User:Jytdog/sandbox

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

latest todo[edit]

hm
http://www.forbesindia.com/printcontent/32568
http://fortune.com/2013/05/23/the-latest-to-claim-fraud-at-generic-lipitor-maker-ranbaxy-its-owners/
http://fortune.com/2013/05/15/dirty-medicine./
http://fortune.com/2014/02/03/ranbaxys-empty-promises/

keep in mind[edit]

needs work[edit]

diagnostics
devices
drugs
people/companies
human orgins mess

churnalism examples[edit]

  • removed phys and sciencedaily ELs churning same release (perfect)
  • replaced use as putative secondary source to support primary source about health, content promoted scientists (unsurprisingly)
  • replaced phys.org ref which obscures that they are republishing press release, with eureka alert which clearly labels as "press release" (ref), see also sciencedaily which also honestly labels here

stuff related to warren, alteon, Alagebrium[edit]

google search]

  • pharmascience -- just it

junk[edit]

Favorite article titles:

Should be required:

paid WP

phsy.org links

academic spamming[edit]

socking

preserve blurb[edit]

The following is unsourced and was moved here per WP:PRESERVE. Per WP:BURDEN please do not restore without finding independent, reliable sources, checking the content against them, and citing them, and ensuring that this content has appropriate WP:WEIGHT in the article overall.

Please be aware that per WP:PROMO: Wikipedia is not for..... Advertising, marketing or public relations. Information about companies and products must be written in an objective and unbiased style, free of puffery. All article topics must be verifiable with independent, third-party sources, so articles about very small "garage" or local companies are typically unacceptable. Wikipedia articles about a company or organization are not an extension of their website or other social media marketing efforts. External links to commercial organizations are acceptable if they identify notable organizations which are the topic of the article. Wikipedia neither endorses organizations nor runs affiliate programs. See also Wikipedia:Notability (organizations and companies) for guidelines on corporate notability. Those promoting causes or events, or issuing public service announcements, even if noncommercial, should use a forum other than Wikipedia to do so. Contributors must disclose any payments they receive for editing Wikipedia. See also Wikipedia:Conflict of interest.

Please note the " Wikipedia articles about a company or organization are not an extension of their website" piece of that.

wikidata/en-WP problems[edit]

community imposed bans/blocks for TOU violations[edit]

  • jennepicfoundation, disclosed and not editing directly, but doing nothing but battering talk page

really current[edit]

laser articles

to write[edit]

McBride, Ryan (6 January 2011). "Rich Aldrich, Biotech Powerbroker, Breaks Silence on New $87M Longwood Founders Fund". Xconomy.


Timmerman, Luke (17 March 2009). "Pfizer's VC Leader, Barbara Dalton, on Corporate Venture and Northwest Deal Hunting". Xconomy.
"Barbara J. Dalton Ph.D.: Executive Profile & Biography". Bloomberg. Retrieved 15 February 2017.</ref>

current[edit]

related to this Articles created by NeatGrey/Spectra239

Explicit transhumanist aspects
Classic paid editing, but some of these have implicit transhumanist aspects


  • working on same article as each other
  • FAA

tracking article creators as I cannot see them after they are deleted:

13:01, 18 July 2017 RickinBaltimore (talk | contribs) deleted page Darrick E. Antell (G11: Unambiguous advertising or promotion)
01:21, 30 November 2016 DGG (talk | contribs) deleted page Darrick E. Antell (G11: Unambiguous advertising or promotion)
15:57, 31 January 2011 Closedmouth (talk | contribs) deleted page Darrick E. Antell (Speedy deleted per CSD G4, a substantially identical copy of a page deleted via a deletion discussion. using TW)
16:32, 27 June 2009 Indubitably (talk | contribs) deleted page Darrick E. Antell (Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Darrick E. Antell)
see also Darrick E. Antell, MD
04:04, 22 July 2017 Athaenara (talk | contribs) deleted page Collaborative Research Center 1080 (G11: Unambiguous advertising or promotion: more at User talk:Kay1080)
19:42, 21 October 2014 TexasAndroid (talk | contribs) deleted page Collaborative Research Center 1080 (A7: No explanation of the subject's significance (organization) (TW))
22:20, 23 July 2017 Salvidrim! (talk | contribs) deleted page Riordan Clinic (Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Riordan Clinic closed as delete)
00:07, 26 September 2011 Fastily (talk | contribs) deleted page Riordan Clinic (Expired PROD, concern was: clearly doesn't meet WP:Notability (organizations and companies) as there aren't sufficient independent sources to prove notability)
11:58, 10 August 2017 Athaenara (talk | contribs) deleted page Macrotellect (G11: Unambiguous advertising or promotion: more at User talk:Orare200)
11:35, 26 July 2016 DGG (talk | contribs) deleted page Macrotellect (G11: Unambiguous advertising or promotion)
09:33, 18 May 2015 RHaworth (talk | contribs) deleted page Macrotellect (A7: Article about a company, corporation or organization, which does not credibly indicate the importance or significance of the subject) by User talk:Orare200
11:56, 10 August 2017 Athaenara (talk | contribs) deleted page Jacob Israel Liberman (G11: Unambiguous advertising or promotion: more at User talk:Orare200) by User talk:Orare200
11:30, 10 August 2017 RHaworth (talk | contribs) deleted page Dr. Bassam Damaj (G12: Unambiguous copyright infringement of https://www.innovuspharma.com/management-team.php) User talk:Fbinquiries
  • Tomas Gorny my goodness.
  • 05:40, 28 April 2017 Spartaz (talk | contribs) protected Tomas Gorny [Create=Require administrator access] (indefinite) (Repeatedly recreated) (hist)
  • 05:40, 28 April 2017 Spartaz (talk | contribs) deleted page Tomas Gorny (Wikipedia:Deletion_review/Log/2017_April_19)
  • 04:03, 20 April 2017 Drmies (talk | contribs) restored page Tomas Gorny (148 revisions) (restore for deletion review)
  • 04:37, 19 April 2017 Drmies (talk | contribs) deleted page Tomas Gorny (Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Tomas Gorny (4th nomination) closed as delete)
  • 12:51, 25 September 2016 Sandstein (talk | contribs) removed protection from Tomas Gorny (Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log/2016 September 17) (hist)
  • 13:20, 2 February 2016 JzG (talk | contribs) protected Tomas Gorny [Create=Require administrator access] (expires 13:20, 2 February 2017) (Recently deleted BLP) (hist)
  • 13:20, 2 February 2016 JzG (talk | contribs) deleted page Tomas Gorny (G4: Recreation of a page that was deleted per a deletion discussion, WP:XFD)
  • 06:23, 5 January 2016 Mkdw (talk | contribs) deleted page Tomas Gorny (Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Tomas Gorny (2nd nomination) closed as delete)
  • SierraSil
  • 19:45, 1 November 2017 Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk | contribs) deleted page SierraSil (Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/SierraSil (XFDcloser))
  • 19:21, 16 November 2008 Star Mississippi (talk | contribs) deleted page SierraSil (G11: Blatant advertising)
  • 17:10, 10 February 2008 Keilana (talk | contribs) deleted page SierraSil (CSD A7 (Band): Article about a band that does not assert significance)
  • 21:20, 27 June 2007 Tone (talk | contribs) deleted page SierraSil (content was: '{{db-copyvio|url=http://www.sierrasil.com/professional_science.php}}{{db-copyvio|url=http://www.sierrasil.com/files/pdf/SierraSil_ScienceSheet.pdf}}...')

Sourcing and citations[edit]

The note above mentions and links to the three main guidance documents for editing about health --WP:MEDRS (sourcing), WP:MEDMOS (style), and WP:MEDHOW (important tips).

The note below provides a bit more brief information about sourcing per MEDRS and a concrete explanation on how to format citations from MEDHOW. But there is no substitute for reading the documents.

Just follow the steps 1, 2 and 3 as shown and fill in the details

Thank you for contributing to Wikipedia. Remember that when adding content about health, please only use high-quality reliable sources as references. We typically use review articles, major textbooks and position statements of national or international organizations (There are several kinds of sources that discuss health: here is how the community classifies them and uses them). WP:MEDHOW walks you through editing step by step. A list of resources to help edit health content can be found here. The edit box has a built-in citation tool to easily format references based on the PMID or ISBN.

  1. While editing any article or a wikipage, on the top of the edit window you will see a toolbar which says "cite" click on it
  2. Then click on "templates",
  3. Choose the most appropriate template and fill in the details beside a magnifying glass followed by clicking said button,
  4. If the article is available in Pubmed Central, you have to add the pmc parameter manually -- click on "show additional fields" in the template and you will see the "pmc" field. Please add just the number and don't include "PMC".

We also provide style advice about the structure and content of medicine-related encyclopedia articles. The welcome page is another good place to learn about editing the encyclopedia. If you have any questions, please feel free to drop me a note.

discussions that went well, and ones that didn't[edit]

went well[edit]

didn't[edit]

  • User talk:Polaritytherapie - I jumped the gun and assumed COI and intervened on content before there was a response to the initial query

hm[edit]

examples[edit]

self-citers
company spammers
attorneys spamming for litigation
fairly obvious no-longer-active paid editors
academics here for selfpromotion


1, raising the issue and asking for disclosure[edit]

Conflict of interest in Wikipedia[edit]

(elevate the above to main section) Hi xxxx I spend time working on conflict of interest issues here in Wikipedia, along with my regular editing, which is mostly about health and medicine. I am not an administrator. Your edits to date are promotional with respect to XX. Lots of people come to Wikipedia with some sort of conflict of interest and are not aware of how the editing community defines and manages conflict of interest. I'm giving you notice of our Conflict of Interest guideline and Terms of Use, and will have some comments and requests for you below.

{{subst:uw-coi

Comments and requests[edit]

Wikipedia is a widely-used reference work and managing conflict of interest is essential for ensuring the integrity of Wikipedia and retaining the public's trust in it. Unmanaged conflicts of interest can also lead to people behaving in ways that violate our behavioral policies and cause disruption in the normal editing process. Managing conflict of interest well, also protects conflicted editors themselves - please see WP:Wikipedia is in the real world, and Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia for some guidance and stories about people who have brought bad press upon themselves through unmanaged conflict of interest editing.

As in academia, COI is managed here in two steps - disclosure and a form of peer review. Please note that there is no bar to being part of the Wikipedia community if you want to be involved in articles where you have a conflict of interest; there are just some things we ask you to do (and if you are paid, some things you need to do).

Disclosure is the most important, and first, step. While I am not asking you to disclose your identity (anonymity is strictly protecting by our WP:OUTING policy) would you please disclose if you have some connection with XXX, directly or through a third party (e.g. a PR agency or the like)? You can answer how ever you wish (giving personally identifying information or not), but if there is a connection, please disclose it, and if you are editing for pay or the expectation of being paid, you must disclose that.. (ALT: Here in Wikipedia such disclosures must be made explicitly. Would you please disclose any connection you have with XXX? ) After you respond (and you can just reply below), if it is relevant I can walk you through how the "peer review" part happens and then, if you like, I can provide you with some more general orientation as to how this place works. Please reply here, just below, to keep the discussion in one place. Thanks!

A discussion of this took place here in response to a help request. Mathglot (talk) 18:52, 5 November 2017 (UTC)

Step 2, post initial disclosure[edit]

Thanks for your note, and for disclosing your relationship with XXX. So you have a COI for that company and related topics, as we define that in Wikipedia.
After it is clear that you understand the "ground rules" here I will be happy to discuss the content you want to change, but first things first.
To finish the disclosure piece, would you please add the disclosure to your user page (which is User:XXX - a redlink, because you haven't written anything there yet). Just something simple like: "I work for XC and have a conflict of interest with regard to that company and related topics" would be fine. If you want to add anything else there that is relevant to what you want to do in WP feel free to add it, but please don't add anything promotional about the company or yourself (see WP:USERPAGE for guidance if you like).
I added a tag to the XX article's talk page, so the disclosure is done there. Once you disclose on your user page, the disclosure piece of this will be done.
As I noted above, there are two pieces to COI management in WP. The first is disclosure. The second is a form of peer review. This piece may seem a bit strange to you at first, but if you think about it, it will make sense. In Wikipedia, editors can immediately publish their work, with no intervening publisher or standard peer review -- you can just create an article, click save, and voilà there is a new article, and you can go into any article, make changes, click save, and done. No intermediary - no publisher, no "editors" as that term is used in the real world. So the bias that conflicted editors tend to have, can go right into the article. Conflicted editors are also really driven to try to make the article fit with their external interest. If they edit directly, this often leads to big battles with other editors.
What we ask of editors who have a COI or who are paid, and want to work on articles where their COI is relevant, is:
a) if you want to create an article relevant to a COI you have, create the article as a draft through the WP:AFC process, disclose your COI on the Talk page with the Template:Connected contributor (paid) tag, and then submit the draft article for review (the AfC process sets up a nice big button for you to click when it is ready) so it can be reviewed before it publishes; and
b) And if you want to change content in any existing article on a topic where you have a COI, we ask you to
(i) disclose at the Talk page of the article with the Template:Connected contributor (paid) tag, putting it at the bottom of the beige box at the top of the page; and
(ii) propose content on the Talk page for others to review and implement before it goes live, instead of doing it directly yourself. Just open a new section on the talk page, put the proposed content there formatted just as you would if you were adding it directly to the article, and just below the header (at the top of the editing window) place the {{request edit}} tag to flag it for other editors to review. In general it should be relatively short so that it is not too much review at once. Sometimes editors propose complete rewrites, providing a link to their sandbox for example. This is OK to do but please be aware that it is lot more for volunteers to process and will probably take longer.
By following those "peer review" processes, editors with a COI can contribute where they have a COI, and the integrity of WP can be protected. We get some great contributions that way, when conflicted editors take the time to understand what kinds of proposals are OK under the content policies. (There are good faith paid editors here, who have signed and follow the Wikipedia:Statement on Wikipedia from participating communications firms, and there are "black hat" paid editors here who lie about what they do and really harm Wikipedia).
But understanding the mission, and the policies and guidelines through which we realize the mission, is very important! There are a whole slew of policies and guidelines that govern content and behavior here in Wikipedia. Please see User:Jytdog/How for an overview of what Wikipedia is and is not (we are not a directory or a place to promote anything), and for an overview of the content and behavior policies and guidelines. Learning and following these is very important, and takes time. Please be aware that you have created a Wikipedia account, and this makes you a Wikipedian - you are obligated to pursue Wikipedia's mission first and foremost when you work here, and you are obligated to edit according to the policies and guidelines. Editing Wikipedia is a privilege that is freely offered to all, but the community restricts or completely takes that privilege away from people who will not edit and behave as Wikipedians.
I hope that makes sense to you.
I want to add here that per the WP:COI guideline, if you want to directly update simple, uncontroversial facts (for example, correcting the facts about where the company has offices) you can do that directly in the article, without making an edit request on the Talk page. Just be sure to always cite a reliable source for the information you change, and make sure it is simple, factual, uncontroversial content. If you are not sure if something is uncontroversial, please ask at the Talk page.
Will you please agree to learn and follow the content and behavioral policies and guidelines, and to follow the peer review processes going forward when you want to work on the XXX article or any article where your COI is relevant? Do let me know, and if anything above doesn't make sense I would be happy to discuss. Best regards

alternatives[edit]

many alternatives
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.


WP:SELFCITE, WP:REFSPAM[edit]

Your contributions to date seem to be all about adding references to papers by XXXX While we love experts here (see WP:EXPERT) we do not love experts who use their editing privileges to promote their own work, which is a violation of the policy against abusing WP for promotion. This is also considered a form of spam -- see WP:REFSPAM. Please also see WP:SELFCITE and WP:MEDCOI.

We do love experts, and it would wonderful if you would consider contributing more broadly. But please, enough of the refspamming. Thanks.

Conflict of interest editing in Wikipedia; username[edit]

Hi XXX. I spend time working on conflict of interest issues here in Wikipedia, along with my regular editing. I am not an administrator. Your edits to date are promotional with respect to XX. Lots of people come to Wikipedia with some sort of conflict of interest and are not aware of how the editing community defines and manages conflict of interest.

Your edits to date are pretty much all about YYY. A person whose name is the same as your username is ZZZZ

With respect to the WP:USERNAME policy, specifically WP:IMPERSONATE, would you please review that section and take one of the actions advised there? If you don't we may need to soft-block this account until the issue can be resolved. Thanks.

If you do happen to be the real world XXX, I'm giving you notice of our Conflict of Interest guideline and Terms of Use, and will have some comments and requests for you below. This is a separate but possibly related issue to the one above.

{{subst:uw-coi

Comments and requests[edit]

Wikipedia is a widely-used reference work and managing conflict of interest is essential for ensuring the integrity of Wikipedia and retaining the public's trust in it. Unmanaged conflicts of interest can also lead to people behaving in ways that violate our behavioral policies and cause disruption in the normal editing process. Managing conflict of interest well, also protects conflicted editors themselves - please see WP:Wikipedia is in the real world, and Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia for some guidance and stories about people who have brought bad press upon themselves through unmanaged conflict of interest editing.

As in academia, COI is managed here in two steps - disclosure and a form of peer review. Please note that there is no bar to being part of the Wikipedia community if you want to be involved in articles where you have a conflict of interest; there are just some things we ask you to do (and if you are paid, some things you need to do).

Disclosure is the most important, and first, step. As mentioned above, you are editing here under the name of a real world person, and once we resolve the IMPERSONATE issues, that will be somewhat resolved, but we would still need you to explicitly declare your relationship with YYY, if there is one. Would you please disclose any such relationship?

After you respond (and you can just reply below), I can walk you through how the "peer review" part happens and then, if you like, I can provide you with some more general orientation as to how this place works. Please reply here, just below, to keep the discussion in one place. Thanks!

explanation about paid editing in WP[edit]

OK, ProblemSolver321. So I work on conflict of interest issues here in Wikipedia along with my regular editing. You've already received notice of our COI and PAID policies - I would just like to walk you through the process and explain the reasoning for it.

Wikipedia is a widely-used reference work and managing conflict of interest is essential for ensuring the integrity of Wikipedia and retaining the public's trust in it. As in academia, COI is managed here in two steps - disclosure and a form of peer review. Please note that there is no bar to being part of the Wikipedia community if you want to be involved in articles where you have a conflict of interest of that you are paid to work on; there are just some things we ask you to do (and if you are paid, some things you need to do).

I don't know if you are familiar with public scandals that COI editing have caused in the past... if you are not, please see:

The Statement above grew out of two scandals that hit us ~2013. One was about a firm called Wiki-PR that offers Wikipedia editing services. The other was about Banc de Binary which offered $10,000 for editors to "fix" their page in the midst of other scandals they were having (which became a scandal itself). See this WSJ article which names the BdB scandal but not the other. The WSJ piece says "Throughout February and March, the Wikimedia community extensively discussed the issue of undisclosed paid editing, resulting in 320,000 words of discussion on the site and 6.3 million views of the proposal that is being adopted." It was actually a much longer time, and many more words. There is a good-sized chunk of the community that hates paid editors. Another big chunk says "content not contributors" and doesn't care if you are paid or not. So people talked and talked and talked, mostly at each other, and at the end of the day, we didn't ban paid editing. As a result, the Wikimedia Foundation, which owns this site, took some executive action and updated the Terms of Use, to at least require paid editors to disclose what they were doing. (See the last bolded item here) Then the WMF would have legal grounds to take action, if they wanted to, against people who didn't disclose that they were editing for pay, and who was paying them. The WMF actually sent a cease-and-desist order to Wiki-PR, with regard to the use of the Wikipedia name, due to their undisclosed paid editing.

That is the context that you are working in. My stance is that we need to help editors manage their COIs. We have gotten some great contributions from conflicted editors; I have also given hours and hours of my time to cleaning up after conflicted editors who wouldn't follow our procedure for managing COI.

What everybody cares about, is good, neutral point of view content. The thing about COI is that it causes bias. People with a COI tend to write crappy content, because they cannot see what they are actually doing (they always say they can; they are pretty much always wrong) If you don't believe me, I can show you diffs of people being either unbelievably blind to themselves, or lying. Really. People who come here with a COI often don't know about, and don't care about, the policies that govern content and behavior here. When we are done working through how people with a COI or who are PAID should do at a basic level, I would appreciate it if you would let me walk you through the basic policies and guidelines. But later....

Anyway, I wanted to make sure you were aware of all that.

So - disclosure is the most important, and first, step. There is a second step, but first things first. While I am not asking you to disclose your identity (anonymity is strictly protecting by our WP:OUTING policy) would you please disclose if you have some connection with the campaign of David Jolly or with a PR agency or the like? You can answer how ever you wish (giving personally identifying information or not), but if there is a connection, please disclose it. After you respond (and you can just reply below), we can talk through how to more formally make any disclosure you have, and then about the second step. Thanks.

alt[edit]

alt:

Thanks for your note, I have replies on two levels. First, the conflict of interest level. Management of COI in Wikipedia has two steps - disclosure and a form of peer review. You are clearly a published scientist so you know the drill on academic publishing and disclosure of COI when you present or submit a manuscript. In Wikipedia, that disclosure should go on the relevant article Talk page (which I already did for you), and on your user page (which is here: User:XXXX). Something simple like "I am employee of XXXX, a company that makes systems for xxxxxx." would be great. Would you please take care of that?
The peer review" piece may seem a bit strange to you at first, but if you think about it, it will make sense. In Wikipedia, editors can immediately publish their work, with no intervening publisher or standard peer review -- you can just create an article, click save, and viola there is a new article, and you can go into any article, make changes, click save, and done. No intermediary. What we ask editors who have a COI to do, is a) if you create an article, submit it through the WP:AFC process so it can be reviewed before it publishes. b) And if you want to change content in an existing article on a topic where you have a COI, we ask you to propose content on the Talk page for others to review and implement before it goes live, instead of doing it directly yourself. You can make the edit request easily - and provide notice to the community of your request - by using the "edit request" function as described in the conflict of interest guideline. I made that easy for you by adding a section to the beige box at the top of the Talk page at Talk:xxxxxx - there is a link at "click here" in that section -- if you click that, the Wikipedia software will automatically format a section in which you can make your request.
Will you please make the COI disclosure on your user page, and agree to follow the peer review processes? Thanks!

alt: Conflict of interest in Wikipedi

Hi XXXX- welcome again to Wikipedia. I saw [XXXX this comment] you made. Thanks for acknowledging that you work for XXXXX. I'd like to call your attention to Wikipedia's conflict of interest guideline and other relevant policies for editors with a conflict. Please do read the links in the notice below (especially the link at "conflict of interest"), and please follow them. These policies and guidelines exist to ensure the integrity of Wikipedia; the community takes them seriously and we ask you to as well. If you have any questions, you can leave them here - I am watching your page.

uw-coi

Best regards,


alt Question re EXPERT[edit]

Wikipedia highly values contributions by subject matter experts; at the same time, experts have some special challenges when they first start editing here. Please see the essay with advice for experts, WP:EXPERTS, which discusses both sides of that coin.

One of the challenges is related to conflicts of interest (COI). I am sure you are familiar with that concept from your academic publishing, but it has some interesting twists here in Wikipedia, since Wikipedia editors directly publish their edits, with no mediation (no publisher, no peer review - just direct publication) Please do read WP:COI, especially the section on Writing about yourself and your work. This meshes with the last bullet of the EXPERT essay I linked to above. We love experts here, but please refrain from citing your own papers; if you do cite your own papers and others remove them, please respect that, or ask about it on the Talk page, as described in the section of the COI guideline I mentioned above. Also, please avoid emphasizing your own perspectives on things; all of Wikipedia is meant to reflect "accepted knowledge" per WP:NOT) and to give the most emphasis in articles to consensus views in any given field per WP:WEIGHT (which is part of the WP:NPOV policy - one of our core content policies). Would you please agree to do that going forward?

As an expert you are well positioned to describe the consensus views in your field, and I hope you will contribute content describing them. I hope that all makes sense - would be happy to discuss further. Best regards,

alt EXPERT[edit]

Hi XXXX. I work on conflict of interest issues here in Wikipedia.

Although you were provided with formal notice of our COI guideline above, you have been extensively editing the article about yourself. Perhaps a bit more discussion....

Wikipedia highly values contributions by subject matter experts; at the same time, experts have some special challenges when they first start editing here. Please see the essay with advice for experts, WP:EXPERTS, which discusses both sides of that coin.

One of the challenges is related to conflicts of interest (COI). I reckon you are very familiar with that concept from your academic work, but it has some interesting twists here in Wikipedia, since we allow editors to be anonymous here, and editors directly publish their edits, with no mediation (no publisher, no peer review - just direct publication) Please do read WP:COI, especially the section on Writing about yourself and your work.

Wikipedia is a scholarly project, and like all scholarly endeavors, managing COI is essential for ensuring the integrity of Wikipedia and retaining the public's trust in it. As in academia, COI is managed here in two steps - disclosure and a form of peer review.

You are editing under your own name, so disclosure is pretty much done.

Peer review step. What we ask editors with a COI to do, is offer suggestions on the Talk page for others to review instead of directly editing the article. Going forward, please do not directly edit articles where you have a COI, but rather offer suggestions at the article's Talk page. You can do that easily - and provide notice to the community of your request - by using the "edit request" function as described in the conflict of interest guideline. There is a section at the bottom of the mustard-colored box at the top of the Talk page - there is a link at "click here" in that section. If you click that, the Wikipedia software will automatically format a section in which you can make your request. Would you please do that going forward?

Please let me know if you are willing to do that. I am happy to talk, if you have any questions or want to discuss anything, you can write them below. I will see them, as I am "watching" this page. Best regards,


Notes[edit]

Wikipedia is a scholarly project, and like all scholarly endeavors, managing conflict of interest is essential for ensuring the integrity of Wikipedia and retaining the public's trust in it.

Briefly, conflict of interest is managed in Wikipedia in two steps: disclosure of the conflict, and offering edits on the Talk page for others to review instead of directly editing the article. You have already disclosed the connection, so the first part is done. Going forward, please do not edit the article directly, but rather offer suggestions at the article's Talk page. You can do that easily - and provide notice to the community of your request - by using the "edit request" function as described in the conflict of interest guideline. I made that easy for you by adding a section to the beige box at the top of the Talk page - there is a link at "click here" in that section -- if you click that, the Wikipedia software will automatically format a section in which you can make your request. Thanks. You can reply here if you have any questions or want to discuss anything, or you can ask at the article Talk page.

You may also want to read Wikipedia:Statement on Wikipedia from participating communications firms and Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia.

alt Question[edit]

Wikipedia highly values contributions by subject matter experts; at the same time, experts have some special challenges when they first start editing here. Please see the essay with advice for experts, WP:EXPERTS, which discusses both sides of that coin.

One of the challenges is related to conflicts of interest (COI). You may be familiar with that concept from your real world work, but it has some interesting twists here in Wikipedia, since we allow editors to be anonymous here. Please do read WP:COI, especially the section on Writing about yourself and your work. Wikipedia is a scholarly project, and like all scholarly endeavors, managing COI is essential for ensuring the integrity of Wikipedia and retaining the public's trust in it. As in academia, COI is managed here in two steps - disclosure and a form of peer review.

Disclosure first: you have already disclosed your connection to XXX in Talk pages. To make that disclosure complete, we need two things. The first is to make the disclosure on your User page, (here: User:CCCC). Again, you don't have to disclose any personally identifying information, but you should disclose the connection (like: I work for "XXX") See Second, you should make sure that you disclose your COI on the Talk pages of articles you edit, where the COI is present. An easy way to do this, is to simply include a link to the COI disclosure on your User page in your signature, which you can customize in the preferences for your account. See User:Middle 8 for an example. We can also handle this by using the "Connected contributor" tag in the headers of the talk page. The third alternative is to simply note your COI when you make comments on Talk pages. In any case, would you please add the disclosure to your User page?

Peer review step. What we ask editors with a COI to do, is offer suggestions on the Talk page for others to review instead of directly editing the article. Going forward, please do not directly edit articles where you have a COI, but rather offer suggestions at the article's Talk page. You can do that easily - and provide notice to the community of your request - by using the "edit request" function as described in the conflict of interest guideline. I made that easy for you by adding a section to the beige box at the top of the Talk page - there is a link at "click here" in that section -- if you click that, the Wikipedia software will automatically format a section in which you can make your request. Would you please do that going forward?

You can reply here with answers to those two questions. I am happy to talk, if you have any questions or want to discuss anything, you can write them below. I will see them, as I am "watching" this page. Best regards,

another version[edit]

Question[edit]

Wikipedia highly values contributions by subject matter experts; at the same time, experts have some special challenges when they first start editing here. Please see the essay with advice for experts, WP:EXPERTS, which discusses both sides of that coin.

One of the challenges is related to COI, which has some interesting twists here in Wikipedia, since we allow editors to be anonymous here and edits are immediately published (no intervening publisher or peer review). Please do read WP:COI, especially the section on Writing about yourself and your work.

Wikipedia is a reference work that the public relies on; managing COI is essential for ensuring the integrity of Wikipedia and retaining the public's trust in it. COI is managed here in two steps - disclosure and a form of peer review.

While I am not asking you to disclose your identity (anonymity is strictly protecting by out WP:OUTING policy) would you please disclose if you have some connection with Nautilus Productions? You can answer how ever you wish, but if you have some connection with Nautilus - especially if you work for or own Nautilus, you must disclose that per the Terms of Use. (disclosing now is OK - editors with conflicts of interest are part of the community). After you respond (and you can just reply below), perhaps we can talk a bit about editing Wikipedia, to give you some more orientation to how this place works. Thanks! Jytdog (talk) 04:57, 29 May 2015 (UTC)

Yes, it's my company. Feel free to refute anything posted on the page.— Preceding unsigned comment added by Caprockranger (talk • contribs) 11:07, 29 May 2015 (UTC)


Thanks very much for disclosing that. OK, as I mentioned above there are two steps - disclosure and peer review. Please let me finish the disclosure part. Best practice with COI is to disclose your conflict of interest on your user page (here: User:Caprockranger) and on articles where your conflict is relevant. Would you please add a statement to your userpage disclosing your COI? Something like "Nautilus Productions is my company" or the like. (You can see an example of such a disclosure here: User:Alexbrn, for example. With respect to the article level disclosure, I have added a tag to the Nautilus Productions' article talk page. Since you have edited a wide range of pages where you have a conflict, a more practical approach may be to add a link to the disclosure to your Wikipedia signature, which you can do in your Preferences. "Middle 8" is another editor with a declared COI on his user page, and he has incorporated a link to his COI in his signature, as you can see on his talk page here: User talk:Middle 8. Would you please make the declaration on your User page?
Now, for the peer review step. Going forward, please do not edit the article directly, but rather offer suggestions at the article's Talk page. You can do that easily - and provide notice to the community of your request - by using the "edit request" function as described in the conflict of interest guideline. I made that easy for you by adding a section to the beige box at the top of the Talk page at Nautilus Productions for example - there is a link at "click here" in that section -- if you click that, the Wikipedia software will automatically format a section in which you can make your request. Will you please agree to do that going forward, on articles where you have a conflict of interest?
Finally, I have tagged the Nautlius Productions article with a COI tag, and left a note about that on the article Talk page.
You can reply here if you have any questions or want to discuss anything, or you can ask at the article Talk page. Thanks again for talking.

another version[edit]

Hi XXX. I work on Conflict of Interest (COI) issues in Wikipedia. I saw that you have disclosed your COI on your Userpage and you responded a bit COIN, which is great. I'd like to continue the conversation, if you are open to that.

I'll start by giving you notice of our Conflict of Interest guideline and Terms of Use, and will have some comments and requests for you below. Please do read this carefully. Subst:uw-coi

Question[edit]

Wikipedia is a widely used referenced work, and managing conflict of interest is essential for ensuring the integrity of Wikipedia and retaining the public's trust in it. I don't know if you are familiar with public scandals that COI editing have caused in the past... if you are not, please see:

  • Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia (yes we actually have an article about it)
  • Wikipedia:Statement on Wikipedia from participating communications firms
  • the Statement above grew out of two scandals that hit us ~2013. One was about Banc de Binary with offered $10,000 for editors to "fix" their page in the midst of other scandals they were having. and the other was about a firm called Wiki-PR. (see Wiki-PR editing of Wikipedia) See this WSJ article which names the BdB scandal but not the other. The WSJ piece says "Throughout February and March, the Wikimedia community extensively discussed the issue of undisclosed paid editing, resulting in 320,000 words of discussion on the site and 6.3 million views of the proposal that is being adopted." It was actually a much longer time, and many more words. There is a good-sized chunk of the community that, to be frank, hates paid editing. Another big chunk says "content not contributors" and doesn't care if you are paid or not. That is the context that you are working in, as someone who works for an SEO firm. (My stance is that we need to help editors manage their COIs. We have gotten some great contributions from conflicted editors; I have also given hours and hours of my time to cleaning up after conflicted editors who wouldn't follow our procedure for managing COI.)

What everybody cares about, is good, neutral point of view content. The thing about COI is that it causes bias. People with a COI tend to write crappy content, because they cannot see what they are actually doing (they always say they can; they are pretty much always wrong) If you don't believe me, I can show you diffs of people being either unbelievably blind to themselves, or lying. Really.

Anyway, I wanted to make sure you were aware of all that.

Here is the heart of what I want to communicate to you.

Wikipedia highly values contributions by subject matter experts; at the same time, experts have some special challenges when they first start editing here. Please see the essay with advice for experts, WP:EXPERTS, which discusses both sides of that coin.

One of the challenges is related to conflicts of interest (COI). You may be familiar with that concept from your real world work, but it has some interesting twists here in Wikipedia, since we allow editors to be anonymous here (not an issue with you as you have disclosed who you are) but even more so with the instant nature of publishing here. You make an edit, you save it, and you are published - no intervening publisher, no peer review.

So... as in academia, COI is managed here in two steps - disclosure and a form of peer review.

Like I said, disclosure is complete with you. So how do we do peer review? We ask editors who have a COI to refrain from directly editing content where they have a COI, but rather, propose content at the relevant article's Talk page. You can do that easily - and provide notice to the community of your request - by using the "edit request" function as described in the conflict of interest guideline. I made that easy for you by adding a section to the bottom of the beige box at the top of the Talk pages where you have a COI - there is a link at "click here" in that section -- if you click that, the Wikipedia software will automatically format a section in which you can make your request. What that does, is it gives everybody a chance to review the content to make sure it is NPOV and well-sourced. No drama.

The other way we do peer review, is that we ask editors who create articles, who have a COI with regard to topics in the article, to a) put the article through the WP:AFC process instead of creating them directly (AfC is very clearly a peer review process) and b) to disclose their COI so that the reviewers are aware of it, while reviewing.

Will you please agree to do that going forward?

Also, we prefer if editors refrain from citing their own work here - it is a big temptation, we know, but again that becomes a form of self-promotion. Please see WP:SELFCITE about that.

So - will you please agree to do that too? You can reply here if you have any questions or want to discuss anything - I am watching this page. Thanks! Jytdog (talk) 01:30, 27 June 2015 (UTC)

advocacy version[edit]

Hi XX

Along with my editing here, which is mostly about health, I work on conflict of interest and advocacy issues in Wikipedia.

I'd like to make sure you are aware of what we are all about here. First and foremost, there are a lot of things that Wikipedia is not. Due to its open nature as "the encyclopedia that anyone can edit", a lot of people come to Wikipedia with a misunderstanding of what Wikipedia is, and what it isn't. One of our most important policies, is What Wikipedia is not.

One of the things it isn't, is a platform for advocacy or advertising (these are the same thing, from the community's perspective - content written to promote or denigrate something, that violates key content policies and guidelines as well).

This is discussed in the WP:SOAPBOX section of NOT.

We do understand that sometimes people are passionate about something in the real world, and want to come to Wikipedia to contribute to articles about that. This passion is a double-edged sword -- it drives contributions, but it can also lead people to be in too much of a hurry, and too intense, to learn how Wikipedia works and how to edit and behave according to the policies and guidelines that the community has built to govern itself. People who are passionate also have a hard time listening, and working through differences calmly, based on the policies and guidelines.

This is discussed somewhat in the policy section, WP:YESPOV. We also have two very good essays offering advice - one is WP:ADVOCACY and the other is WP:SPA (the latter stands for "single purpose account"). Please do read them both.

It takes time to really be what we call WP:HERE (as in "here to build an encyclopedia"). Only you can decide if you will be here, or not here.

If you do want to be here, and become part of the community and help with our work, you are very welcome and there are lots of people who will be willing to help you. But please do be aware that you agree to learn and follow the policies and guidelines every time you edit here - that agreement is in Terms of Use that is linked-to, at the bottom of every page, and a link to the Terms of Use is also directly over the "save" button in the editing window. That is the basis on which we restrict the privileges of people who are NOTHERE.

So really - it is your choice! Please slow down and learn, and please stop trying to use Wikipedia as a SOAPBOX for YYY. If you continue as you have been, you will end up very frustrated and frustrating a lot of people in the process.

So... good luck! I will be happy to answer any questions you have. You can reply here if you like - I am watching your page now.


Advocacy and Conflict of interest in Wikipedia[edit]

Hi XXX. I work on conflict of interest and advocacy issues in Wikipedia. Per the notice above, please do change your username so it clearly reflects a person and not a movement or the like.

I'd like to make sure you are aware of what we are all about here. First and foremost, there are a lot of things that Wikipedia is not, and one of them, is a platform for advocacy. Please read WP:SOAPBOX - that is both a policy and a "pillar" - something very essential to the very guts of this place. (that bit at SOAPBOX is part of a larger document called "What Wikipedia is Not" - as this is "the encyclopedia that anyone can edit", as you can imagine all kinds of people come here to hijack Wikipedia - some people come here and try to create promotional content about their companies (classic "COI"), some come to tell everybody how bad it is to eat meat, some come to grind various political axes... we get all kinds of abuse. It all comes down to violations of SOAPBOX.)

For non-financial advocacy issues, we have two very good essays offering advice - one is WP:ADVOCACY and the other is WP:SPA (the latter stands for "single purpose account"). Please do read them both. And also WP:COI - being involved in a dispute outside of Wikipedia does constitute a conflict of interest within Wikipedia.

Bottom line, is that if you continue to attempt to use Wikipedia as a platform for advocacy (we don't care what the cause is - raw capitalism or the most important social justice issue on the planet), you are going to lose access to Wikipedia. Editing Wikipedia is not a right - it is a privilege. One that is available to everybody, but one that can be lost by abusing Wikipedia. So please..... cool it. Please.

It takes time to really be what we call WP:HERE (as in "here to build an encyclopedia"). Only you can decide if you will be here, or not here.

If you do want to be here, and become part of the community and help with our work, you are very welcome and there are lots of people who will be willing to help you. Because we are a community with only a minimal hierarchy, the community has puts lots of policies and guidelines ("PAG") in place that govern not only content, but how we treat each other. You agree to follow those policies and guidelines every time you edit here - that agreement is in Terms of Use that is linked-to, at the bottom of every page. That is the basis on which we restrict the privileges of people who are NOTHERE.

It takes time to learn the letter - and most importantly, the spirit - of PAG. One of the hardest things for new users (especially passionate ones) to learn, is that PAG exist at all and that they form the foundation for everything that happens here. Passionate new editors are often in too much of a hurry to even wrap their heads around that. They tend to create a lot of fires, and then either leave angry, or get thrown out of here. Either way, it is unproductive drama for everybody involved.

So really - it is your choice! Slow down and learn, and stop trying to use Wikipedia as a SOAPBOX, or end up very frustrated (and frustrating a lot of people in the process - people who are volunteers and could be doing the work of building the encyclopedia, if they didn't have to deal with drama).

So... good luck! I will be happy to answer any questions you have. You can reply here if you like - I am watching your page now.

Comments/requests[edit]

Wikipedia is a widely-used reference work and managing conflict of interest is essential for ensuring the integrity of Wikipedia and retaining the public's trust in it. I really hope you can understand that. If every company used Wikipedia to promote itself (in violation of our policy against promotion) this place would be a garbage dump and nobody would come read it. Right? So it is important that we manage COI.

The thing about COI is that it causes bias and that leads to content that fails our WP:NPOV policy. People with a COI tend to write crappy content, because they cannot see what they are actually doing (they always say they can; they are pretty much always wrong) If you don't believe me, I can show you diffs of people being unbelievably blind to themselves. Really.

You are clearly a EE expert. Wikipedia highly values contributions by subject matter experts; at the same time, experts have some special challenges here - especially when they come here to write about their companies. Please see the essay with advice for experts, WP:EXPERTS, which discusses both sides of that coin. You are a published scientific author, so you are surely familiar with the concept of COI from your real world work, but COI has some interesting twists here in Wikipedia, due to the instant nature of publishing here. You make an edit, you save it, and you are published - no intervening publisher, no peer review.

So... as in academia, COI is managed here in two steps - disclosure and a form of peer review.

  • Disclosure first. You are editing under your real name. And you clearly work for BEM. This actually makes you what we call a "paid editor" and you have been editing in violation of the Terms of Use here. That is a serious thing, Fred.

You can fix this. The first thing is to make your COI disclosure complete by adding something like the following to your Userpage -- User:Fklatt:

I work for Best Electric Machine which makes motors and other devices related to electric vehicles, the grid, 3-D printing, etc. Here is a list of articles I have directly edited in the past that are related to BEM's businesses:

Something like that. That would take care of the disclosure part. Would you please add that, or something like it, to your user page? Thanks.

  • The other step is peer review. We ask editors who have a COI to refrain from directly editing content where they have a COI, but rather, propose content at the relevant article's Talk page. You can do that easily - and provide notice to the community of your request - by using the "edit request" function as described in the conflict of interest guideline. I made that easy for you by adding a section to the bottom of the beige box at the top of the Talk pages where you have a COI - there is a link at "click here" in that section -- if you click that, the Wikipedia software will automatically format a section in which you can make your request. What that does, is it gives everybody a chance to review the content to make sure it is NPOV and well-sourced. No drama.

Another way we do peer review, is that we ask editors who create articles, who have a COI with regard to topics in the article, to a) put the article through the WP:AFC process instead of creating them directly (AfC is very clearly a peer review process) and b) to disclose their COI so that the reviewers are aware of it, while reviewing.

Also, we prefer if editors refrain from citing their own work here - it is a big temptation, we know, but again that becomes a form of self-promotion. Please see WP:SELFCITE about that.

Will you please agree to do those three peer review steps going forward?

Please do answer those two questions I have bolded. You can reply here, and you if you have any questions or want to discuss anything you can reply with those too - I am watching this page. Thanks!

Advocacy in Wikipedia[edit]

Based on what you have wrote above, I want to make sure are aware of issues with advocacy in Wikipedia.

There are a lot of things that Wikipedia is not (see What Wikipedia is not) and one of the things WP is not, is a platform for advocacy. Please especially see the section, WP:NOTADVOCACY. "What Wikipedia is Not" is both a policy and a "pillar" - something very essential to the very guts of this place. People come edit for many reasons, but one of the main ones is that they are passionate about something. That passion is a double-edged sword. It drives people to contribute which has the potential for productive construction, but it can also lead people to abuse Wikipedia - to hijack it from its mission of providing the world with free access to "accepted knowledge." Some people come here and try to create promotional content about their companies (classic "COI"), some come to tell everybody how bad it is to eat meat, some come to grind various political axes... we get all kinds of advocacy (COI is just a subset of it) It all comes down to violations of NOTADVOCACY. A lot of times, people don't even understand this is not OK. I try to talk with folks, to make sure they are aware of these issues.

For non-COI advocacy issues, we have three very good essays offering advice - one is WP:ADVOCACY another is WP:SPA that I already pointed you to, and see also WP:TENDENTIOUS which describes how advocacy editors tend to behave.

So, while I hear you that you are _____________ in the real world, but please do try to check that at the login page. And while you are free to edit about whatever the heck you want, please do consider broadening the scope of your editing. (I do realize that you are just getting started here, and everybody starts somewhere! Who knows where you will end up)

Changes to content (adding or deleting) need to be governed by the content policies and guidelines - namely WP:VERIFY, WP:OR, WP:NPOV, and WP:NOT and the sourcing guidelines WP:RS and WP:MEDRS. Your removal of the content added by Denis was correct as the content he added did violate the content policies and guidelines, but your reasoning was not correct. (Managing COI is complicated here, and I can explain that, if you want)

In terms of behavior, the really key behavioral policies are WP:CONSENSUS, WP:CIVIL, WP:AGF, WP:HARASSMENT, and WP:DR, and the key guideline is WP:TPG. If you can get all that (the content and behavior policies and guidelines) under your belt, you will become truly "clueful", as we say. If that is where you want to go, of course.

But do try to aim everything you do and write in Wikipedia to further Wikipedia's mission (not your mission) and base everything you do on the spirit (not just the letter) of the content and behavior policies and guidelines. Your passions will determine what you work on, but they shouldn't guide how you work here. I hope that makes sense.

If you have questions about working in WP at any time going forward, or about anything I wrote above, please ask me. I am happy to talk. Thanks again for your patience with me.

another way to go about it[edit]

So XXX, here is the deal. This is "the encyclopedia that anyone can edit." That means get we get the whole spectrum of editors. In topics about health:

  • people who are everyday doctors (not celebrity doctors, who fall into a different bucket)
  • people who are scientists
  • people who are kind of interested in medicine, health, etc
  • people who are really strong believers in X thing about health or medicine (more on on this in a bit)
  • people who come here to try to advertise stuff related to health (often directly paid to help some company or person make money and this ranges from drugs to medical devices to dietary supplements to specific companies and people, including celebrity doctors)

The "really strong believers" cover a very wide range of things. We get people who:

  • believe that some drug or device or dietary supplement or intervention of some kind saved their life/transformed their life etc. and just want to write about how awesome it is, relentlessly
  • believe that some drug or device or dietary supplement or intervention has harmed them and come here to add all kinds of negative information about it, relentlessly.
  • believe in really crazy stuff that is unfortunately pretty widespread (eg vaccines cause autism)
  • believe in really crazy stuff (like magnetic bracelets can cure cancer) (see WP:Lunatic charlatans - really - please read that if you never have)
  • believe strongly in some diet/lifestyle (eg Paleolithic lifestyle or Atkins Diet or Veganism - we get all kinds from rabid cavemen meat eaters to ferocious vegans)

That is just some of it. As a result, we have policies and guidelines and norms that we apply to everything. We need to be able to give consistent answers, based on consistent reasoning, to all those people above -- all of whom want to add NPOV-violating content of one kind or another to Wikipedia -- some of whom are relentless. The meat fan and the vegan; the accupuncturist and the drug salesman. All of them.

When it comes to extreme claims about health, the mainstream medical and scientific literature often doesn't even discuss them specifically. There are too many, and there is often really nothing scientific to say about a lot of this stuff. This is specifically discussed in WP:PARITY. We absolutely need PARITY to address the broad range of stuff that people bring to Wikipedia.

Please think about the objections you keep raising at the XXXX article, in light of the whole scope of stuff I have laid out above.


Conflict of interest in Wikipedia; experts[edit]

Hi YYYY. I work on conflict of interest issues here in Wikipedia, along with my regular editing, which is mostly about health and medicine. Your edits to date have a concentration on citing and discussing the publications and work of BLAHBLAH.

While we love experts in Wikipedia (please WP:EXPERT), we often run into problems with people using their editing privileges to promote their own ideas or papers, or those of people they know, or work for or with. Please see WP:REFSPAM, WP:SELFCITE,and WP:MEDCOI.

I'm giving you notice of our Conflict of Interest guideline and Terms of Use, and will have some comments and requests for you below.

{{subst:uw-coi

Comments and requests[edit]

Wikipedia is a widely-used reference work and managing conflict of interest is essential for ensuring the integrity of Wikipedia and retaining the public's trust in it. Conflict of interests can also lead to people behaving in ways that violate our behavioral policies; unmanaged conflicts of interest often cause disruption in the normal editing process. As in academia, COI is managed here in two steps - disclosure and a form of peer review. Please note that there is no bar to being part of the Wikipedia community if you want to be involved in articles where you have a conflict of interest; there are just some things we ask you to do (and if you are paid, some things you need to do).

Disclosure is the most important, and first, step. While I am not asking you to disclose your identity (anonymity is strictly protecting by our WP:OUTING policy) would you please disclose if you have some connection with XXX? You can answer how ever you wish (giving personally identifying information or not), but if there is a connection, please disclose it. After you respond (and you can just reply below), I can walk you through how the "peer review" part happens and then, if you like, I can provide you with some more general orientation as to how this place works. Please reply here, just below, to keep the discussion in one place. Thanks!

for crypto[edit]

Conflict of interest and advocacy in Wikipedia[edit]

Hi XC. I work on conflict of interest and advocacy issues here in Wikipedia, along with my regular editing Your recent edits at YY are promotional. I don't know if you are aware, but we have had so much promotional editing across cryptocurrency articles by people in the online communities that have formed around these currencies, that we have added "holding a cryptocurrency" to the COI guideline, as something that creates a conflict of interest here in Wikipedia with regard to that cryptocurrency and others. Folks in those communities, and who hold them, have come to WP in the hopes of promoting them. In case you do have a COI with respect to this currency, I'm giving you notice of our Conflict of Interest guideline and Terms of Use, and will have some comments and requests for you below.

{{subst:uw-coi

Comments and requests[edit]

Wikipedia is a widely-used reference work and managing conflict of interest is essential for ensuring the integrity of Wikipedia and retaining the public's trust in it. Unmanaged conflicts of interest can also lead to people behaving in ways that violate our behavioral policies and cause disruption in the normal editing process. As in academia, COI is managed here in two steps - disclosure and a form of peer review. Please note that there is no bar to being part of the Wikipedia community if you want to be involved in articles where you have a conflict of interest; there are just some things we ask you to do (and if you are paid, some things you need to do).

Disclosure is the most important, and first, step. While I am not asking you to disclose your identity (anonymity is strictly protecting by our WP:OUTING policy) would you please disclose if you have some connection with Bitcoin Cash community, and if you hold this currency? After you respond (and you can just reply below), if it is relevant I can walk you through how the "peer review" part happens. Please reply here, just below, to keep the discussion in one place. Thanks!

COI tag talk page note[edit]

I've added a conflict of interest tag to this article. This signifies to readers that the article has been extensively edited by someone with a conflict of interest, and is likely to have bias, in the form of missing negative content, overemphasis on "positives", non-neutral language (all of which are violations of the WP:NPOV content policy), and is likely to have unsourced or poorly sourced content, in violation of the WP:VERIFY content policy. It is likely that the content promotes the subject of the article, in violation of the WP:PROMO policy. Independent editors need to review the article and correct it, and then may remove the tag. If you do so, please leave a note here. Thanks.

alt The UPE and COI tags signify to editors and to readers that the article has been extensively edited by someone with a conflict of interest, and is likely to have bias, in the form of missing negative content, overemphasis on "positives", non-neutral language (all of which are violations of the WP:NPOV content policy), and is likely to have unsourced or poorly sourced content, in violation of the WP:VERIFY content policy. It is likely that the content promotes the subject of the article, in violation of the WP:PROMO policy. Independent editors need to review the article, including doing their own searches for sources to ensure that the article truly reflects what reliable sources say, and correct it, and then may remove the tag. If you do so, please leave a note here. Thanks.

How to edit[edit]

OK, this will get you oriented to how this place works, and to the key policies and guidelines. It is as brief as I can make it...

The first thing, is that our mission is to produce articles that provide readers with encyclopedia content that summarize accepted knowledge, and to do that as a community that anyone can be a part of. That's the mission. As you can imagine, if this place had no norms, it would be a Mad Max kind of world interpersonally, and content would be a slag heap (the quality is really bad in parts, despite our best efforts). But over the past 15 years the community has developed a whole slew of norms, via lots of discussion. One of the first, is that we decide things by consensus. That decision itself, is recorded here: WP:CONSENSUS, which is one of our "policies". And when we decide things by consensus, that is not just local in space and time, but includes meta-discussions that have happened in the past. The results of those past meta-discussions are the norms that we follow now. We call them policies and guidelines - and these documents all reside in "Wikipedia space" (There is a whole forest of documents in "Wikipedia space" - pages in Wikipedia that start with "Wikipedia:AAAA" or for short, "WP:AAAA". WP:CONSENSUS is different from Consensus.)

People have tried to define Wikipedia - is it a democracy, an anarchy, secret cabal? In fact it is a clue-ocracy (that link is to a very short and important text).

There are policies and guidelines that govern content, and separate ones that govern behavior. Here is a very quick rundown:

Content policies and guidelines
  • WP:NOT (what WP is, and is not -- this is where you'll find the "accepted knowledge" thing. You will also find discussion of how WP is not a catalog, not a how-to manual, not a vehicle for promotion, etc)
  • WP:OR - no original research is allowed here, instead
  • WP:VERIFY - everything has to be cited to a reliable source (so everything in WP comes down to the sources you bring!) Please note that writing content that interprets a source, and then citing the source you interpreted is not OK. Content in Wikipedia summarizes sources, it doesn't interpret sources. (this is discussed in WP:OR)
  • WP:RS is the guideline defining what a "reliable source" is for general content and WP:MEDRS defines what reliable sourcing is for content about health
  • WP:NPOV and the content that gets written, needs to be "neutral" (as we define that here, which doesn't mean what most folks think -- it doesn't mean "fair and balanced" - it means that the language has to be neutral, and that topics in a given article are given appropriate "weight" (space and emphasis). An article about a drug that was 90% about side effects, would generally give what we call "undue weight" to the side effects. Of course if that drug was important because it killed a lot of people, not having 90% of it be about the side effects would not be neutral) We determine weight by seeing what the reliable sources say - we follow them in this too. So again, you can see how everything comes down to references.
  • WP:BLP - this is a policy specifically covering discussion about living people anywhere in WP. We are very careful about such content (which means enforcing the policies and guidelines above rigorously), since issues of legal liability can arise for WP, and people have very strong feelings about other people, and about public descriptions of themselves.
  • WP:NOTABILITY - this is a policy that defines whether or not an article about X, should exist. What this comes down to is defined in WP:Golden rule - which is basically, are there enough independent sources about X, with which to build a decent article.
  • WP:DELETION discusses how we get rid of articles that fail notability.

In terms of behavior, the key norms are:

  • WP:CONSENSUS - already discussed
  • WP:CIVIL - basically, be nice. This is not about being nicey nice, it is really about not being a jerk and having that get in the way of getting things done. We want to get things done here - get content written and maintained and not get hung up on interpersonal disputes. So just try to avoid doing things that create unproductive friction.
  • WP:AGF - assume good faith about other editors. Try to focus on content, not contributor. Don't personalize it when content disputes arise. (the anonymity here can breed all kinds of paranoia)
  • WP:HARASSMENT - really, don't be a jerk and follow people around, bothering them. And do not try to figure out who people are in the real world. Privacy is strictly protected by the WP:OUTING part of this policy.
  • WP:DR - if you get into an content dispute with someone, try to work it out on the article Talk page. Don't WP:EDITWAR. If you cannot work it out locally, then use one of the methods here to get wider input. There are many - it never has to come down to two people arguing. There are instructions here too, about what to do if someone is behaving badly, in your view. Try to keep content disputes separate from behavior disputes. Many of the big messes that happen in Wikipedia arise from these getting mixed up.
  • WP:COI and WP:PAID which I discussed way above already. This is about preserving the integrity of WP. A closely related issue is WP:ADVOCACY; COI is just a subset of advocacy.
  • WP:TPG - this is about how to talk to other editors on Talk pages, like this one, or say Talk:Electronic cigarette aerosol and e-liquid. At article talk pages, basically be concise, discuss content not contributors, and base discussion on the sources in light of policies and guidelines, not just your opinions or feelings. At user talk pages things are more open, but that is the relevant place to go if you want to discuss someone's behavior or talk about general WP stuff - like this whole post.

If you can get all that (the content and behavior policies and guidelines) under your belt, you will become truly "clueful", as we say. If that is where you want to go, of course. I know that was a lot of information, but hopefully it is digestable enough.

If at some point you want to create an article, here is what to do.

  1. look for independent sources that comply with WP:MEDRS for anything related to health, and WP:RS for everything else, that give serious discussion to the topic, not just passing mentions. Start with great sources.
  2. Look at the sources you found, and see if you have enough per WP:Golden rule to even go forward. If you don't, you can stop right there.
  3. Read the sources you found, and identify the main and minor themes to guide you with regard to WP:WEIGHT - be wary of distortions in weight due to WP:RECENTISM
  4. Go look at manual of style guideline created by the relevant WikiProject, to guide the sectioning and other style matters (you can look at articles on similar topics but be ginger b/c WP has lots of bad content) - create an outline. (For example, for biographies, the relevant project is WP:WikiProject Biography) (For example, for companies, the relevant project is Wikipedia:WikiProject_Companies/Guidelines)
  5. Create the article following the process described at articles for creation for your first few articles.
  6. Start writing the body, based only on what is in the sources you have, and provide an inline citation for each sentence as you go.
  7. Make sure you write in neutral language. The most rigorous way to do this is to use no adjectives at your first go-round and add them back only as needed.
  8. When you are done, write the lead and add infobox, external links, categories, etc
  9. Consider adding banners to the Talk page, joining the draft article to relevant Wikiprojects, which will help attract editors who are interested and knowledgeable to help work on the article. If you have a COI for the article, note it there.
  10. The completed work should have nothing unsourced (because the sources drove everything you wrote, not prior knowledge or personal experiences or what the client wanted; there is no original research nor WP:PROMO in it.
  11. Submit your article for review by clicking the "submit your draft" button that was set up when you created the article. You will get responses from reviewers, and you can work with them to do whatever is needed to get the article ready to be published.

There you go! Let me know if you have questions about any of that

Again that was a lot, but the goal is to get you somewhat oriented.


So this is the promised second level. As you seem to be aware, WP has policies and guidelines that govern content and behavior that help the community work together to create neutral content that communicates "accepted knowledge" -- that is the mission! The key policies/guidelines are:

  • WP:NOT (what WP is, and is not -- this is where you'll find the "accepted knowledge" thing)
  • WP:OR - no original research is allowed here, instead
  • WP:VERIFY - everything has to be cited to a reliable source (so everything in WP comes down, to the sources you bring!)
  • WP:RS is the guideline defining what a "reliable source" is for general content; and
  • WP:MEDRS defines what reliable sourcing is for content about health
  • WP:NPOV and the content that gets written, needs to be "neutral" (as we define that here, which doesn't mean what you think -- it means that the language has to be neutral, and that topics in a given article are given appropriate "weight" (space and emphasis). An article about a drug that was 90% about side effects, would give what we call "undue weight" to the side effects. We determine weight by seeing what the reliable sources say - we follow them in this too. So again, you can see how everything comes down to references.

Anytime you want to create an article or a chunk of new content:

  1. look for independent sources that comply with WP:MEDRS for anything related to health, and WP:RS for everything else, that give serious discussion to the topic, not just passing mentions. . Start with great sources.
  2. Look at the sources you have, and see if you have enough per WP:Golden rule to even go forward. If you don't, tell the client, "There are not enough independent, reliable sources to create an article in WP - there is a policy called WP:NOTABILITY that defines the criteria, and X doesn't meet them"
  3. Read the sources you found, and identify the main and minor themes to guide you with regard to WP:WEIGHT - be wary of distortions in weight due to WP:RECENTISM
  4. Go look at manual of style guideline created by the relevant WikiProject, to guide the sectioning and other style matters (you can look at articles on similar topics but be ginger b/c WP has lots of bad content) - create an outline.
  5. Start writing the body, based only what is in the sources you have, and source each sentence as you go.
  6. Make sure you write in neutral language.
  7. When you are done, write the LEAD, infobox, EL's etc.

The completed work should have nothing unsourced (because the sources drove everything you wrote, not prior knowledge or personal experiences or what the client wanted; there is no original research nor WP:PROMO in it.


If I may, I would like to explain a bit about how Wikipedia actually works. There are some non-intuitive things about editing here, that I can zip through ~pretty~ quickly....
The first, is that our mission is to produce articles that provide readers with accepted knowledge, and to do that as a community that anyone can be a part of. That's the mission. As you can imagine, if this place had no norms, it would be a Mad Max kind of world interpersonally, and content would be a slagheap (the quality is really bad in parts, despite our best efforts). But over the past 15 years the community has developed a whole slew of norms, via loads of discussion. One of the first, is that we decide things by consensus. That decision itself, is recorded here: WP:CONSENSUS. (there is a whole forest of things, in "Wikipedia space" - pages in Wikipedia that start with "Wikipedia:AAAA" or for short, "WP:AAAA". WP:CONSENSUS is different from Consensus. See? And when we decide things by consensus, that is not just local, but includes meta-discussions that have happened in the past. Those are the norms. We call them policies and guidelines. There are policies and guidelines that govern content, and separate ones that govern behavior. Here is very quick rundown:
  • WP:NOT (what WP is, and is not -- this is where you'll find the "accepted knowledge" thing)
  • WP:OR - no original research is allowed here, instead
  • WP:VERIFY - everything has to be cited to a reliable source (so everything in WP comes down to the sources you bring!)
  • WP:RS is the guideline defining what a "reliable source" is for general content and WP:MEDRS defines what reliable sourcing is for content about health
  • WP:NPOV and the content that gets written, needs to be "neutral" (as we define that here, which doesn't mean what most folks think -- it doesn't mean "fair and balanced" - it means that the language has to be neutral, and that topics in a given article are given appropriate "weight" (space and emphasis). An article about a drug that was 90% about side effects, would give what we call "undue weight" to the side effects. We determine weight by seeing what the reliable sources say - we follow them in this too. So again, you can see how everything comes down to references.
  • WP:BLP - this is a policy specifically about articles about living people. We are very careful about these articles (which means enforcing the policies and guidelines above rigorously), since issues of legal liability can arise for WP, and people have very strong feelings about other people, and about public descriptions of themselves. I reckon this one will be of special interest to you.
  • WP:NOTABILITY - this is a policy that defines whether or not an article about X, should exist. What this comes down to is defined in WP:Golden rule - which is basically, are there enough independent sources about X, with which to build a decent article. I reckon this will be of special interest to you.
In terms of behavior, the key norms are:
  • WP:CONSENSUS - already discussed
  • WP:CIVIL - basically, be nice. This is not about being nicey nice, it is really about not being a jerk and having that get in the way of getting things done. We want to get things done here - get content written and maintained and not get hung up on interpersonal disputes. So just try to avoid doing things that create unproductive friction.
  • WP:AGF - assume good faith about other editors. Try to focus on content, not contributor. Don't personalize it when content disputes arise. (the anonymity here can breed all kinds of paranoia)
  • WP:HARASSMENT - really, don't be a jerk and follow people around, bothering them. And do not try to figure out who people are in the real world. Privacy is strictly protected by the WP:OUTING part of this policy.
  • WP:DR - if you get into an argument with someone. Try to work it. If you cannot, then use one of the methods here to get wider input.
  • WP:TPG - this is about how to talk to other editors on Talk pages, like this one, or the one in the article about you: Talk:YYY
If you can get all that (the content and behavior policies and guidelines) under your belt, you will become truly "clueful", as we say. If that is where you want to go, of course.
I know that was a lot of information, but hopefully it is digestable enough.
I am hoping you may have some answers about questions I raised at Talk:YYY, and I hope you have time to weigh in there. You are probably the best person to answer them as you probably are aware of what has been written about you, and where!

Note on formatting citations[edit]

Quick note, that there is a very easy and fast way to do citations, which often also provides a link that allows readers to more easily find the source being cited.

You will notice that when you are in an edit window, that up at the top there is a toolbar. On the right, it says "Cite" and there is a little triangle next to it. If you click the triangle, another menu appears below. On the left side of the new menu bar, you will see "Templates". If you select (for example) "Cite journal", you can fill in the "doi" or the "PMID" field, and then if you click the little magnifying glass next to the field, the whole thing will auto-fill. Then you click the "insert" button at the bottom, and it will insert a ref like this (I changed the ref tags so it shows):

(ref) Huhtaniemi, I (2014). "Late-onset hypogonadism: current concepts and controversies of pathogenesis, diagnosis and treatment". Asian Journal of Andrology. 16 (2): 192–202. doi:10.4103/1008-682X.122336. PMC 3955328. PMID 24407185.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: unflagged free DOI (link) (/ref)

That takes about 10 seconds. As you can see there are templates for books, news, and websites, as well as journal articles, and each template has at least one field that you can use to autofill the rest. The autofill isn't perfect and I usually have to manually fix some things before I click "insert" but it generally works great and saves a bunch of time.

The PMID parameter is the one we care about the most.

One thing the autofill doesn't do, is add the PMC field if it is there (PMC is a link to a free fulltext version of the article). you can add that after you insert the citation, or -- while you have the "cite journal" template open -- you can click the "show/hide extra fields" button at the bottom, and you will see the PMC field on the right, near the bottom. If you add the PMC number there that will be included, like this (again I have changed the ref tags):

(ref) Huhtaniemi, I (2014). "Late-onset hypogonadism: current concepts and controversies of pathogenesis, diagnosis and treatment". Asian Journal of Andrology. 16 (2): 192–202. doi:10.4103/1008-682X.122336. PMC 3955328. PMID 24407185.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: unflagged free DOI (link) (/ref)

The autofill also doesn't add the URL if there is a free fulltext that is not in PMC. You can add that manually too, after you autofill with PMID

just wow[edit]

better welcome[edit]

{{subst:Welcome-belated}}

Welcome! Here, have some cookies.

Here's wishing you a welcome to Wikipedia, USER. Thank you for your contributions. Here are some useful links, which have information to help editors get the most out of Wikipedia:

Also, when you post on talk pages you should sign your name using four tildes (~~~~); that should automatically produce your username and the date after your post.

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! If you have any questions, feel free to leave me a message on my talk page, consult Wikipedia:Questions, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and ask your question there.

Please do take some time to review the information in the links above. Again, welcome!

"Assume good faith" - a pillar of Wikipedia (drafty)[edit]

The fact that everyone here is allowed to be anonymous (and this anonymity is fiercely protected by the out policy) ~can~ breed all kinds of bad thoughts, especially during disagreements over content. It is kind of natural for people to wonder at others' motivations, and especially when it comes to something you are passionate about and have strong ideas about, it is very easy to think that someone opposing you is doing so from some corrupt or bad motive. The anonymity of other editors can exacerbate that.

This is why WP:AGF is one of the pillars of this place (not just a policy - a pillar). It calls on editors to not personalize at all but rather to focus on "content, not contributor" -- to avoid filling the void that the privacy policy creates, and look at what people do, not who you think they are, nor why they might be doing whatever they are doing. It is hard for some people to get comfortable with that, and all the time, people fling accusations of COI or other bad faith motivations at other editors in the midst of content disputes. Now, there is COI editing here, and there are advocates of all stripes. If you suspect someone has a COI or other issue, you might be right. But AGF tells us not to hold off from "going there" and really try to work out content disputes based on the content policies and guidelines, while following the behavioral policies and guidelines, and to use the dispute resolution processes to work out the content dispute. The community does have ways of dealing with advocates (those who have a COI, and those who are POV-pushers) but it you need to use those carefully and thoughtfully, and not just "wham" go for the kill on talk page. Instead, assume good faith, focus on content not contributor, and work on content according to the content policies and guidelines, and behave according to the behavioral policies and guidelines, and you will have a pretty nice time here. I hope that makes sense.

But really - there is nothing new under the sun here. This place is a laboratory of human behavior; you can watch new people come and make the same kinds of mistakes people before them did, that other people are making now, and that people in the future will make. Some people figure this place out and become productive members of the community; some stick around but get miserable and leave, others yet, go out in fireballs. The choice is always, always, in their hands.

old drugs[edit]

old chemicals[edit]

i like[edit]

  • additional note. great comment by Colin here from 2007. "The sort of press-releases that hospitals/labs do, which are written to stimulate funding and press interest rather than advance medical science, are the last thing WP should be using as a source. And when newspapers get hold of these, they either regurgitate verbatim and uncritically, or else they mess with it. I'll try to find an example if you like. The latest cutting edge unproven research is really not what an "encyclopaedia" is about IMO."

{{subst:RSPlease}}

old discussion about Intersection of FRINGE and MEDRS w quackwatch[edit]

things i can never find[edit]

  • {{subst:AFC submission/draftnew}}

{{Reliable sources for medical articles}} {{WikiProjectBannerShell|1= {{WikiProject Medicine {{WikiProject Pharmacology

{{Connected contributor | User1 = | U1-EH =yes | U1-banned = | U1-otherlinks = Promotional SPA Per [[Special:Contributions/ |contribs]] | User2 = | U2-EH = yes | U2-banned = | U2-otherlinks =Promotional SPA per[[Special:Contributions/ |contribs]] | User3 = | U3-EH = yes | U3-banned = | U3-otherlinks = Promotional SPA per [[Special:Contributions/ |contribs]] | User4 = |U4-EH =yes | U4-banned = | U4-otherlinks = Promotional SPA per [[Special:Contributions/|contribs]] | User5 = | U5-EH = yes | U5-banned = | U5-otherlinks = Promotional SPA per [[Special:Contributions/|contribs]] | User6 = | U6-EH = yes | U6-banned = | U6-otherlinks = Promotional SPA per [[Special:Contributions/ |contribs]] | User7 = | U7-EH =yes | U7-banned = | U7-otherlinks = Promotional SPA per [[Special:Contributions/|contribs]] | User8 = | U8-EH = yes | U8-banned = | U8-otherlinks = Promotional SPA per [[Special:Contributions/|contribs]] | User9 = | U9-EH = yes | U9-banned = | U9-otherlinks = Promotional SPA per [[Special:Contributions/|contribs]] | User10 = | U10-EH = yes | U10-banned = | U10-otherlinks = Promotional SPA per [[Special:Contributions/|contribs]] }}

{{Connected contributor (paid) | checked = 31-12-2016 by {{u|Example}} | User1 = | U1-employer = | U1-client = | U1-EH = | U1-banned = | U1-otherlinks = | User2 = | U2-employer = | U2-client = | U2-EH = | U2-banned = | U2-otherlinks = | User3 = | U3-employer = | U3-client = | U3-EH = | U3-banned = | U3-otherlinks = | User4 = | U4-employer = | U4-client = | U4-EH = | U4-banned = | U4-otherlinks = | User5 = | U5-employer = | U5-client = | U5-EH = | U5-banned = | U5-otherlinks = | User6 = | U6-employer = | U6-client = | U6-EH = | U6-banned = | U6-otherlinks = | User7 = | U7-employer = | U7-client = | U7-EH = | U7-banned = | U7-otherlinks = | User8 = | U8-employer = | U8-client = | U8-EH = | U8-banned = | U8-otherlinks = | User9 = | U9-employer = | U9-client = | U9-EH = | U9-banned = | U9-otherlinks = | User10 = | U10-employer = | U10-client = | U10-EH = | U10-banned = | U10-otherlinks = }}

  • {{uw-coi}} (to warn editors who may have a conflict of interest)
  • {{uw-coi-username}} (to warn editors whose username violates the WP:Usernames policy)
  • {{COI editnotice}} (for article talk pages, provides instructions for conflicted editors to use edit requests)
  • {{WPMED|class=|importance=}} - Placed on talk pages of medicine-related articles and used to assess articles.
  • {{reqphoto|medical subjects}} - Used on talk pages to request that photographs be added to the article.
  • {{med-stub}} - Used on stub articles (here is the complete list)
  • {{Medref}} - Used to indicate an article in need of adequate references.
    • {{Medref|section|{{subst:DATE}}}} - Used to indicate an section in need of adequate references.
  • {{Medicine}} - The bottom navbox template to be used on articles about broad disciplines of medicine.
  • {{medical advice}} - placed around requests for medical advice on talk pages (box ends with {{cob}}).
  • {{Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Navigation}} - transcludes the navigation template shown to the right.
  • {{Reliable sources for medical articles}} - |synonym1=antibiotic-induced+diarrhea
  • Welcome messages (all of these should be substituted onto a user's talk page):
    • {{subst:WPMED welcome2}}~~~~ - my tweak with more general orientation
    • {{subst:WPMED welcome}} ~~~~ – Welcome message for new Wikipedians (with invitation to join us) – newish, with video
    • {{subst:MedWelcome}} ~~~~ – Welcome template to greet new Wikipedians and invite them to join WikiProject Medicine. – includes general intro links
    • {{subst:Welcome medical student}} ~~~~ – For welcoming new editors who appear to be students associated with a course
  • [[File:New medical editor.ogv|thumb|thumbtime=2:59|right|320px|Welcome to Wikipedia and [[WP:MED|Wikiproject Medicine]]]] A video that can be transcluded onto the pages of new users.
  • {{User WPMed}} – Userbox for members of this WikiProject.
  • {{User MedLat}} – Userbox for those who understand Medical Latin (Babel-compatible; just add |MedLat to your Babel template)
  • {{subst:RSPlease}} ~~~~ – User Talk page request to use MEDRS sources

indenting and signing[edit]

Thanks for replying! Quick note on the logistics of discussing things on Talk pages, which are essential for everything that happens here. In Talk page discussions, we "thread" comments by indenting (see WP:THREAD) - when you reply to someone, you put a colon in front of your comment, which the Wikipedia software will render into an indent when you save your edit; if the other person has indented once, then you indent twice by putting two colons in front of your comment, which the WP software converts into two indents, and so on, and when that gets ridiculous you reset back to the margin (or "outdent") by putting this {{od}} in front of your comment. Threading/indenting also allows you to make it clear if you are also responding to something that someone else responded to if there are more than two people in the discussion; in that case you would indent the same amount as the person just above you in the thread. I hope that all makes sense.

Also, at the end of the comment, please "sign" by typing exactly four (not 3 or 5) tildas "~~~~" which the WP software converts into a date stamp and links to your talk and user pages when you save your edit.

Threading and signing, are how we know who said what to whom and when.

Please be aware that threading and signing are fundamental etiquette here, as basic as "please" and "thank you", and continually failing to thread and sign communicates rudeness, and eventually people may start to ignore you (see here).

I know this is unwieldy, but this is the software environment we have to work on. Will reply on the substance in a second...

fix[edit]

Please help me understand how the following colleges/universities are allowed to post information about their schools and I am not allowed to.
  • Drake University College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences
  • Northeastern University School of Pharmacy
  • University of Michigan College of Pharmacy
  • Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy
  • Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences
  • UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy had this note on the talk page, "Much of the information on this page needs to be edited as they are either out of date or not really relevant to the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy (the sections about the AHEC, for instance). I'm planning to do a major overhaul of the page in the coming days. -- Regarding the note about the major contributor having close ties with the school: I do work at the school, which is why I knew that much of the old information in the article was incorrect, outdated, or not actually relevant to the school. However, if you examine the content I've contributed, I think it's pretty obvious all of the information provided are facts (research dollar amount, programs offered, name of buildings, etc.). Uncsop (talk) 14:36, 15 November 2010 (UTC)"
  • Skaggs School of Pharmacy - they are part of the wikiproject Pharmocolgy "a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of pharmacology on wikipedia (do I need to join this?)
  • McWhorter School of Pharmacy - they are part of the wikiproject Universities
  • Nova Southeaster University College of Pharmacy
  • University of Florida College of Pharmacy
  • University of Kentucky College of Pharmacy
I am only trying to do my job - fulfill the request from the Dean to have a page of our own. Please help me understand. Can someone call and talk to me?

Lauralibal (talk) 18:16, 16 April 2015 (UTC)

handy[edit]

draft for christian terrorism[edit]

Mark Juergensmeyer, a sociologist of religion,[1] characterizes "religious terrorism" broadly, yet also attempts to nuance that phrase. He uses the mainstream definition of "terrorism" as acts of violence, usually against noncombatants, intended to bring attention to a message through shock and fear.Cite error: A <ref> tag is missing the closing </ref> (see the help page).: 10  His book, Terrorism in the Mind of God, focuses on "religious activists who have used violence or who justify its use."Cite error: A <ref> tag is missing the closing </ref> (see the help page).: xxviii 


  1. ^ Peter J. Woolley. Review of Juergensmeyer, Mark. Terrorism in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000 in The Journal of Conflict Studies (Fall 2002), pp. 152-153.

drafty bit[edit]

just want to again back to the scope. this article is about the flawed study and the media circus around it. everything else is aftermath. I want to note when elsevier retracted the study, they said: "A more in-depth look at the raw data revealed that no definitive conclusions can be reached with this small sample size regarding the role of either NK603 or glyphosate in regards to overall mortality or tumor incidence. Given the known high incidence of tumors in the Sprague-Dawley rat, normal variability cannot be excluded as the cause of the higher mortality and incidence observed in the treated groups. Ultimately, the results presented (while not incorrect) are inconclusive, and therefore do not reach the threshold of publication for Food and Chemical Toxicology." In other words, they goofed in publishing it in the first place; while the results were free of problems (there was no fraud in going from the raw data to the results presented in the paper) the conclusions drawn from the results were wrong ("The results were inconclusive") - redbaron if you were not aware, scientific papers present the materials and methods, then results, then conclusions -- the problem was primarily with the last section- they drew conclusions from the results, and they should not have. The editors offered the Seralini team the chance to voluntarily withdraw it (which is what commonly happens when mistakes are made) and the team refused. So the journal did it for them. This is not censorship, it is fixing a mistake the journal made by publishing it in the first place. As they wrote: "do not reach the threshold of publication for Food and Chemical Toxicology" That is the mainstream story, and it goes directly to the topic of the article. The controversy over the retraction and the republication are all side shows, but they are noted.Jytdog (talk) 21:48, 5 October 2014 (UTC)

todos[edit]

create

drugs of abuse/nooptropic pharmacology editors

article to work on

  • John Ioannidis

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/308269/?single_page=true http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=201218 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/

  • alt med

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/09/opinion/sunday/dont-take-your-vitamins.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

http://www.sram.org/article/the_office_of_alternative_medicine_nccam_should_be_abolished http://www.sram.org/media/documents/uploads/article_pdfs/5-4-06.Green.pdf http://www.csicop.org/si/show/ongoing_problem_with_the_national_center

people who appear to be advocates or conflicted[edit]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Elise1997 same law firm

blurbs[edit]

You are new here and you don't understand the rules very well, much less the spirit that informs them - it is very very unwise to jump straight into a heated dispute as you have on the xxxxxxx article, generating an extended argument with several experienced editors and starting two drama board actions. And you have been here about a month! What you have done by jumping right in and getting into a dispute, is to create a bad reputation for yourself - first with your behavior on the article itself, and then bringing fruitless drama board actions -- all that will make it even harder for you to win consensus for the content you want. So really -- my advice to you is slow down, be more humble and open, and learn how we operate (and really learn! please understand the spirit as well as the substance of WP:MEDRS and WP:FRINGE and WP:NPOV) and then engage with the content you care about again. By being so combative before you understand the policies and guidelines, you are setting yourself up for a miserable time here, and will likely burn out and leave (and frustrate a bunch of other editors in the meantime). Big, unhappy waste of time for everybody. And please fix the WP:SOCK violation as soon as possible and please stop continuing the violation - you must edit under one account only going forward. Good luck.

I am sorry about this, but if you really want to get involved, it turns out that Wikipedia is a pretty complex place. Being an "encyclopedia that anyone can edit" means that over the years, Wikipedia has developed lots of policies and guidelines (PAG) to help provide a "body of law" as it were, that form a foundation for rational discussion. Without that foundation, this place would be both a garbage dump of random content and a wild west - a truly ugly place. But with the foundation, there is guidance for generating excellent content and there are ways to rationally work things out - if, and only if, all the parties involved accept that foundation and work within it. One of the hardest things for new people, is to understand not only that this foundation exists, but what its letter and spirit is. (I keep emphasizing the spirit, because too often people fall prey to what we call "wikilawyering") The more I have learned about how things are set up here - not just the letter of PAG and the various drama boards and administrative tools, but their spirit - the more impressed I have become at how, well ... beautiful this place is. It takes time to learn both the spirit and the letter of PAG, and to really get aligned with Wikipedia's mission to crowdsource a reliable, NPOV source of information for the public (as "reliable" and "NPOV" are defined in PAG!). People come edit for many reasons, but one of the main ones is that they are passionate about something. That passion is a double-edged sword. It drives people to contribute which has the potential for productive construction, but it can also lead to WP:TENDENTIOUS editing, which is really destructive. WP:ADVOCACY is one of our biggest bedevilments. Anyway, I do hope you slow down and learn. There are lots of people here who are happy to teach, if you open up and listen and ask authentic questions, not rhetorical ones. And really, good luck.

PAG are described and discussed in a whole forest of documents within Wikipedia that are "behind the scenes" in a different "namespace", in which the documents start with "Wikipedia:" or in shorthand, "WP:" (for example, our policy on edit warring is here: WP:EDITWAR not here EDITWAR). You won't find these documents by using the simple search box above, which searches only in "main space" where the actual articles are. However if you search with the prefix, (for example if you search for "WP:EDITWAR") you will find policies and guidelines. Likewise if you do an advanced search with "wikipedia" or "help" selected you can also find things in "Wikipedia space". The link in the welcome message above the "Five Pillars" points you to our most important policies and I recommend that you read them all, if you have not already and if you intend to stick around! They guide everything that happens here.

With all that in mind, here are some things that I suggest you read (I know, I know, things to read... but like I said, Wikipedia can be complicated!)

  • WP:SPA - please read this - right now your account is what we call a "single purpose account")
  • WP:MEDRS - this is our guideline for sourcing health-relating content in Wikipedia. This is probably the key thing you are missing right now
  • WP:MEDMOS - this our manual of style, for how we write about health-related things. We are very careful not to discuss pre-clinical findings, as well as initial clinical results, as though they are applicable to medicine. We are very conservative in that regard!
  • WP:OR - no original research is allowed -instead...
  • WP:VERIFY - everything must be based on reliable sources (as we define them - see WP:RS for general content and WP:MEDRS for health-related content)
  • WP:MEDRS - this is our guideline for sourcing health-relating content in Wikipedia. This is probably the key thing you will need to mind
  • WP:NPOV - this does not mean what most people think it means. it means that you read the most recent and best reliable sources you can find, and figure out what the mainstream view is, and that is what gets the most WP:WEIGHT. Pay special mind to the WP:PSCI section, which is further elaborated in the WP:FRINGE guideline.
  • WP:MEDMOS - this our manual of style, for how we write about health-related things. We are very careful not to discuss pre-clinical findings, as well as initial clinical results, as though they are applicable to medicine. We are very conservative in that regard!
  • WP:CONSENSUS - Wikipedia has plenty of policies and guidelines, as I mentioned, but really at the end of the day this place is ... a democracy? an anarchy? something hard to define. But we figure things out by talking to one another. CONSENSUS is the bedrock on which everything else rests. So please talk - please never edit war (see warning above). If you make a change to an article and someone else reverts it, the right thing to do is to follow WP:BRD (please do read that) - but briefly, when you are reverted, open a discussion on the article's Talk page. Ask the reason under policy and guidelines why your change was reverted -- and really ask, and really listen to the answer, and go read whatever links you are pointed to. Think about it, and if there is something you don't understand, ask more questions. Please only start to actually argue once you understand the basis for the objection. If you and the other party or parties still disagree, there are many ways to resolve disputes (see WP:DR) - it never needs to become emotional - because we do have this whole "body of law" and procedures to resolve disputes.

Anyway, good luck!

snippets taken out of why medrs[edit]

People who come from a physics background are used to science being driven by theory. We have a deep, law-driven understanding of the physical world, that we can express in mathematical equations and that we can test experimentally. Newton and other scientists observed the world, doing experiments many times and taking careful measurements, and extracted equations - laws of nature - from the data, and those equations then allowed them to predict other things. When strange things have emerged that have been different from the predictions, those differences provoke more work, and eventually new theories and equations emerge, and so the fields have advanced. Because we have come so far, we can do amazing things -- Moore's law is a direct result of our advances in physics and materials science and our ability to apply science - to create technology to serve us... to the point where we have amazing things like smart phones: computers we can hold in our hands and interact with in intuitive ways, that just a couple decades ago would have taken an entire room full of equipment to provide and that only cutting edge scientists could operate. (I'm not saying the physics is "done" - there are still huge questions on the macro scale (like what the hell is dark matter) and the tiny scale (Higgs boson etc) -- but much in the middle is very well understood and predictable)

Similar things happen with concerns about whether a given chemical might be toxic or not. Right now there is a lot of concern with the idea of chemicals that may be endocrine disruptors - an idea that some chemicals (for example, BPA) might be causing subtle, long-term damage to us or to the environment. Toxicology is an especially hard branch of biology. It is all based on testing compounds in models and extrapolating to humans, or doing epidemiological studies and trying to draw correlations. We can't actually test these chemicals on humans in any kind of controlled experiment, like we do with drugs. That would be unethical. So there is always a lot of uncertainty about toxicology. And there are a lot of legitimate ideas out there, about what society should do if something ~might~ be dangerous. But people get very emotional about this stuff, and to score rhetorical points, start pushing the evidence way, way harder than it can bear'. And companies that sell the products often downplay the potential risks way more than they should. And all of this conflicted or emotionally laden bullshit makes having important conversations about managing risk very very hard.

Turning for a moment to drugs... trying to discover a drug, that you can have a person swallow, and that will go and stop whatever the bad actor in a disease is... is wildly difficult. Drug discovery is the process of doing experiments with different candidate drug chemicals on individual proteins, or cells, or model organisms like flies or worms or rats... then changing the chemical and seeing what happens, again and again until you have something that looks like it might work and might be safe. (skipping some steps) Then you test your best chemical on a few healthy humans to make sure it won't kill people (really dangerous and intellectually thrilling work) - this is a Phase I clinical trial. Then you test it on a few sick people to get a sense of whether it might actually work, and to continue seeing if it is safe. These are Phase II clinical trials. Then if it still looks promising, you test it in lots of sick people to see if it is safe and effective. These are Phase III trials. Be clear -- all three Phases are actual experiments - we have no way of knowing what any of them will tell us before we do it. Many many drugs fail in Phase I trials; fewer, but still many, fail in Phase II trials, and fewer yet, but still many, fail Phase III trials. Developing new medicine is some of the financially riskiest, and most intellectually challenging, science that happens in the world today. And some of the most important.


other stuff[edit]

address health concerns in meat article. need to find secondary sources and remove primaries.

so interesting, on antibiotic resistance http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/08/science/antibiotic-resistant-germs-lying-in-wait.html?smid=tw-nytimesscience&seid=auto

for the fluorescent stuff http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=5761&page=2

good source for organic stuff http://web.pppmb.cals.cornell.edu/resourceguide/pdf/resource-guide-for-organic-insect-and-disease-management.pdf

guiding drug discovery/development choices using genomics; "nature's experiments" http://lifescivc.com/2014/05/leveraging-natures-experiments-mitigating-drug-discovery-risks-through-human-genetics/

review https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_starch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_pathological_epidemiology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposome


sources for ag tech history http://web.mit.edu/sts/pubs/pdfs/MIT_STS_WorkingPaper_12_Fitzgerald.pdf http://www.iptv.org/iowapathways/mypath.cfm?ounid=ob_000073  ??

FUD stuff

I just did my own review of the sources:
  • Blair, Robert. (2012). Organic Production and Food Quality: A Down to Earth Analysis. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, UK. ISBN 978-0-8138-1217-5
This excellent book (the full text of which is available online here) shows that organic food is pretty much the same as conventional food (including GM food) and it discusses consumer fears, but seems almost purposefully careful to avoid discussing marketing. It does make the statement that the organic movement is driven from bottom up (p243) and that fears are exaggerated (p 70) as are claim of benefit (p 262). So not useful for FUD claims.
  • Schuldt, J.P. and Schwarz, N. (2010). The “organic” path to obesity? Organic claims influence calorie judgments and exercise recommendations. Judgment and Decision Making 5: 144–150.
This is cited in the Blair book (and is in any case primary so we shouldn't use it). Also says nothing about FUD/marketing.

Magkos F et al (2006) Organic food: buying more safety or just peace of mind? A critical review of the literature Crit Rev Food Sci Nutr 46(1): 23–56 | pmid=16403682

this is also excellent - a review that is NPOV. it actually discusses marketing a bit (page 24, 2nd column) with respect to the purported benefit of organic food to cancer patients. Page 47, right hand columns has good discussion of unfounded consumer fears. This article cites another paper (Wellman NS, et al Do we facilitate the scientific process and the development of dietary guidance when findings from single studies are publicized? An American Society for Nutritional Sciences controversy session report. Am J Clin Nutr. 1999 Nov;70(5):802-5.) on the danger of over-emphasizing single studies in the media... this is background for any possible FUD campaign but not on target.
  • Smith-Spangler, C; Brandeau, ML; Hunter, GE; Bavinger, JC; Pearson, M; Eschbach, PJ; Sundaram, V; Liu, H; Schirmer, P; Stave, C; Olkin, I; Bravata, DM (September 4, 2012). "Are organic foods safer or healthier than conventional alternatives?: a systematic review.". Annals of Internal Medicine 157 (5): 348–366. PMID 22944875.
great article but says nothing about FUD
  • Dangour AD et al (2009) Nutritional quality of organic foods: a systematic review The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 92(1):203–210

Jump up ^ Canavari, M., Asioli, D., Bendini, A., Cantore, N., Gallina Toschi, T., Spiller, A., Obermowe, T., Buchecker, K. and Lohmann, M. (2009). Summary report on sensory-related socio-economic and sensory science literature about organic food products Jump up ^ Winter, Carl K.; Davis, Sarah F. (November 2006). "Organic Foods". Journal of Food Science 71 (9): R117–R124. doi:10.1111/j.1750-3841.2006.00196.x.


Wikipedia guidelines
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Further information: Wikipedia:Verifiability § Sources, Wikipedia:No original research § Sources, Wikipedia:Manual of Style (medicine-related articles), and Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources (medicine)

This essay about sourcing toxicity content, is a supplement to the guideline, Identifying reliable sources (medicine) which in turn supports the general sourcing policy at Wikipedia:Verifiability with specific attention given to sources appropriate for the medical and health-related content in any type of article, including alternative medicine. Sources for all other types of content—including all non-medical information in medicine-related articles—are covered by the general guideline on identifying reliable sources rather than WP:MEDRS or this essay.

See the reliable sources noticeboard for queries about the reliability of particular sources or ask at relevant WikiProjects such as WikiProject Medicine and WikiProject Pharmacology.

Wikipedia's articles, while not intended to provide medical advice, are nonetheless an important and widely used source of health information.[1] In general, while toxicologists believe that Wikipedia does a better job at communicating information to the public than the media

Ideal sources for such content includes literature reviews or systematic reviews published in reputable medical journals, academic and professional books written by experts in the relevant field and from a respected publisher, and medical guidelines or position statements from nationally or internationally recognised expert bodies.

Definitions[edit]

Further information: Primary, secondary, and tertiary sources, Wikipedia:Identifying and using primary and secondary sources, and Difference between third-person and secondary source
  • A primary source in medicine is one in which the authors directly participated in the research or documented their personal experiences. They examined the patients, injected the rats, filled the test tubes, or at least supervised those who did. Many, but not all, papers published in medical journals are primary sources for facts about the research and discoveries made.
  • A secondary source in medicine summarizes one or more primary or secondary sources, usually to provide an overview of the current understanding of a medical topic, to make recommendations, or to combine the results of several studies. Examples include literature reviews or systematic reviews found in medical journals, specialist academic or professional books, and medical guidelines or position statements published by major health organizations.
  • A tertiary source usually summarizes a range of secondary sources. Undergraduate textbooks, lay scientific books, and encyclopedias are examples of tertiary sources.

All Wikipedia articles should be based on reliable, published secondary sources. Reliable primary sources may occasionally be used with care as an adjunct to the secondary literature, but there remains potential for misuse. For that reason, edits that rely on primary sources should only describe the conclusions of the source, and should describe these findings clearly so the edit can be checked by editors with no specialist knowledge. In particular, this description should follow closely the interpretation of the data given by the authors, or by other reliable secondary sources. Primary sources should not be cited in support of a conclusion that is not clearly made by the authors or by reliable secondary sources, as defined above (see: Wikipedia:No original research). When citing primary sources, particular care must be taken to adhere to Wikipedia's undue weight policy. Secondary sources should be used to determine due weight.

Basic advice[edit]

Respect secondary sources[edit]

Shortcut
Further information: Wikipedia:Identifying and using primary and secondary sources

Individual primary sources should not be cited or juxtaposed so as to "debunk" or contradict the conclusions of reliable secondary sources. Synthesis of published material that advances a position is a form of original research and should be avoided in Wikipedia articles, which are not a venue for open research. Controversies or areas of uncertainty in medicine should be illustrated with reliable secondary sources describing the varying viewpoints. The use and presentation of primary sources should also respect Wikipedia's policies on undue weight; that is, primary sources favoring a minority opinion should not be aggregated or presented devoid of context in such a way as to undermine proportionate representation of expert opinion in a field.

Scientific findings are often touted in the popular press as soon as the original, primary research report is released, and before the scientific community has had an opportunity to analyze the new results. For a short time afterwards, the findings will be so new that they will not be reflected in any review articles or other secondary sources. If the findings involve phase I or phase II clinical trials, small studies, studies that did not directly measure clinically important results, laboratory work with animal models, or isolated cells or tissue, then these findings are probably only indirectly relevant to understanding human health; in these cases, they should be entirely omitted. In other situations, such as randomized controlled trials, it may be helpful to temporarily cite the primary research report, until there has been time for review articles and other secondary sources to be written and published. When using a primary source, Wikipedia should not overstate the importance of the result or the conclusions. When in doubt, omit mention of the primary study (in accordance with recentism) because determining the weight to give to such a study requires reliable secondary sources (not press releases or newspaper articles based on them). If the conclusions of the research are worth mentioning, they should be described as being from a single study, for example:

"A 2009 U.S. study found the average age of formal autism spectrum diagnosis was 5.7 years." (citing PMID 19318992)

After enough time has passed for a review in the area to be published, the review should be cited in preference to the primary study. Using a secondary source often allows the fact to be stated with greater reliability:

"In the U.S., the average age of formal autism spectrum diagnosis is 5.7 years." (citing a review)

If no review on the subject is published in a reasonable amount of time, then the text associated with the primary source should be removed.

If the same material could be supported by either a primary source or a secondary source of otherwise equal quality, it is normally preferable to cite the secondary source.

Summarize scientific consensus[edit]

Shortcut

Scientific journals are the best place to find primary source articles about experiments, including medical studies. Every rigorous scientific journal is peer reviewed. Be careful of material published in a journal that lacks peer review or that reports material in a different field. (See: Martin Rimm.) Be careful of material published in disreputable journals or disreputable fields. (See: Sokal affair.)

However, the fact that a claim is published in a refereed journal need not make it true. Even a well-designed randomized experiment can (with low probability) produce spurious results. Experiments and studies can produce flawed results or fall victim to deliberate fraud (See: the Retracted article on dopaminergic neurotoxicity of MDMA and the Schön scandal.)

Wikipedia policies on the neutral point of view and not using original research demand that we present any prevailing medical or scientific consensus, which can be found in recent, authoritative review articles or in textbooks or in some forms of monographs. Although significant-minority views are welcome in Wikipedia, such views must be presented in the context of their acceptance by experts in the field. Additionally, the views of tiny minorities need not be reported.

Finally, make readers aware of controversies that are stated in reliable sources. A well-referenced article will point to specific journal articles or specific theories proposed by specific researchers.

Assess evidence quality[edit]

Shortcut

Knowing the quality of the evidence helps editors distinguish between minority and majority viewpoints, determine due weight, and identify information that will be accepted as evidence-based medicine. In general, editors should rely upon high-quality evidence, such as systematic reviews, rather than lower-quality evidence, such as case reports, or non-evidence, such as anecdotes or conventional wisdom. The medical guidelines or position statements produced by nationally or internationally recognised expert bodies often contain an assessment of the evidence as part of the report.

The best evidence comes primarily from meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials (RCTs).[2] Systematic reviews of bodies of literature of overall good quality and consistency addressing the specific recommendation have less reliability when they include non-randomized studies.[3] Narrative reviews can help establish the context of evidence quality. Roughly in descending order of quality, lower-quality evidence in medical research comes from individual RCTs; other controlled studies; quasi-experimental studies; non-experimental, observational studies, such as cohort studies and case control studies, followed by cross-sectional studies (surveys), and other correlation studies such as ecological studies; and non-evidence-based expert opinion or clinical experience. Case reports, whether in the popular press or a peer reviewed medical journal, are a form of anecdote and generally fall below the minimum requirements of reliable medical sources.

Speculative proposals and early-stage research should not be cited in ways that suggest wide acceptance. For example, the results of an early-stage clinical trial are unlikely to be appropriate for inclusion in the Treatment section of an article about a disease because a possible future treatment has little bearing on current treatment practice. However, the results might—in some cases—be appropriate for inclusion in an article dedicated to the treatment in question or to the researchers or businesses involved in it. Such information, particularly if citing a secondary source, might also be appropriate for a well-documented section on research directions in an article about a disease. To prevent misunderstandings, the text should clearly identify the level of research cited (e.g., "first-in-human safety testing").

Several formal systems exist for assessing the quality of available evidence on medical subjects.[4][5] "Assessing evidence quality" means that editors should determine the quality of the type of study. Editors should not perform a detailed academic peer review. Do not reject a high-quality type of study due to personal objections to the study's inclusion criteria, references, funding sources, or conclusions.

Avoid over-emphasizing single studies, particularly in vitro or animal studies[edit]

In vitro studies and animal models serve a central role in biomedical research, and are invaluable in elucidating mechanistic pathways and generating hypotheses. However, in vitro and animal-model findings do not translate consistently into clinical effects in human beings. Where in vitro and animal-model data are cited on Wikipedia, it should be clear to the reader that the data are pre-clinical, and the article text should avoid stating or implying that the reported findings necessarily hold true in humans. The level of support for a hypothesis should be evident to the reader.

Use of small-scale, single studies make for weak evidence, and allow for easy cherry picking of data. Results of studies cited or mentioned in Wikipedia should be put in sufficient context that readers can determine their reliability.

Use up-to-date evidence[edit]

Shortcut

Here are some rules of thumb for keeping an article up-to-date, while maintaining the more-important goal of reliability. These instructions are appropriate for actively researched areas with many primary sources and several reviews and may need to be relaxed in areas where little progress is being made or few reviews are being published.

  • Look for reviews published in the last five years or so, preferably in the last two or three years. The range of reviews you examine should be wide enough to catch at least one full review cycle, containing newer reviews written and published in the light of older ones and of more-recent primary studies.
  • Within this range, assessing them may be difficult. While the most-recent reviews include later research results, do not automatically give more weight to the review that happens to have been published most recently, as this is recentism.
  • Prefer recent reviews to older primary sources on the same topic. If recent reviews do not mention an older primary source, the older source is dubious. Conversely, an older primary source that is seminal, replicated, and often-cited in reviews can be mentioned in the main text in a context established by reviews. For example, the article genetics might mention Darwin's 1859 book On the Origin of Species as part of a discussion supported by recent reviews.

These rules of thumb have several exceptions:

  • History sections often cite older work for obvious reasons.
  • Cochrane Library reviews are generally of high-quality and are routinely maintained even if their initial publication dates fall outside the above window.

Use independent sources[edit]

Many medical claims lack reliable research about the efficacy and safety of proposed treatments or about the legitimacy of statements made by proponents. In such cases, reliable sources may be difficult to find while unreliable sources are readily available. Whenever writing about medical claims not supported by mainstream research, it is vital that third-party, independent sources be used. Sources written and reviewed by the advocates of such marginal ideas can be used to describe personal opinions, but extreme care should be taken when using such sources lest the more controversial aspects of their opinions be taken at face value or, worse, asserted as fact. If the independent sources discussing a medical subject are of low quality, then it is likely that the subject itself is not notable enough to have its own article or relevant enough to be mentioned in other articles.

Choosing sources[edit]

Montage with central stripe reading "PLoS MEDICINE". Other images are orange segments, a woman in a blue shawl carrying a food package labeled "USA", a pregnant woman holding hands with a child, a hand holding several different pills over a lap covered by a colorful dress, patients in a hospital, and pills on a leaf.
PLoS Medicine and other open access journals can be useful as sources for images in Wikipedia articles. Because the above image was published under the terms of a Creative Commons license, it can be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons and used on Wikipedia. Click on the above image to find its source.

A Wikipedia article should cite the best and most reliable sources regardless of whether they require a fee or a subscription. When all else is equal, it is better to cite a source with a full text is freely readable so that readers can follow the link to the source. Some high-quality journals, such as JAMA, publish a few freely readable articles even though most are not free. A few high-quality journals, such as PLoS Medicine, publish only freely readable sources. Also, a few sources are in the public domain; these include many U.S. government publications, such as the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

When searching for biomedical sources, it is wise to skim-read everything available, including abstracts of papers that are not freely readable, and use that to get a feel for what reliable sources are saying. However, when it comes to actually writing a Wikipedia article, it is misleading to give a full citation for a source after reading only its abstract; the abstract necessarily presents a stripped-down version of the conclusions and omits the background that can be crucial for understanding exactly what the source says. To access the full text, the editor may need to visit a medical library or ask someone at the WikiProject Resource Exchange or WikiProject Medicine's talk page to either provide an electronic copy or read the source and summarize what it says; if neither is possible, the editor may need to settle for using a lower-impact source.

Biomedical journals[edit]

As mentioned above, the biomedical literature contains two major types of sources: primary publications describe novel research for the first time while review articles summarize and integrate a topic of research into an overall view. In medicine, primary sources include clinical trials, which test new treatments; secondary sources include meta-analyses, which combine the results of many clinical trials in an attempt to arrive at an overall view of how well a treatment works. It is usually best to use reviews and meta-analyses where possible, as these give a balanced and general perspective of a topic—and are usually easier to understand!

Peer reviewed medical journals are a natural choice as a source for up-to-date medical information in Wikipedia articles. They contain a mixture of primary and secondary sources as well as less technical material such as biographies. Although almost all such material will count as a reliable source for at least some purposes, not all the material is equally useful, and some, such as a letter from a non-expert, should be avoided. Journal articles come in many types: original research, reviews, case reports, editorials and op-ed pieces, advocacy pieces, speculation, book reviews, letters to the editor and other forms of commentary or correspondence, biographies, and eulogies.

Research papers that describe original experiments are primary sources; however, they normally contain previous-work sections that are secondary sources (these sections are often incomplete[6] and typically less useful or reliable than reviews or other sources, such as textbooks, which are intended to be reasonably comprehensive). A general narrative review of a subject by an expert in the field can make a good secondary source covering various aspects of a subject within a Wikipedia article. Such reviews typically do not contain primary research, but can make interpretations and draw conclusions from primary sources that no Wikipedia editor would be allowed to do. A systematic review uses a reproducible methodology to select primary (or sometimes secondary) studies meeting explicit criteria to address a specific question. Such reviews should be more reliable and accurate and less prone to bias than a narrative review.[4] However, whereas a narrative review may give a panorama of current knowledge on a particular topic, a systematic review tends to have a narrower focus.

Some journals specialize in particular article types. A few, such as Evidence-based Dentistry (ISSN 1462-0049), publish third-party summaries of reviews and guidelines published elsewhere. If an editor has access to both the original source and the summary, and finds both helpful, it is good practice to cite both sources together (see: Formatting citations for details). Others, such as Journal of Medical Biography, publish historical material that can be valuable for History sections, but is rarely useful for current medicine. Still others, such as Medical Hypotheses, publish speculative proposals that are not reliable sources for biomedical topics.

The Abridged Index Medicus provides a list of 114 selected "core clinical journals" (this subset of the medical literature can be searched in PubMed using a 'journal categories' filter).[7][8] Another useful grouping of core medical journals is the 2003 Brandon/Hill list, which includes 141 publications selected for a small medical library[9] (although this list is no longer maintained, the listed journals are of high quality). Core general medical journals include the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the Annals of Internal Medicine, the British Medical Journal (BMJ), and the Canadian Medical Association Journal. Core basic science and biology journals include Science, Cell, and Nature.

Books[edit]

Medical textbooks published by academic publishers are often excellent secondary sources. If a textbook is intended for students, it may not be as thorough as a monograph or chapter in a textbook intended for professionals or postgraduates. Ensure that the book is up to date, unless a historical perspective is required. Doody's maintains a list of core health sciences books, which is available only to subscribers.[10] Major academic publishers (e.g., Elsevier, Springer Verlag, Wolters Kluwer, and Informa) publish specialized medical book series with good editorial oversight; volumes in these series summarize the latest research in narrow areas, usually in a more extensive format than journal reviews. Specialized biomedical encyclopaedias published by these established publishers are often of good quality, but as a tertiary source, the information may be too terse for detailed articles.

Additionally, popular science and medicine books are useful sources, which may be primary, secondary, or tertiary, but there are exceptions. Most self-published books or books published by vanity presses undergo no independent fact-checking or peer review and, consequently, are not reliable sources. Books published by university presses or the National Academy of Sciences, on the other hand, tend to be well-researched and useful for most purposes.

Medical and scientific organizations[edit]

Statements and information from reputable major medical and scientific bodies may be valuable encyclopedic sources. These bodies include the U.S. National Academies (including the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences), the British National Health Service, the U.S. National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the World Health Organization. The reliability of these sources range from formal scientific reports, which can be the equal of the best reviews published in medical journals, through public guides and service announcements, which have the advantage of being freely readable, but are generally less authoritative than the underlying medical literature.

Popular press[edit]

The popular press is generally not a reliable source for scientific and medical information in articles. Most medical news articles fail to discuss important issues such as evidence quality,[11] costs, and risks versus benefits,[12] and news articles too often convey wrong or misleading information about health care.[13] Articles in newspapers and popular magazines generally lack the context to judge experimental results. They tend to overemphasize the certainty of any result, for instance, presenting a new and experimental treatment as "the cure" for a disease or an every-day substance as "the cause" of a disease. Newspapers and magazines may also publish articles about scientific results before those results have been published in a peer reviewed journal or reproduced by other experimenters. Such articles may be based uncritically on a press release, which can be a biased source even when issued by an academic medical center.[14] News articles also tend neither to report adequately on the scientific methodology and the experimental error, nor to express risk in meaningful terms. For Wikipedia's purposes, articles in the popular press are generally considered independent, primary sources.

A news article should therefore not be used as a sole source for a medical fact or figure. Editors are encouraged to seek out the scholarly research behind the news story. One possibility is to cite a higher-quality source along with a more-accessible popular source, for example, with the |lay-url= parameter of {{cite journal}}.

Conversely, the high-quality popular press can be a good source for social, biographical, current-affairs, and historical information in a medical article. For example, popular science magazines such as New Scientist and Scientific American are not peer reviewed, but sometimes feature articles that explain medical subjects in plain English. As the quality of press coverage of medicine ranges from excellent to irresponsible, use common sense, and see how well the source fits the verifiability policy and general reliable sources guidelines. Sources for evaluating health-care media coverage include the review websites Behind the Headlines, Health News Review[3], and Media Doctor, along with specialized academic journals, such as the Journal of Health Communication; reviews can also appear in the American Journal of Public Health, the Columbia Journalism Review, the Bad Science column in The Guardian, and others. Health News Review's criteria for rating news stories[15] can help to get a general idea of the quality of a medical news article.

Other sources[edit]

Press releases, blogs, newsletters, advocacy and self-help publications, and other sources contain a wide range of biomedical information ranging from factual to fraudulent, with a high percentage being of low quality. Conference abstracts present incomplete and unpublished data and undergo varying levels of review; they are often unreviewed self-published sources and these initial conclusions may have changed dramatically if and when the data are finally ready for publication. Consequently, they are usually poor sources and should always be used with caution, never used to support surprising claims, and carefully identified in the text as preliminary work. Peer reviewed medical information resources such as WebMD, UpToDate, Mayo Clinic, and eMedicine are usually acceptable sources in themselves, and can be useful guides about the relevant medical literature and how much weight to give different sources; however, as much as possible Wikipedia articles should cite the more established literature directly.

Searching for sources[edit]

Main page: Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Resources

Search engines are commonly used to find biomedical sources. Each engine has quirks, advantages, and disadvantages, and may not return the results that the editor needs unless used carefully. It typically takes experience and practice to recognize when a search has not been effective; even if an editor finds useful sources, they may have missed other sources that would have been more useful or they may generate pages and pages of less-than-useful material. A good strategy for avoiding sole reliance on search engines is to find a few recent high-quality sources and follow their citations to see what the search engine missed. It can also be helpful to perform a plain web search rather than one of scholarly articles only.

PubMed is an excellent starting point for locating peer reviewed medical sources. It offers a free search engine for accessing the MEDLINE database of biomedical research articles offered by the National Library of Medicine at the U.S. National Institutes of Health.[16] There are basic and advanced options for searching PubMed.[8] For example, clicking on the "Review" tab will help narrow the search to review articles. The "Limits" tab can further limit the search, for example, to meta-analyses, to freely readable sources, and/or "core clinical journals". Although PubMed is a comprehensive database, many of its indexed journals restrict online access. Another website, PubMed Central, provides free access to full texts. While it is often not the official published version, it is a peer reviewed manuscript that is substantially the same, but lacks minor copy-editing by the publisher.[17]

When looking at an individual abstract on the PubMed website, an editor can click on "Publication Types, MeSH Terms" at the bottom of the page to see how PubMed has classified a document. For example, a page that is tagged as "Comment" or "Letter" is a non-peer reviewed letter to the editor. The classification scheme includes about 70 types of documents.[4] For medical information, the most useful types of articles are typically labeled "Guideline", "Meta-analysis", "Practice guideline", or "Review".

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ Laurent, MR; Vickers, TJ (2009). "Seeking health information online: does Wikipedia matter?". J Am Med Inform Assoc. 16 (4): 471–479. doi:10.1197/jamia.M3059. PMC 2705249. PMID 19390105.
  2. ^ Pages 102–105: Straus SE, Richardson WS, Glasziou P, Haynes RB (2005). Evidence-based Medicine: How to Practice and Teach EBM (3rd ed.). Edinburgh: Churchill Livingstone. ISBN 0-443-07444-5.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  3. ^ Page 99: Straus SE, Richardson WS, Glasziou P, Haynes RB (2005). Evidence-based Medicine: How to Practice and Teach EBM (3rd ed.). Edinburgh: Churchill Livingstone. ISBN 0-443-07444-5.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  4. ^ a b Greenhalgh T (1997). "How to read a paper: Papers that summarise other papers (systematic reviews and meta-analyses)" (PDF). BMJ. 315 (7109): 672–5. doi:10.1136/bmj.315.7109.672. PMC 2127461. PMID 9310574.
  5. ^ Young JM, Solomon MJ (2009). "How to critically appraise an article". Nat Clin Pract Gastroenterol Hepatol. 6 (2): 82–91. doi:10.1038/ncpgasthep1331. PMID 19153565. S2CID 6532496.
  6. ^ Robinson KA, Goodman SN (2011). "A systematic examination of the citation of prior research in reports of randomized, controlled trials". Ann Intern Med. 154 (1): 50–5. doi:10.7326/0003-4819-154-1-201101040-00007. PMID 21200038. S2CID 207536137.
  7. ^ "Abridged Index Medicus (AIM or "Core Clinical") Journal Titles". NLM. Retrieved 17 November 2012.
  8. ^ a b "PubMed tutorial: filters". NLM. Retrieved 17 November 2012.
  9. ^ Hill DR, Stickell H, Crow SJ (2003). "Brandon/Hill selected list of print books for the small medical library" (PDF). Mt. Sinai School of Medicine. Archived from the original on June 15, 2011. Retrieved 2008-09-16.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  10. ^ Shedlock J, Walton LJ (2006). "Developing a virtual community for health sciences library book selection: Doody's Core Titles". J Med Libr Assoc. 94 (1): 61–6. PMC 1324773. PMID 16404471.
  11. ^ Cooper, B. E. J.; Lee, W. E.; Goldacre, B. M.; Sanders, T. A. B. (May 2011). "The quality of the evidence for dietary advice given in UK national newspapers". Public Understanding of Science. 21 (6): 664–673. doi:10.1177/0963662511401782. PMID 23832153. S2CID 36916068. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |lay-source= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |lay-url= ignored (help)
  12. ^ Schwitzer G (2008). "How do US journalists cover treatments, tests, products, and procedures? an evaluation of 500 stories". PLOS Med. 5 (5): e95. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0050095. PMC 2689661. PMID 18507496. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |lay-date= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |lay-source= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |lay-url= ignored (help)CS1 maint: unflagged free DOI (link)
  13. ^ Dentzer S (2009). "Communicating medical news—pitfalls of health care journalism". N Engl J Med. 360 (1): 1–3. doi:10.1056/NEJMp0805753. PMID 19118299.
  14. ^ Woloshin S, Schwartz LM, Casella SL, Kennedy AT, Larson RJ (2009). "Press releases by academic medical centers: not so academic?". Ann Intern Med. 150 (9): 613–8. doi:10.7326/0003-4819-150-9-200905050-00007. PMID 19414840. S2CID 25254318.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  15. ^ "How we rate stories". Health News Review. 2008. Retrieved 2009-03-26.
  16. ^ Greenhalgh T (1997). "How to read a paper: The Medline database". BMJ. 315 (7101): 180–3. doi:10.1136/bmj.315.7101.180. PMC 2127107. PMID 9251552.
  17. ^ Goodman D, Dowson S, Yaremchuk J (2007). "Open access and accuracy: author-archived manuscripts vs. published articles" (PDF). Learn Publ. 20 (3): 203–15. doi:10.1087/095315107X204012. S2CID 44572906. Retrieved 2008-10-24.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)

Further reading[edit]

storage[edit]

posted here

I have not seen any description other than Wood's for the fact that the contact was made. (it probably was) We have no idea what was said in the call nor who made it from "our side" nor why. What we do know is that his employer acted on whatever information they were given and that the employer decided to fire him. Saying that WP/WMF "got Woods fired" is Woods' spin on the story, and that is as far as that goes as far as I am concerned. His employer fired him.
I've never looked into the on-Wiki history of this. So I did. I was wondering what account it was - above someone said it was Morning277 and based on this that appears to be true. They were blocked for socking in August 2012 (the call to his employer was apparently made in Jan 2013). I hope anybody reflecting on this takes time to read the vast SPI archive to see what all unfolded there before the call was made. Wood had already sucked up a lot of community resources - time people could have spent doing more contructive things. Here is the AN where Wood was community banned. This is also relevant and makes it clear that a lot of the discussions about what to do about Wood/Morning277 were held offline. Finally, I checked the archives of this page and there was no discussion here around that time. Here is the post that was made on this page when the Business Insider article appeared in Jan 2013; the next dif after the one I just gave is the one where it was removed. Quite a taunt. Jytdog (talk) 01:54, 29 May 2016 (UTC)
key discussions on boards
  • Other very likely socks of Intermittentgardener gang, are Roman666 and Goodmedicine - see history here.

frequency therapeutics[edit]

Frequency Therapeutics
IndustryBiotechnology
Founded2015
Key people
  • David Lucchino
  • Robert Langer
  • Jeffrey Karp
Websitefrequencytx.com

Frequency Therapeutics is a biotechnology company based in Woburn, Massachusetts. The company was started in 2015 and focuses on discovering and developing drugs to treat hearing loss by regenerating cochlear cells.[1] The company was co-founded by MIT professor Bob Langer, Harvard Medical School professor Jeffrey Karp, and David Lucchino.[2]

In 2017, the company raised $32 million in series A round funding led by CoBro Ventures, Mark Cohen, Emigrant Capital, Alexandria Real Estate Equities and Morningside Ventures, and published work showing that a combination of known growth factors and known small molecules could cause mouse progenitor cells to produce new hair cells in the lab.[3] Its lead drug candidate, FX-322, is injected into the ear, and its ingredients had not been disclosed as of 2017.[3][4] The company said it completed a phase I trial of FX-322 at the end of 2017.[4]

References==

References

  1. ^ Sheridan, Cormac (7 June 2017). "Interest rekindles in drug cocktails that reprogram cells". Nature Biotechnology. 35 (6): 489–490. doi:10.1038/nbt0617-489. PMID 28591109. S2CID 4576571.
  2. ^ Weisman, Robert (April 11, 2017). "Could an injection reverse hearing loss? This Woburn startup thinks so". Boston Globe.
  3. ^ a b Fidler, Ben (2017-04-11). "Frequency Nabs $32M, Will Push Hearing-Loss Drugs To Human Studies". Xconomy.
  4. ^ a b Woods, Bob (2 January 2018). "Breakthrough drugs offer hope for the 360 million people with hearing loss". CNBC. Retrieved 7 February 2018.
External links==


books[edit]

  • Joshi, Gajanan S.; Burnett, James C.; Abraham, Donald J. (2003). "Cardiac Drugs: Antianginal, Vasodilators, Antiarrhythmic". In Abraham, Donald J. (ed.). Burger's medicinal chemistry and drug discovery. Volume 3: Cardiovascular Agents and Endocrines (6th ed.). Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley. ISBN 9780471270904.
  • Katzung, Bertram G.; et al. (2012). Basic and Clinical Pharmacology (12th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill Medical. ISBN 9780071764025. {{cite book}}: Explicit use of et al. in: |author= (help)
  • Sittig, M. Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Encyclopedia, Volumes 1-2 (2nd Edition). William Andrew Publishing/Noyes, 1988. ISBN 9780815511441
  • Guyton AC and Hall JE, ed. (2006). Textbook of Medical Physiology (11th ed.). Elsevier Saunders. ISBN 9780721602400.
  • Fink, Cynthia A; McKenna, Jeffrey M.; Werner, Lincoln H. (2003). "Diuretic and Uricosuric Agents". In Abraham, Donald J. (ed.). Burger's medicinal chemistry and drug discovery. Volume 3: Cardiovascular Agents and Endocrines (6th ed.). Wiley. pp. 55–154. ISBN 978-0471370291.
  • Fitzgerald M (2014). Diet Cults: The Surprising Fallacy at the Core of Nutrition Fads and a Guide to Healthy Eating for the Rest of US. Pegasus Books. ISBN 978-1-60598-560-2.
  • Nestle, Mariontitle=What to Eat (2006). What to Eat. New York: North Point Press (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). ISBN 978-0-86547-738-4.
  • Longe, Jacqueline L., ed. (2005). The Gale encyclopedia of alternative medicine (2nd ed.). Detroit: Thomson/Gale. ISBN 0-7876-7424-9. {{cite book}}: |first1= missing |last1= (help); Missing pipe in: |first1= (help)CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  • Stahl, Stephen M. (2013). Stahl's essential psychopharmacology : neuroscientific basis and practical application (4th ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781107025981.
  • Longo, Dan L.; Kasper, Dennis L., eds. (2012). Harrison's principles of internal medicine (18th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill. ISBN 978-0071748896.
  • Russell, Jill; Rovere, Amy, eds. (2009). American Cancer Society Complete Guide to Complementary & Alternative Cancer Therapies (2nd ed.). Atlanta, Ga.: American Cancer Society. ISBN 978-0944235713.
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