes that it is “highly likely” that it first occurred naturally before spreading from animal to human. Since no one is 100% sure, he’s open to a thorough investigation. Dr. Fauci said that does not mean he believes the virus first emerged in a lab, as some have suggested. [5] XOR'easter (talk) 16:02, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

• Oppose As many above have quoted "Wikipedia's articles are not meant to provide medical advice. Nevertheless, they are widely used among those seeking health information...". This is the reason why there is the MEDRS sourcing requirements. The origin of pandemics and diseases is not a medical question; it's a multidisciplinary question. In a complex situation, it becomes an investigative process that requires scientists, biosafety experts, and in this case intelligence agencies when a country does not cooperate. The origin of the 1971 Aral smallpox incident, 1977 Russian flu, 1978 smallpox outbreak in the United Kingdom, Sverdlovsk anthrax leak, and SARS laboratory accidents 2003–2004 are examples of such complex virus/bacteria origin events, which required a multidisciplinary field of investigators and researchers to solve the problem. What is most important is to use the best sources available, and the general reliable sourcing content guidelines tell us how to do that already. --Guest2625 (talk) 06:13, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

• Oppose Per TFD. WP:MEDRS clearly states the justification for a stricter policy, namely that people might seek medical advice on Wikipedia. Normal RS criteria should be applied to the origins of diseases. I don't find the arguments that this is too important or complicated to use the normal RS policy. There are plenty other no less complex and important areas of human knowledge where wrong information can cause harm (think of voting based on fake news), if the RS policy is good enough for them it's good enough here too. If it's not good enough, it should be discussed at WP:RS. Alaexis_¿question? 06:22, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

• Oppose as explained by others above. WP:BMI should be updated to clarify that not all aspects of origins requires WP:MEDRS so that other reliable sources on the investigations can be used Weburbia (talk) 07:39, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

• This should be done for this pandemic specifically, since so much pseudoscience is being published everywhere - including in ordinarily reputable newspapers. Scientific journal articles, by contrast, have been consistent and phenomenal on the origins of SARS-CoV-2. -Darouet (talk) 07:45, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

• Oppose. The purpose of WP:MEDRS is to prevent false and misleading medical advice from being introduced in the project. It's not a means to its own end, or a "privilege" granted to medical articles and medical publications. It adresses a specific problem, i.e. that readers use Wikipedia as a substitute for professional advice, diagnosis and prescription. This is made clear by reading the current version of § What is biomedical information?, which targets things that are related to these areas and exclude things like funding information. We should not expand the scope of MEDRS to subjects that do not raise the same issues. Reliable sources are reliable, and they can and should be used to source statements that are not likely to influence the choices and the decisions of patients. JBchrch talk 10:59, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

• Oppose Per many of those above who point out that WP:MEDRS is to keep anything that can be construed as medical advice sourced to the highest standards. Medical advice for how to treat or remain safe from a pandemic is the same whether that pandemic leaked from a lab, sprang to humans in a wet market, crossed species due to an animal bite, mutated on its own in the human population, or made the leap from livestock to farmers. There is no reason to hold investigations into the origin, which very well may be discovered by investigative journalism or a whistleblower, to the same standard as how a disease spreads or is treated, nor is that what WP:MEDRS is there to address. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 11:27, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

• Oppose Reiterating what many have said before, WP:MEDRS is about medical advice, the origin of this virus is a historical matter, no reasonable person would use this information to inform medical opinion. High Tinker (talk) 12:48, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

• Comment Over on the SARS-COV-2 page, we have an excellent demonstration of why MEDRS is essential. This diff from editor Darouet explains how other editors wanted to insert text from a Washington Post article about biosafety levels at the Wuhan lab. The Post is normally a reliable source, right? Except that Darouet did some actual due diligence, they checked the actual interview that the Post article summarizes, and found that the snippet quoted in the Post article dramatically misrepresents what the scientist actually said about biosafety levels and rules at the lab in the full interview, which turns out to be much more complex.

  And as I pointed out in my response, even the more complete text of the interview still leaves us with problems, because as you see, different editors have different interpretations of what the scientist meant in the interview, because even good MEDPOP interviews are still going to be vague and non-specific if they're intended for public reading. It forces us into issues of WP:SYNTH and WP:OR, and even as someone who actually interprets between clinical and regulatory language professionally, I can't really be certain that my interpretation of the interview is correct. And if I can't be certain, I damned well can't imagine how Randy in Boise is going to be either.

  This is why we must use MEDRS in these situations, these are the very real pitfalls of relying on standard journalism or even MEDPOP sources. Hyperion35 (talk) 14:00, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

  Would the usage of the Washington Post in that situation have given anyone poor information they could have taken as medical advice that put them at risk? ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 14:03, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

In the big picture, yes, because perception of the problem affects how we devote resources to addressing it. In a democracy, those resources are decided by the people, and when they all write to their legislators to demand better lab safety, and experts are then forced to focus on lab safety when the next zoonotic outbreak occurs, and it will occur, then we will be even less prepared than we were for this one. But leaving that aside, as XOREaster points out below, this is a very narrow view of MEDRS. If someone places unsources info on a BLP, we don't argue over whether it might actually be good for someone's career if we falsely claimed that they had committed a crime, we apply BLP policy and remove it. Hyperion35 (talk) 16:03, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

• If you don't like how the core RS policy works, you should get community-wide consensus to re-write it. Geogene (talk) 14:09, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

Leaving aside the fact that this is a discussion about how we should apply our RS policies (MEDRS is an RS policy), you appear to have fundamentally misunderstood my comment, as I was not suggesting rewriting our RS policies and I cannot fathom how you could interpret it that way. I am at a loss of words for how to describe this in a more simple fashion: MEDRS exists, here is an example of how it prevents incorrect information from entering our articles (as it did in that example). Hyperion35 (talk) 16:03, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

You're complaining about how core RS policy (of which MEDRS is a limited, special case) is supposedly inadequate. Instead of misapplying MEDRS all over Wikipedia, perhaps you should rewrite the core policy instead. I'm not sure how I can make this any simpler so that you can understand it. Perhaps more simple, declarative sentences. Your argument isn't convincing because it seems to have been resolved without applying MEDRS. That shows that standard RS policy works. That makes your argument self-refuting. Geogene (talk) 16:12, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

• Oppose TFD spelled it out correctly, the purpose of MEDRS is to prevent Wikipedia from giving out bad medical advice, not as a blanket policy that covers everything that a disease touches. Let me offer a hypothetical. Lets say that there is a local disease outbreak and the government in charge of that locale issued a statement to the effect of 'We know this disease was caused by a tainted drinking source, which we have cleaned up.' If we did as the supporters propose, we would, what, exactly? Be forbidden from citing the government's statement because it was not issued from a MEDRS? Bonewah (talk) 14:14, 26 May 2021 (UTC)
• Support I think Aquillion, bɜ:ʳkənhɪmez and others lay out the case pretty well. If it takes biomedical research to answer, it's a biomedical question. Really, the argument that MEDRS is only here to prevent bad medical advice is rather specious. Yes, that's the stated rationale at the beginning of the page, which makes sense because it's the obvious reason to have a stringent guideline, but that's not where the story ends. The fundamental issue is that misinformation about health and medicine is dangerous, and it's our responsibility to take precautions. The intro of WP:BLP doesn't list any specific kinds of harm that violating it would lead to; should we then conclude that the risks are all just hypothetical? The intro of WP:NORG says nothing at all about the harms that including articles on non-notable companies can lead to; should we conclude there is no motivation for WP:NORG at all? On top of all that, conspiratorial thinking about the origin of a disease can indeed affect health choices people make. Just look at the past couple decades of the antivax movement to see the psychology at work. Recently, there has been research suggesting that COVID conspiracy theories can feed into vaccine refusal or hesitancy. The risk is real, not hypothetical, and the matter of disease origin becomes one for MEDRS even under the strictest reading. XOR'easter (talk) 15:11, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

References

Discussion (RFC Parts II and III)

Talking as a biotechnology professional, I’d like to point out that epidemiology in specific and public health in the general does not draw only from biological sciences the way medicine does [6], so I'm not sure this page is the right venue for this RFC. It is clear from the votes above that the application of WP:MEDRS to COVID-19 origins in specific and disease outbreaks in the general require further clarification. I would suggest a part II and III, as follows.

II: Which aspects of COVID-19 etiology should fall under WP:MEDRS?

• Species of the reservoir and/or intermediary host of the etiological agent
• Evolutionary history of the virus
• Identity and provenance of virus’s most recent ancestor/s
• Place, time, and mechanism of the transmission of the first human infection/s
• Insert other etiological aspect
• All of the above

III: As per WP:MEDASSES and WP:BESTSOURCES, how should sources be assessed to put the claim in WP:WIKIVOICE of a scientific consensus on COVID-19 origins for any given spillover hypothesis?

• Only papers with supporting forensic or phylogenetic evidence are enough to make such a claim, as with most disease outbreaks.
• Any papers with expert opinions weighing the probabilities of different origin hypotheses are enough to make such a claim, and Source bias isn’t a thing.
• Any papers from the Vatican or the WHO, regardless of whether supporting evidence is provided or not, because they are exalted by the hand of God and unsullied by the petty politicking of men.

Please suggest any obvious and not-so-obvious amendments to the above text so that we can have a nice WP:RFCNEUTRAL statement. CutePeach (talk) 15:59, 26 May 2021 (UTC)