Talk:Soviet–German Syphilis Expedition

A fact from Soviet–German Syphilis Expedition appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 27 October 2018 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that the Soviet-German Syphilis Expedition of 1928 sought to explain the endemic syphilis among the "primitive" Buryat people?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2018/October. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Soviet-German Syphilis Expedition.

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Salvarsan

The article mentions that one of the objectives of the expedition was to discover the efficacy of the drug Salvarsan. So what did they discover in this respect? Cwmhiraeth (talk) 05:27, 21 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Cwmhiraeth:, complex answer and the article has room for huge expansion. The Russian agenda led to a compulsory interview of Buriat people prior to giving access to Salvarsan. They had a good uptake of syphilitic Buriats turning up to out patient clinics, particularly once word spread of physicians giving out medication for syphilis. Those interviews gave good insight into living habits. The German agenda was to demonstrate that the syphilitic Buriat people responded differently to Salvarsan than other (European) people and therefore prove syphilis in Buriats was different to syphilis in Europeans. They found no difference. The expedition, seen as essentially two expeditions with two agendas/missions, ended after only three months.[1][2] Whispyhistory (talk) 06:57, 21 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. This objective just seemed to have been forgotten by the time the end of the article was reached. Incidentally, the graph above shows an amazing peak of viewings around October 14th, the sort of spike you might get on a DYK main page appearance day, but not on any other occasion. Cwmhiraeth (talk) 08:21, 21 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Cwmhiraeth:. Thanks. @Redrose64: may have a better understanding of the results shown in the graph. I rounded the article with Salvarsan. It can be expanded later. You are quite right with your comment. Whispyhistory (talk) 14:45, 21 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The spike in views is because Max Jessner appeared on dyk that day with this article as a link in the hook. Whispyhistory (talk) 16:36, 21 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Yet Jessner got less than 1000, proving that you can bold it but that doesn't make people click. Philafrenzy (talk) 19:42, 21 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I am currently highly sceptical of the pageviews graphs, see mw:Template talk:Graph:PageViews#Reverse curve. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:01, 21 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]