Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Medicine/Archive 158
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"Fixing refs"
User:Adam Harangozó (NIHR WiR) is "fixing refs"; there are too many errors for me to review and revert. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:15, 28 January 2022 (UTC)
- In that diff, he changed:
- "CBT and treatment resistant schizophrenia". discover.dc.nihr.ac.uk. 20 November 2018. doi:10.3310/signal-000678. S2CID 239813849. Retrieved 10 January 2020.
- to
- "CBT and treatment resistant schizophrenia". NIHR Evidence. 20 November 2018. doi:10.3310/signal-000678. S2CID 239813849. Retrieved 10 January 2020.
- and removed a pointless URL (it now automatically uses the doi, which won't break the next time they rearrange their website). What errors were introduced? WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:41, 29 January 2022 (UTC)
- @SandyGeorgia: In most of the edits I was changing URLs that pointed to Pubmed to the DOI as that leads to the NIHR Journals article which has more content including a plain-English summary. WP:MEDMOS states: "If and only if the article's full text is freely available online, supply a uniform resource locator (URL) to this text by hyperlinking the article title in the citation. If the full text is freely available on the journal's website and on PubMed Central, prefer to link the former as PubMed central's copy is often a pre-publication draft." In your example the original site I removed (discover.dc.nihr.ac.uk) does not exist anymore. --Adam Harangozó (NIHR WiR) (talk) 12:05, 29 January 2022 (UTC)
- Hi, User:Adam Harangozó (NIHR WiR). I posted one brief sample yesterday while I was iPad editing from a hotspot (too long explanation of my editing limitations here) on the assumption that other editors would take a deeper look beyond that one sample. Unfortunately, that did not happen, or has not yet happened, and since your good-faith edits warrant a fuller explanation, it looks like it will fall to me anyway. I will work on typing that up as soon as I have a free moment from a real computer rather than iPad (later today). Stay tuned, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:22, 29 January 2022 (UTC)
Back now, on real computer, for a fuller explanation. My apologies for the brevity in my initial post, as I was hoping others would take a thorough look and fill in the blanks. Because you are probably setting up to do more editing of this nature, I was hoping you would find more helpful guidance here. Your edits are introducing some helpful and necessary improvements, along with some that could be better.
As I indicated on your talk, you will encounter many (most? unsure) medical articles with an established WP:CITEVAR style using this tool, which you may find helpful. Further samples follow.
- Schizophrenia
At Schizophrenia, you made this edit. The poorly cited text pre-dated your edit, but the edit was not an improvement. Before your edit, we have:
- In the UK it is recommended as an add-on therapy in the treatment of schizophrenia, but is not supported for use in treatment resistant schizophrenia.[1][2]
References
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References
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The citations were to 1) a Cochrane review that, as far as I can tell, never mentions current UK guidelines or recommendations (if it does, please point it out; I couldn't find it), and 2) an already incorrectly written citation you were attempting to correct, which should not be used to support this content anyway. It is unclear to me how to best format this source, as it does not appear to be a journal, rather the NIHR website, that is discussing a primary study, apparently done by them (?), but that I cannot find published elsewhere. If the current UK recommendation is a) add-on therapy, that b) is not supported for treatment resistance schizophrenia, the correct citation for this text would be the NICE guidelines (rather than a review that covers the topic generally, and a primary study published on a website). Because schizophrenia (pretends to be, but needs review) a Featured article, it should use best sources.
Headbomb has worked on improving the citation as you changed it, but I don't believe we have yet correctly cited the text; here were the problems with your edit:
- Your edit left the source at cite journal, but with an access date; access dates are required on websites, but not journals, and it doesn't appear (?) to be a journal, rather a website.
- But your edit left a blank website parameter in the template, along with an access date?
- And added a URL to a DOI, when the DOI is access free.
I'm not sure what to make of this, but Headbomb switched it to a cite document (but that allows no access-date), and I moved it back to a cite web (to be able to provide an access date); we need to figure out what it is, but the bigger concern is neither of those sources should be used there anyway; the statement about what current UK recommendations are should be cited to NICE, I believe.
- Causes and origins of Tourette syndrome
Examining this edit:
- It removes the free full text URL at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK338526/pdf/Bookshelf_NBK338526.pdf
- It removes spaces in the cite template that were intentionally put there to aid editors with poor eyesight (me). @Headbomb and WhatamIdoing: as promised on that less then a few days ago. Please don’t do that; it's not any sort of breach of any guideline, but please realize that they don't need to be removed, and in many cases (like this one), may have been put their intentionally. (If you are using an automated tool that removes them, it would be helpful to know which one that is.)
- Continuing
Examining quickly several other edits, I found more of same, where DOIs were being used in the URL field, replacing free full text links to PMCs; samples: [1] [2] On most of those kinds of edits, preserving a citation style is less crucial than on featured articles, which must maintain a consistent style, but it may be helpful for you to watch in your regular editing for whether you are editing an FA or GA. FAs have in the upper right corner, and GAs have ; in those cases, one has to be aware to preserve citation style.
I hope this is a helpful start, and apologize for yesterday's brevity. Regards, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:50, 29 January 2022 (UTC)
- There's a few weird things here. First the NIHR is the research arm of the NHS. If they can't be trusted to be accurate wrt to what UK research policy is, no source will ever qualify. Second, the Cochrane review writes "CBT is now recommended by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) as an add‐on treatment for people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia." Not sure how that's also not a good enough source.
- Second is that access date aren't required for any sources that have published dates, not just journals. If a thesis is hosted online, its content won't subsequently change.
- Whether NIHR Evidence is a website or journal is also rather immaterial, given that its rendered exactly the same way on the page.
- The removal or addition of whitespace might be annoying, but it's also not an error. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 19:59, 29 January 2022 (UTC)
- Adam was using the visual editor, which formats all templates (citation or otherwise) according to the format specified in the template's documentation page. We should consider a site-wide RFC to see whether people would mind changing these template's default formatting. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:32, 29 January 2022 (UTC)
- Ah, ha; the visual editor again. That has come up wrt other problems on other articles. Headbomb, yes, I indicated that the removal of spaces was not an error; I added it to this discussion as just a few days ago I was asked for a sample, so we could figure out where that was coming from. On the UK recommendations, thanks for pointing out the actual text; my mistake was to search the text for "UK" and "United Kingdom" rather than "NICE". It still sounds like we need to split the sentence then, as Jones supports the first half, but not the second. The NIHR page says "NICE 2014 guidelines recommend offering CBT to all people with schizophrenia. This includes people who have persistent psychotic symptoms, those who are withdrawn and also people in remission. The aim is to promote recovery. It is recommended that CBT consist of at least 16 planned sessions." How do we get from Cochrane saying NICE recommends it generally, to a primary study excluding a NICE recommendation for treatment resistant? Websites need access dates because they can change; is this a published journal study or is it not? I can't find one. The edits left me unclear on what exactly this source was, and I still am. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:05, 29 January 2022 (UTC)
- Adam was using the visual editor, which formats all templates (citation or otherwise) according to the format specified in the template's documentation page. We should consider a site-wide RFC to see whether people would mind changing these template's default formatting. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:32, 29 January 2022 (UTC)
- Anything with a published date has the published date. If a dated web page article gets updated, so is the date (or with a date addendum in other cases). Access-date can be nice to have, but it's not required. No difference between a journal (with erratas etc...) and a website with post publication updates. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 12:36, 30 January 2022 (UTC)
- @SandyGeorgia: I'm still a bit confused if these are errors. 1. At the Scizophrenia example I did not read the source to judge if it fits (it was already there), I've replaced the defunct URL with a DOI. 2. Tourette: I've replaced a pdf with a link to the full text in the official journal. 3. The other DOIs I inserted point to the official journal texts, per the guideline favoring that versus PMC (see above). 4. For errors or differences in style by the visual editor, I'm not the person to turn to. I think access dates are added by the visual editor as well, though I would agree it's not needed for DOIs. 5. I will write an introductory post soon here about my work at the NIHR and I'll explain what the NIHR Evidence website is. 6. I can't help to think that the length of this discussion is a bit disproportionate to the nature of errors in my edits (most of which are not errors). If I would be a beginner editor I would be surely put off by this. Adam Harangozó (NIHR WiR) (talk) 10:10, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
- Adam Harangozó (NIHR WiR) Yes, the schizophrenia text was in bad shape before you touched it, so I'm sorry I chose to put that example up here, since that complicated the discussion. I recognize you were only trying to reformat what was already there (which I now know was faulty), but when I first looked, I saw a website mentioning a primary study but formatted as a journal. It was asking for someone to take a deeper look, and my hope was that would happen here, as I was traveling and on an iPad. My apologies to you for the unnecessary complication. In this series of edits, I have cleaned up some of the issues in that section; please scroll to the bottom to see how I have left it, but I am as yet uncertain if Headbomb and WAID agree with me as to how that source should be presented. We seem to have a primary study, hosted on the NIHR website (but unpublished in hard print elsewhere?), which disagrees with part of the rest of the sentence regarding NICE guidelines. So I've added a source for the parts that can be sourced correctly, while separating and tagging the NIHR piece as primary; I've used cite web, as I can't find a journal article, and added an accessdate, as websites aren't enduring. That was messy and not all your fault. On Tourette's, the link was to a NCBI book; I believe that is an enduring source that is likely to outlive any other source, so does not need to be replaced. If I am mistaken, someone will let me know, but it looks to me as a matter of personal preference rather than error. Yes, many of the other issues seem to be related to the visual editor, unfortunately; another problem complicating that is that most of the how-to pages encourage new editors to use the visual editor, and never mention that most medical content (and almost all FAs) uses citations generated from the Diberri/BogHog tool, and FAs must maintain a consistent citation style. Yes, this discussion was disproportionate. The next time I am in a hurry and want others to look in, rather than posting here for help, I will wait until I have time to dialogue directly with the editor; my sincere apologies to you for getting you into several issues that aren't related directly to your edits. On the other hand, if this is the worst thing that happens to you as a new editor, this is light years ahead of the things that happened to me when I was new, so hopefully things are improving :) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 12:44, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
- FAs must maintain a consistent citation style, but I'm not sure that your changes had any effect on the citation style. Readers saw a citation beginning with a linked title and some id numbers before your changes, and they saw a citation beginning with a linked title and some id numbers after your changes.
- Also, I don't think that Diberri's tool is used as much as it was 10 years ago. Both the 2010 and VisualEditor have built-in tools for expanding PMIDs. (VE can also handle ISBNs, DOIs, PubMedCentral ids, Wikidata's Q ids [if for some reason you just happen to know the Wikidata number for the source you're citing], and plain-text searching for book titles, but people mostly use it for URLs.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:32, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
- Most FAs use Diberri. Visual editor introduces a lot of gobbledeegook. The question of citation style is informational only, for the benefit of a good-faith new user (I may be repeating myself?). The changes were because of other problems in the same edit. Whether we have a website-only primary source is unanswered. Have you looked at schizophrenia and do you think it's cited correctly now? I'd like to not keep exposing a good-faith new editor to the rest of this discussion, so that discussion can continue there, as I clearly erred in bringing it here, and just fixed it myself (I think). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:12, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
- I think some might also use Citoid. I certainly do. Filling out the citation templates is the most annoying part of Wikipedia article writing by far. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 18:37, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
- I don't know that tool (and it probably falls under "old dog, new tricks" for me), but Diberri is a breeze to use, with the added benefit that it returns much cleaner citations than some other tools (by using vancouver-style authors, there is much less gobbledeegook to edit around). I have encountered (I believe because of the visual editor, but I could be wrong) up to 80 parameters of author names (40 authors with first and last), along with outrageous ref names that can add a full line to have to get around while copyediting! So we can end up with ten times the number of lines in edit mode for the citation than for the text ... that'll encourage new editors to want to dig in. Bst, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:43, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
- Citoid is in the visual editor. In my experience, outrageously long ref names are usually Diberri. The visual editor adds extremely short, incomprehensible ones like
:0
or:1
; technically, the citoid servce doesn't touch that part of the ref at all. The RefToolBar autofiller (under the "Cite" tab of the still-popular 2010 wikitext editor) only permits manually created ref names. - If you give Diberri a URL to a PubMed item, here's what you get back:
- If you give the same URL to a PubMed item to the citoid service (in the visual editor), here's what it gives you:
- If you give the same URL to the PubMed item to the RefToolBar autofiller, here's what you get:
- The difference in templates is because Diberri always uses {{cite web}} if you give it a URL. The citoid service recognizes PubMed's URLs and corrects the template automagically. The RefToolBar filler makes you choose which of the four you want in advance. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:51, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
- Nope; diberri lets you name your own ref; I have never had it return a ref like that, and I don't know what settings you are using to get that. You should be typing in a PMID to get a clean cite journal template. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:57, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
- If it needs anything more than an URL it's not good for me. Citoid output has to be rewritten so that it works with sfn, a tool that auto-creates the sfn templates would be cool. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 20:18, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
- Diberri's tool only handles URLs if you set the dropdown menu to "URL" (the default is PubMedID). If you want to put in the PMID number alone, then you'll get a ref name like
<ref name="pmid12345678">
, which is also not what most of us want (PMID example, URL example for the same source) WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:57, 1 February 2022 (UTC)- These are the Diberri/Boghog Options:
- Fill vertically
- Show extended fields
- Pad parameter names and values
- Add ref tag
- Don't use et al. for author list
- Omit URL field if DOI field is populated (journals only)
- Don't strip trailing period from article title
- Use full journal title
- Link journal title
- Add URL (if available)
- Add access date (if relevant)
- The default is not to "Add ref tag", which I don't, as I don't want meaningless gobbledeegook cluttering around text I have to edit. I use a standard ref name of AuthorYear (which makes editing much easier, but that's because I know all of my sources and authors quite well). Point being, you can choose a ref tag you understand and like! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:09, 1 February 2022 (UTC)
- Problem is that the tool picks cite web even for journal articles when I tried with an Elsevier article. Citoid has better judgment. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 16:37, 1 February 2022 (UTC)
- Yep; this tool was designed by a physician-editor and works best in medical articles, which rely heavily on PMIDs and med identifiers -- not applicable so much in your area of editing. Bst, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:52, 1 February 2022 (UTC)
- Problem is that the tool picks cite web even for journal articles when I tried with an Elsevier article. Citoid has better judgment. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 16:37, 1 February 2022 (UTC)
- These are the Diberri/Boghog Options:
- Diberri's tool only handles URLs if you set the dropdown menu to "URL" (the default is PubMedID). If you want to put in the PMID number alone, then you'll get a ref name like
- If it needs anything more than an URL it's not good for me. Citoid output has to be rewritten so that it works with sfn, a tool that auto-creates the sfn templates would be cool. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 20:18, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
- Nope; diberri lets you name your own ref; I have never had it return a ref like that, and I don't know what settings you are using to get that. You should be typing in a PMID to get a clean cite journal template. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:57, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
- Citoid is in the visual editor. In my experience, outrageously long ref names are usually Diberri. The visual editor adds extremely short, incomprehensible ones like
- I don't know that tool (and it probably falls under "old dog, new tricks" for me), but Diberri is a breeze to use, with the added benefit that it returns much cleaner citations than some other tools (by using vancouver-style authors, there is much less gobbledeegook to edit around). I have encountered (I believe because of the visual editor, but I could be wrong) up to 80 parameters of author names (40 authors with first and last), along with outrageous ref names that can add a full line to have to get around while copyediting! So we can end up with ten times the number of lines in edit mode for the citation than for the text ... that'll encourage new editors to want to dig in. Bst, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:43, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
- I think some might also use Citoid. I certainly do. Filling out the citation templates is the most annoying part of Wikipedia article writing by far. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 18:37, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
- Most FAs use Diberri. Visual editor introduces a lot of gobbledeegook. The question of citation style is informational only, for the benefit of a good-faith new user (I may be repeating myself?). The changes were because of other problems in the same edit. Whether we have a website-only primary source is unanswered. Have you looked at schizophrenia and do you think it's cited correctly now? I'd like to not keep exposing a good-faith new editor to the rest of this discussion, so that discussion can continue there, as I clearly erred in bringing it here, and just fixed it myself (I think). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:12, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
- Adam Harangozó (NIHR WiR) Yes, the schizophrenia text was in bad shape before you touched it, so I'm sorry I chose to put that example up here, since that complicated the discussion. I recognize you were only trying to reformat what was already there (which I now know was faulty), but when I first looked, I saw a website mentioning a primary study but formatted as a journal. It was asking for someone to take a deeper look, and my hope was that would happen here, as I was traveling and on an iPad. My apologies to you for the unnecessary complication. In this series of edits, I have cleaned up some of the issues in that section; please scroll to the bottom to see how I have left it, but I am as yet uncertain if Headbomb and WAID agree with me as to how that source should be presented. We seem to have a primary study, hosted on the NIHR website (but unpublished in hard print elsewhere?), which disagrees with part of the rest of the sentence regarding NICE guidelines. So I've added a source for the parts that can be sourced correctly, while separating and tagging the NIHR piece as primary; I've used cite web, as I can't find a journal article, and added an accessdate, as websites aren't enduring. That was messy and not all your fault. On Tourette's, the link was to a NCBI book; I believe that is an enduring source that is likely to outlive any other source, so does not need to be replaced. If I am mistaken, someone will let me know, but it looks to me as a matter of personal preference rather than error. Yes, many of the other issues seem to be related to the visual editor, unfortunately; another problem complicating that is that most of the how-to pages encourage new editors to use the visual editor, and never mention that most medical content (and almost all FAs) uses citations generated from the Diberri/BogHog tool, and FAs must maintain a consistent citation style. Yes, this discussion was disproportionate. The next time I am in a hurry and want others to look in, rather than posting here for help, I will wait until I have time to dialogue directly with the editor; my sincere apologies to you for getting you into several issues that aren't related directly to your edits. On the other hand, if this is the worst thing that happens to you as a new editor, this is light years ahead of the things that happened to me when I was new, so hopefully things are improving :) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 12:44, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
- @SandyGeorgia: I'm still a bit confused if these are errors. 1. At the Scizophrenia example I did not read the source to judge if it fits (it was already there), I've replaced the defunct URL with a DOI. 2. Tourette: I've replaced a pdf with a link to the full text in the official journal. 3. The other DOIs I inserted point to the official journal texts, per the guideline favoring that versus PMC (see above). 4. For errors or differences in style by the visual editor, I'm not the person to turn to. I think access dates are added by the visual editor as well, though I would agree it's not needed for DOIs. 5. I will write an introductory post soon here about my work at the NIHR and I'll explain what the NIHR Evidence website is. 6. I can't help to think that the length of this discussion is a bit disproportionate to the nature of errors in my edits (most of which are not errors). If I would be a beginner editor I would be surely put off by this. Adam Harangozó (NIHR WiR) (talk) 10:10, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
@Jo-Jo Eumerus: You wrote "If it needs anything more than an URL it's not good for me"
but the PubMed ID (PMID) is already in the URL and the ID can be used to generate a journal citation. For example, for the URL used above, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32628263/
, the PubMed ID (PMID) is 32628263. The PMID is also on the PubMed page. Using the PMID with Diberri
{{cite journal |vauthors=Kelly JF, Abry A, Ferri M, Humphreys K |title=Alcoholics Anonymous and 12-Step Facilitation Treatments for Alcohol Use Disorder: A Distillation of a 2020 Cochrane Review for Clinicians and Policy Makers |journal=Alcohol Alcohol |volume=55 |issue=6 |pages=641–651 |date=October 2020 |pmid=32628263 |pmc=8060988 |doi=10.1093/alcalc/agaa050 |url=}}
RFC about Vision therapy - is it legitimate medicine or quackery?
Another discussion about the issue has been opened at Talk:Vision therapy/Archive 1#Request for Comment on legitimacy. The article is not tagged for this project, which I think is rather odd. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 09:13, 6 February 2022 (UTC)
- Mostly quackery, except for the convergence insufficiency stuff. The fraud usually focuses on worried parents and the lure is that their child's learning problems can be magically resolved by buying some or other whacky eye exercise. This is all covered in the article, which gets frequent drive-bys from vision therapist proponents upset with this knowledge being published. Alexbrn (talk) 09:37, 6 February 2022 (UTC)
Why is Pilates in Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine (according to a banner at the top of Talk:Pilates)?—Finell 06:31, 7 February 2022 (UTC)
- Seems okay to me, but you could have a read here which might be of help. CV9933 (talk) 15:34, 7 February 2022 (UTC)
Help on Tinea versicolor
Hi, I have Tinea versicolor on my watchlist, and an IP address is trying to add links to an Ayurvedic medicine website. Is there a good explanation of medical reliable sources I could link to on their talk page? Red Fiona (talk) 23:42, 7 February 2022 (UTC)
- @Redfiona99, thanks for watching that page. This seems to be added as a type of Wikipedia:External links, so you could share a link to that page. You can also ask to have the page semi-protected for a few days. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:42, 8 February 2022 (UTC)
Hi, sorry about the repeat post. There is a spinal manipulation and chriopractic care edit suggestion on the talk page of Low back pain that could benefit from a few more sets of eyes.JenOttawa (talk) 18:01, 26 January 2022 (UTC)
- If anyone has time feedback still required on the talk page.JenOttawa (talk) 20:44, 9 February 2022 (UTC)
- I had a look. Overall, I suspect that we are trying to write the lead before writing the body. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:08, 10 February 2022 (UTC)
Suggestion
To whoever designed and now maintains the bots that create standard forms of citations in the biomedical and associated articles (and so can alter them):
You should consider a change to the bot that adds a space after the pipes for each field. Absent a change of that sort, multi-author papers present those and subsequent fields as a run-on mass. This makes the markup appear unnecessarily extended by lines of white space, with breaks that only appear where spaces advantitiously appear in the markup or fields. It can look repeatedly like this:
<ref>{{cite journal|last1=Smith|first1=AB|last2=Jones|first2=CD|last3=Brown|first3=EF...
This is not a matter of annoyance with the tech. The extending of the citation parts of the text (with long blocks of white space) means, when editing articles that have lots of sources, each with lots of authors, the text being edited that appears in the viewing field is reduced, so that more scrolling is required to move through the text being edited. (This is like a minor variation on what we have to deal with in articles that use vertical rather than horizontal {{cite... templates.)
Adding a space after each pipe would allow them to wrap more consistently on the screen (ensure that there are no breaks in the citations as they appear in markup), and so allow more text to be visible on screen while editing.
Thank you in advance, for anyone that can make this small change to the programming of the bots that generate these otherwise very nice citations. 98.253.16.20 (talk) 20:44, 26 January 2022 (UTC)
- This is a good idea that is unfortunately extremely hard to code for, and runs into various social hurdles. See WP:COSMETICBOT and both WP:BOTDICT#cosmetic edit and WP:BOTDICT#editor-hostile wikitext in particular. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 20:54, 26 January 2022 (UTC)
- Thank you for these links. The last of them, WP:BOTDICT#editor-hostile wikitext, makes my case as well, more succinctly, and in better WP-speak. (And it extends it to cover another issue, one I share, that of presenting {{cite template fields in orders that are non-intuitive, which makes filling and checking them for completeness all the harder.) And I understand the WP:COSMETICBOT statement regarding controversy, and would make two points. First, a change to the bot doing the citations now would improve all future citations appearing as a result of its work, and this should not be controversial. Second, creation of a cosmetic bot that adds the space to old bot-generated citations, while potentially controversial, would (assuming proper, thorough testing), be something that could be run a page at a time until it was clear it would not be disruptive (or give unexpected issues). After that, running it broadly would improve the "edit-ability" of all articles with bot-generated citations, for the reasons clearly expressed by WP:BOTDICT#editor-hostile wikitext. Challenges acknowledged, I think that would be a valuable contribution, and hope it happens despite the potential for the controversy WP:COSMETICBOT describes. [And I can appreciate that it might be hard to write another bot to improve appearances from the past work of citation bots—that there are various challenges in trying to script a thorough, once-through replacement of all {{cite-only pipes with a pipe-and-space (only when the pipe is followed by a non-space character), from prior scripting and scrum management experience.] I hope someone can take on both challenges—changing the current bot, and doing something to improve already existing citations. All the best. 98.253.16.20 (talk) 21:25, 26 January 2022 (UTC)
- Single spaces are not that difficult to code for. In fact, the code exists. Just change the settings in Template:Cite journal#TemplateData and the visual editor will "fix" the spacing whenever new citations are added plus whenever any existing ref gets "touched" during an edit (but it won't mass-change all of them on the page, just the ones you engage with).
- The problem is primarily on the social side. People complain when the diffs are harder to read.
- TemplateData is a one-size-fits-all system. This change would require a community-wide consensus. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:21, 26 January 2022 (UTC)
- Thank you for these links. The last of them, WP:BOTDICT#editor-hostile wikitext, makes my case as well, more succinctly, and in better WP-speak. (And it extends it to cover another issue, one I share, that of presenting {{cite template fields in orders that are non-intuitive, which makes filling and checking them for completeness all the harder.) And I understand the WP:COSMETICBOT statement regarding controversy, and would make two points. First, a change to the bot doing the citations now would improve all future citations appearing as a result of its work, and this should not be controversial. Second, creation of a cosmetic bot that adds the space to old bot-generated citations, while potentially controversial, would (assuming proper, thorough testing), be something that could be run a page at a time until it was clear it would not be disruptive (or give unexpected issues). After that, running it broadly would improve the "edit-ability" of all articles with bot-generated citations, for the reasons clearly expressed by WP:BOTDICT#editor-hostile wikitext. Challenges acknowledged, I think that would be a valuable contribution, and hope it happens despite the potential for the controversy WP:COSMETICBOT describes. [And I can appreciate that it might be hard to write another bot to improve appearances from the past work of citation bots—that there are various challenges in trying to script a thorough, once-through replacement of all {{cite-only pipes with a pipe-and-space (only when the pipe is followed by a non-space character), from prior scripting and scrum management experience.] I hope someone can take on both challenges—changing the current bot, and doing something to improve already existing citations. All the best. 98.253.16.20 (talk) 21:25, 26 January 2022 (UTC)
- The oddest thing about this is that there are bots that go around removing the spaces that some of us intentionally use for eyesight issues. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 03:36, 27 January 2022 (UTC)
- Gonna put a big fat [citation needed] on that claim. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 07:00, 27 January 2022 (UTC)
- Because you know the chances of me going back through my gazillion contribs to find the examples, or because you think I'm imagining how many times it happened to me, or because I put up a fuss and (maybe? I dunno) got it stopped when it started so you are no longer aware of it happening? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 07:29, 27 January 2022 (UTC)
- PS, also, it could be a script, rather than a bot ... same effect. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 07:31, 27 January 2022 (UTC)
- Editors here have basically programmed the visual editor to remove spaces from citation templates, so it would be surprising if we never saw this happening. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:21, 27 January 2022 (UTC)
- I will ping both of you when I next see it, but there is no chance of me being able to locate it in my contribs; I know I have lodged complaints, since I intentionally enter spaces in citation templates per my eyesight. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:44, 27 January 2022 (UTC)
- Editors here have basically programmed the visual editor to remove spaces from citation templates, so it would be surprising if we never saw this happening. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:21, 27 January 2022 (UTC)
- Because you know the chances of me going back through my gazillion contribs to find the examples, or because you think I'm imagining how many times it happened to me, or because I put up a fuss and (maybe? I dunno) got it stopped when it started so you are no longer aware of it happening? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 07:29, 27 January 2022 (UTC)
- Gonna put a big fat [citation needed] on that claim. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 07:00, 27 January 2022 (UTC)
- I have asked about changing the settings for the visual editor at Help talk:Citation Style 1/Archive 82#Adding spaces between parameters. Realistically, I don't expect anyone to mind. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:14, 10 February 2022 (UTC)
Discussion about autism-related page moves
Please see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Autism#Should we officially transition our articles from PDDs to Autism spectrum? WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:05, 10 February 2022 (UTC)
CfD about psych diagnostic tests
Hey, there's a discussion at CfD that needs some attention. It's about renaming the categories for psych diagnostic tests. --Xurizuri (talk) 14:35, 9 February 2022 (UTC)
- give opinion(gave mine)--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 03:39, 12 February 2022 (UTC)
Valproate as a performance-enhancing drug
Absolute pitch contains, in the lede, some apparently dodgily-sourced claims about valproate and sound- and language-learning skills, as does the drug article and quite possibly some other articles on-wiki. There may be better sources on the topic (this one is the best I found, with a broader view of plasticity), but this is obviously likely to be a popular subject and will likely require some keeping an eye upon until there's much better data. HLHJ (talk) 18:31, 13 February 2022 (UTC)
- Good point. I edited the sentence you mentioned (diff). Mark D Worthen PsyD (talk) [he/him] 00:27, 14 February 2022 (UTC)
More eyes needed at Zero-COVID article
If anyone is interested we are looking for more input. Talk:Zero-COVID#Delete section "Views on the zero-COVID strategy"?..... simply looking for more experience editors to take part and try to understand what's the POV problem if any.--Moxy- 16:51, 16 February 2022 (UTC)
Medical-related Biography of Living Person
extended BLP of Martin Kulldorff
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I am one of only a few editors actively working on the BLP of Martin Kulldorff, one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration. Because Kulldorff is a controversial figure, involved with a controversial topic, in a politicized pandemic, it is difficult to wade through all of the wiki rules involved (BLP, MEDRS, etc...) and maintain a neutral article that is fair to the subject (Kulldorff) and the mainstream views of some of his ideas. Sourcing is one of the key areas of contention between the current group of editors. Most recently we have been discussing a statement placed in the lead of the biography: "In 2020, Kulldorff was a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated lifting COVID-19 restrictions on lower-risk groups with the impossible aim of keeping vulnerable people safe from the virus." I contend that the clause "impossible aim of keeping vulnerable people safe from the virus" is WP:BMI because the statement is; "...information that relates to (or could reasonably be perceived as relating to) human health" and specifically, it qualifies as "Population data and epidemiology." Is that a correct interpretation of BMI in this context? This is also my first BLP to edit and the first time I've waded into articles pertaining to medicine—so thank you in advance for your comments and patience! Michael.C.Wright (talk) 23:18, 8 February 2022 (UTC)
Any other comments?@WhatamIdoing:, thank you again for your additional comments. I think we are getting closer to a consensus here that the statement is probably BMI and given that it's for a BLP we should be extra cautious and get it right. It would be extremely helpful to get additional comments on this question, especially from more editors with strong experience in medical BLPs as well as editors with expertise in medical matters, especially COVID-19, as I am new to editing BLPs and medicine-related pages and the politics of the issue are making things difficult. Michael.C.Wright (talk) 08:49, 10 February 2022 (UTC)
Unrelated to potential BMI
Reframing the discussionI think WhatamIdoing et al. miss certain features of the debate in the summaries above. What is called into question is whether it is possible in societies (either high or middle/low income, or democracies with legal certainty - or not/without) to implement strong enough measures that they are effective in hindering spread to such a degree that it will lead to fewer deaths in the longer term. The declaration writers assert that it is not, which as a statement can certainly be called into question. We should however remember that the declaration was published before the WHO or any country (apart from China and Russia) had authorized vaccines - and presented a question for which there was/is no answer. We may assert that the declaration is viewed as marginal by the broader community, but that does not mean that all criticism goes - as some critics are also quite marginal, including for instance some that espouse zero Covid. It seems to me wholly inappropriate to reference self-published site Science-Based Medicine as prominently as is suggested above, not only as there is an issue with application of WP:MEDRS/WP:BMI - but also as per WP:WEIGHT. There is far more reliable criticism, and GBD is not unequivocally considered fringe in all medical literature (even in literature that criticizes it, e.g. PMC8266426), as some of the other phenomena that Gorski often criticizes are. This goes also for what Alexbrn suggests, when he cites an opinion piece (well-published enough in the BMJ) from Gorski as absolute evidence that there "is no dispute". It is still an opinion piece and does not account for a full refutation - and is nothing near as strong as those sources used to define or refute climate change denialism. There are quite a few personal views and some off-topic discussion above, which probably doesn't belong - as the question at hand is how we should summarize the debate, not what we personally consider moral about deaths from chicken-pox or other infectious disease. What is important to remember is that while the declaration may be politically marginal, the sources necessary to refute scientific statements or assertions made in it are not the same as those which express political views of it. Semmelweis was considered fringe by his contemporaries - and a thought experiment would be to consider how we would have summarized the scientific literature upon his assertions. Would there "be no dispute", or would we be better off by stating that the scientific consensus does not support his assertions? There is also the entire topic of the Swedish, Japanese, and Korean voluntary and no-general-lockdown responses, and the Ugandan total societal closure with curfews and closed schooled for 2 years, versus the Tanzanian "Covid doesn't exist"-approaches that place on either extreme of the scale. At least the former three should under no circumstances be considered "solely fringe" or "non-debatable". A broader perspective may be useful if we are to target neutrality and not just a narrow summary of the situation in high-income anglocentric nations. Distrait cognizance (talk) 08:30, 12 February 2022 (UTC)
What is illiterate is to interpret "protect" as synonymous with "shield from all harm". The declaration never suggests that focused protection or targeted interventions will bring about 100% safety to those most vulnerable. But neither do lockdowns or and strict measures, unless they are severe enough to stop all disease spread as per zero Covid, which once spread got going was a pipe-dream. It certainly did not work in the UK, the US, or anywhere in Europe, only working in those countries that had strict border closures for years, with even New Zealand dropping it as of recently.
The debate, which is certainly not pseudoscientific, but underlies the totality of all pre-Covid research and policy on pandemic preparedness, is most certainly alive and kicking. It is a straw man to shoot down the analogy of vaccines as irrelevant - it is simply using an extreme example prove a point. There are many other reasonably effective interventions as well. Real examples of focused protection that have been used include cohort care, financial support for risk groups to stay at home, as well as food deliveries to risk groups. That is just off the top of my head from what I've seen in my community. Alexbrn - you are being extremely disingenuous, as the declaration was followed, just a few weeks later in November 2020 by the following on focused protection:
Many arguments here are just going around in circles, and don't even attempt to discuss the issue at hand, which I find Michael.C.Wright encapsulated quite well with his analogy. It almost seems like no one has read the declaration, with most making up their minds based off of lay press summaries. Distrait cognizance (talk) 08:19, 14 February 2022 (UTC)
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How is strabismus one of the causes that lead to anisometropia, and how is it treated or reduced? with the source please
anisometropia & strabismus Son of zeayj (talk) 09:20, 19 February 2022 (UTC)
- @Son of zeayj, why are you asking this? If this is part of your homework, then the Wikipedia:Reference desk might be able to help you. If you know someone with one of these conditions, then I'd suggest asking a qualified healthcare professional, rather than some stranger on the internet. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:54, 20 February 2022 (UTC)
COVID-19 medical cases charts
I think that it is already time to stop editing all of the templates that are listed here. Most of those templates are COVID-19 medical cases charts and they are already useless nowadays. Can they simply be marked as historical or do they need to undergo the usual deletion process? LSGH (talk) (contributions) 09:26, 20 February 2022 (UTC)
- I believe that @Mxn knows about those. The data is store on Commons, not here. If you just think they shouldn't be in any articles, then you only need to remove the template from the article, rather than marking the template in any way. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:53, 20 February 2022 (UTC)
- No, the medical cases charts are still updated manually even if case numbers have already lost their significance. I think that the templates can still remain in the relevant articles, but most of them are already outdated and the others do not need to be updated anymore. LSGH (talk) (contributions) 04:10, 21 February 2022 (UTC)
Req for WP:3O at CFS
Before I inadvertently get embroiled in an edit war; can someone check this reverted undo over at the Chronic fatigue syndrome article? The changes don't seem to be supported by the referenced MEDRS. I initially undid the edits as they were made after a string of edits removed by ClueBOT NG. All were marked as WP:minor – some of them were not. To me the "clarifications" seem to fail verification – though I did not tag my reversion as such. (If edits are fine; then the malformed "epi[[genetics|genetic]]" wikilink will need changing to "[[epigenetics|epigenetic]]".) Little pob (talk) 15:49, 22 February 2022 (UTC)
- @Little pob, that change is not okay. By changing "mechanisms" to "metabolic mechanisms", the new editor is saying that non-metabolic mechanisms either don't exist or that they actually are fully understood, and the only thing left for researchers to understand is the metabolic mechanisms. This is probably unintentional, and it's factually wrong even if it is intentional. (Also, I suspect that the new editor meant "physiological" or even "non-psychological", rather than "metabolic".)
- In the case of the epi/genetics change, the new sentence inadvertently suggests that nobody has ever claimed that the DNA sequence could matter, which is false. It might be worth adding epigenetics to the phrase ("proposed mechanisms include biological, genetic, epigentic, infectious, and physical or psychological stress"), but genetics should not be removed. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:25, 22 February 2022 (UTC)
- I've left a note on the new editor's talk page. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:31, 22 February 2022 (UTC)
- Thanks, WAID. I'll add in epigenetics as a separate item in the prose list. Little pob (talk) 12:46, 23 February 2022 (UTC)
- I've left a note on the new editor's talk page. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:31, 22 February 2022 (UTC)
Hello, WikiProject Medicine,
This article was brought to my attention because in a biographical article, a subject of a recent WP:COIN discussion is stated to suffer from this condition. It doesn't seem like the article is up to WikiProject Medicine standards, has very light sourcing and looking at the page history, it looks like much of the editing has been done by IP editors instead of editors that I recognize as regular content creators. I'm not one myself, I work in admin areas but I thought I'd bring it to the WikiProject's attention in case anyone wants to take it on as a fix-it project. Thank you. Liz Read! Talk! 03:03, 16 February 2022 (UTC)
- thank you for post[8]--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 14:34, 23 February 2022 (UTC)
Poor Presentation and Bias on John A. McDougall
FYI, the Dr. John A. McDougall page on Wikipedia exhibits poor presentation, outdated information, and blatant bias. These issues have been discussed for at least the last six years on the Talk page, and none of them have really been fixed, thanks to a group of editors that control that page. Wikipedia should be ashamed of the poor editorial quality of the entry. I have done a step-by-step analysis of the overall presentation of this entry and I will be posting it to YouTube shortly---the link will pretty be provided here as well. The Wikipedia page goes right up to the borderline but doesn't quite cross it of calling this accomplished clinician and researcher a "quack", and then provides questionable or outdated sources to back up the criticism, with no other viewpoint provided in any significance. His work is built on decades of clinical evidence from researchers from institutions such as Duke University, Cornell University, Oregon Health Sciences Center, even Harvard U [e.g., archeology research] and others published in peer-reviewed studies. Don't you think that the reader should decide whether or not his work is questionable? Just stick to the facts, Wikipedia. Thank you, - Jack Byrom Jack B108 (talk) 16:22, 15 February 2022 (UTC)
- His diet seems to attract fans from time to time. It's true there has been some research published in the last couple of years that could usefully be included (even if it seems inconclusive). Trying to raise a posse via Youtube is likely to result in the article being locked and your account being blocked which is not a good outcome for anyone. The only way to get an article changed on Wikipedia is through editor consensus, and this is best achieved via Talk pages. Alexbrn (talk) 16:58, 15 February 2022 (UTC)
- Jack Byrom some users have canvassed off-site before and posted about McDougall's article on Reddit (I am not sure if you were involved with that). It's up to you what you want to do in your spare time but the canvassing thing never works, just leads to more problems. Do you have any reliable sources for McDougall's biography that specifically mention him? I am talking about reliable secondary sources that are independent (not primary sources written by McDougall). You have been asked multiple times but never give any. I know you mean well and want to improve the article but as Alexbrn says use the talk-page and if you know of any reliable sources put them over there. That is how you improve an article. Psychologist Guy (talk) 18:15, 15 February 2022 (UTC)
- You guys mangle this page and spend hours practicing theoretical medicine on Wikipedia instead of writing a good article. You malign a living person and physician, and then when somebody makes a real critique of the page with a fresh eye, you threaten them with a self-referential Wikipedia threat. How entirely predictable, yet sad, as if WP was the authority on high. I would just be horrified if I or another professional science editor got banned from Wikipedia because of a review of this article on YouTube. By the way, the worse the Wikipedia article, the more the editors responsible cry out that "there are no reliable secondary sources" [to support an actual comprehensive encyclopedia entry]. There's plenty of reliable secondary sources, and you know it. If you were really trying to be a professional writer or editor here, you would go find them. But that's not really your intent...This is actually an encyclopedia, not a medical journal. I wonder if you know the difference. Jack B108 (talk) 04:41, 23 February 2022 (UTC)
- RE: "Jack Byrom some users have canvassed off-site before and posted about McDougall's article on Reddit (I am not sure if you were involved with that)..." --Psychologist Guy Huh? I don't ever use that website, but it sounds like you are not real happy about anybody reviewing or giving a fair opinion of your work, which itself tarnishes the reputation of a dedicated professional. If your work here is fair and balanced, you would think that you would be happy for the attention. Jack B108 (talk) 04:51, 23 February 2022 (UTC)
- The article's not bad. The recent attention has uncovered some new sources and tightened things up, but basically this guy's diet product seems like just another nonsense diet with some highly dubious claims used to promote it, and Wikipedia isn't going to be coy about that reality. Alexbrn (talk) 05:21, 23 February 2022 (UTC)
- There's probably room to improve it, though. For example, he promotes a low-fat vegan diet. This is not the "standard balanced diet", but was it ever popular enough to qualify as a fad diet? A fad diet is one that has a brief flare of popularity, regardless of whether it's scientifically sound.
- Some critical content was removed recently, and that is being discussed on the talk page. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:19, 23 February 2022 (UTC)
- Alexbrn, Yes, it is improved over what I saw when I first looked at it about two weeks ago. But it's still got quite a ways to go before it's up to basic encyclopedia editorial standards. I guess every little bit helps. Thanks, Jack B108 (talk) 20:01, 23 February 2022 (UTC)
- The article's not bad. The recent attention has uncovered some new sources and tightened things up, but basically this guy's diet product seems like just another nonsense diet with some highly dubious claims used to promote it, and Wikipedia isn't going to be coy about that reality. Alexbrn (talk) 05:21, 23 February 2022 (UTC)
- Jack Byrom some users have canvassed off-site before and posted about McDougall's article on Reddit (I am not sure if you were involved with that). It's up to you what you want to do in your spare time but the canvassing thing never works, just leads to more problems. Do you have any reliable sources for McDougall's biography that specifically mention him? I am talking about reliable secondary sources that are independent (not primary sources written by McDougall). You have been asked multiple times but never give any. I know you mean well and want to improve the article but as Alexbrn says use the talk-page and if you know of any reliable sources put them over there. That is how you improve an article. Psychologist Guy (talk) 18:15, 15 February 2022 (UTC)
Wikimedian in residence at the NIHR - introduction
Dear All,
Though I've already been mentioned on this page, I finally caught up with my self to post a proper introduction. So I will be the Wikimedian in residence at the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) until June. This is a joint project between the NIHR and Wikimedia UK. Our goal is to see how we can incorporate Wikipedia editing into the different aspects of research (dissemination, public and patient involvement, training, funding requirements, etc.). We will also work on including NIHR research evidence (the secondary sources) in Wikipedia articles and plan to organise an edit-a-thon focusing on researchers from underrepresented backgrounds. We also set up a project page where I will share updates about the project.
My first question to you is what do you think about using articles from the NIHR Evidence website as sources? These are not traditional secondary sources but all of the studies are chosen by a professional committee based on their importance, impact and relevance.
And of course feel free to contact me with any questions or ideas here or via [email protected]
Best wishes, Adam Harangozó (NIHR WiR) (talk) 10:24, 17 February 2022 (UTC)
- Interesting stuff. It definitely feels worthwhile interfacing with people who might be motivated to edit wikipedia. One concern I have would be the tendency of health bodies to view everything not aimed at other health professionals as a tool for "public health" with all that comes along with it (misleading simplications to encourage compliance and provide 'motivation', summaries designed to protect professional interest, claiming certainty where there is no such thing).
- A nice property of wikipedia for me is that it is not advice written by science communication professionals: it has an WP:Academic bias, every claim is well sourced, it tends to be possible to trace a citation chain all the way down to primary sources if you want to, and there are crowds of people there to remove bias and provide context - which I guess could be summarized as "wikipedia is an encyclopedia that anyone can edit". Looking through a few of the evidence pieces, like [9] there's a bit of a "public health" vibe to the pieces and they aren't really citing their conclusions well. I would very much prefer a systematic review to these sources. Although there is going to be some trade off in terms of up-to-date sources.
- I wonder if it would be possible to plug wikipedia in slightly "higher up" in the chain of articles being written before all the "science communication" starts seeping in. By analogy, NICE often have guidelines together with evidence for the guideline. The later evidence documents are long and detailed and can be very good sources (see for example: https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/cg178/evidence)
- As an aside I think the standards for what counts as a secondary source are relatively low. In WP:MEDRS they talk about the hierarchy of sources. I think sources like this could be quite useful when there is not a systematic review to hand. It might be worth looking into some of the things that happened while people were writing about covid and how these less standard secondary sources were used. I wasn't that involved in this - but others may know more.
- If you look at the archives of this page, there is some discussion about trying to support medics in editing, which might be worth looking at. Again, it's not something I personally have much experience in - but summarizing my limited experience and what other people say: getting medics to appreciate the reasons behind not citing primary sources can be difficult, there can be conflict surrounding "professional status" (I remember some of the guidelines saying things along the lines of "you can your professional knowledge to find good sources"), at times I've interacted with medics with a certain tendency towards censorship and deletionism on the grounds of safety (often with an unfortunate argument that criticism puts patients at risk by decreasing truts in a specialty). There are also the standard thing about being a new editor on wikipedia being difficult - things to learn, admin's having a habit of placing banners on your page, brusque and at times combative communcation style - but I imagine you know about this. It might be worth talking to some people who have joined wikipedia recently, "survived" and are making contributions. @Xurizuri: seems like someone who might be interesting to talk to on this topic (I hope they don't mind me mentioning them). Talpedia (talk) 03:08, 18 February 2022 (UTC)
- I'm happy to talk about my experiences with this - it's not great news, I'm afraid. Basically, I think one of the riskiest things to do at the start is edit anything you're an expert in or otherwise particularly invested in. You want to care just enough to keep editing. Because the Wikipedia "rules of engagement" are really counter-intuitive, people need to be editing in a space where they won't get their hackles up if they get told off, because that will happen. The only times I really got into trouble towards the start was editing where I know a lot about the topic. It's been a bit over a year, and I know of at least a couple people who still don't trust me (and fair enough, I did some incredibly ill-advised editing). If you start out where you won't get defensive about being corrected, then it's easier to actually absorb the reasoning for why someone's just put a banner with a strangely friendly-yet-hostile tone on your talk page or deleted your edit using a bunch of arcane acronyms in their edit summary.Adam Harangozó (NIHR WiR), on another note, by "underrepresented backgrounds", do you mean underrepresented fields or are you referring to our systemic bias? --Xurizuri (talk) 12:06, 25 February 2022 (UTC) (please ping if you respond)
- To counter some of Talpedia's points, I would say there can be a problem where articles are written by editors with no experience of the topic (even if medically qualified in some way) who assume literature reviews actually reflect medical practice, vs sometimes the opinion and hopes of the review author. I agree the NICE guidelines are good, partly because they are forced to come to a decision even if the evidence is weak. Cochrane's systematic reviews can sometimes be a bit "so what?" and I think their frequent "low evidence" conclusions need expert consideration to determine what to make of that. For example, in some fields there are clear and obviously effective drugs and you'd need strong evidence to change those from being first choice. In other fields, you might not have any effective treatments, and so a "low evidence" drug might end up being the only recommended choice. Some of the NIHR pages have commentary by experts, which could be useful supplementary information on top of the study or systematic review being discussed. Not all the articles are health information for the public. this alert is about drug choices made by emergency doctors, not in the community or by a GP.
- I think that Talpedia's concerns about bias could be a problem for some topics, but for most of them it is likely that anyone reading the article could be more likely to come away with a good idea of the state of research knowledge than they might just by doing a PubMed search and picking a review of similar vintage. They also have the advantage of being freely accessible. -- Colin°Talk 14:19, 18 February 2022 (UTC)
- I definitely think more perspective's are good, as are practitioners perspectives on what actually happens in hospitals, particularly complementing more academic sources (as you say). I think having experts be able to say "this isn't at all true - look at this source" to deal with "unknown unknowns" could be very valuable.
- My concern is more around the framing things "advice for patients written by experts" versus "accurate summary of all quality research citing literature". Personally when I look at advice written for patients versus that written for doctors or nurses the difference can be striking. Both can be quite easy to understand, summarized and practical - but the advice written for patients if far more likely to lie to me or gloss over very important details. Talpedia (talk) 20:13, 18 February 2022 (UTC)
- My feeling at the moment (I've looked at a little bit, but not a lot) is that this could be useful in some cases. It helps to poke around the website a bit. There are three types:
- Themed reviews
- Collections, and
- Alerts.
- I thought initially that the reviews and collections would be most useful (because they sound like secondary sources), but then I picked one (a "collection" about recent pregnancy research) and thought about how I would use it, and it didn't seem useful in practice. It was mostly vague platitudes ("Pregnant women should always be at the centre of their care"). I also found myself frustrated that it would say things about the conclusions of a particular piece of research, like "Parents and doctors take different approaches to difficult decisions", but not say what those different approaches were. The linked alert for that bit, on the other hand, provided a list of the four different approaches this primary source found (analytical, absolute, assess/reassess, and delay/avoidance). The Collection might be considered a secondary source, but this information is still based on a single research study. The next such study might decide that there were three approaches, or five.
- The "What's next?" sections in the "Alerts" could be useful for a ==Research directions== section (about what research is underway or recommended for the future).
- This alert is basically a lay-friendly summary of PMID 32362033 (a review article). I don't think I would want to cite the NIHR alert instead of the original review. I could imagine someone providing that link in addition to the review, but not instead of the review. I could also imagine someone using the NIHR contents to make sure that they have correctly understood the original source, to find relevant original research sources, and to see whether they are correctly WP:Balancing aspects (part of NPOV) of the article.
- Finally: a citation to NIHR is probably better than nothing. It may not be the "MEDRS ideal", but it may be a "good enough" source for simpler and less controversial content. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:42, 19 February 2022 (UTC)
- Hi Talpedia, Colin, WhatamIdoing,
- Thanks so much for the feedback. Giving health advice might be less of a problem with the NIHR as they come from the research end but it’s going to be my job to teach them how to edit Wikipedia and I’ll emphasise this aspect.
- I think the NIHR Evidence site is useful not only because of the research but the plain language they are using. I really want to focus on using accessible language during my residency because many medical articles on Wikipedia are not easy to read (there are also studies about this).
- I would also cite the original article but somehow include the matching piece from Evidence as a plain English summary. Another good NIHR source I’m planning to use is the Health Technology Assessment from the NIHR Journals Library, there are many systematic reviews here.
Merge proposal: autism and autism spectrum
An editor has requested for Autism to be merged into Autism spectrum. Since you had some involvement with autism or autism spectrum, you might want to participate in the merger discussion (if you have not already done so). Averixus (talk) 00:20, 27 February 2022 (UTC)