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• WT:MED

Welcome to the WikiProject Medicine talk page. If you have comments or believe something can be improved, feel free to post. Also feel free to introduce yourself if you plan on becoming an active editor!

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Misplaced Pages:Misplaced Pages Signpost/WikiProject used

Template:Reliable sources for medical articles

Template:Reliable sources for medical articles generates this -

Ideal sources for Misplaced Pages's health content are defined in the guideline Misplaced Pages:Identifying reliable sources (medicine) and are typically review articles. Here are links to possibly useful sources of information about WikiProject Medicine. PubMed provides review articles from the past five years (limit to free review articles) The TRIP database provides clinical publications about evidence-based medicine. Other potential sources include: Centre for Reviews and Dissemination and CDC

A robot has put this template on the talk pages of many health articles. The goal behind this was to give users who visit the talk pages of health articles a recommended search which would assist them in finding appropriate scholarly articles which they could use to develop the Misplaced Pages article. The template does a search in a United States government health database, and the search is for the article's name.

Previous discussion of this template happened in the following places:

• Here on the WikiProject Medicine Board - Archive 34 - A link from the talk page to evidence
• At Misplaced Pages's Village Pump Archive 103 - Proposal to add a template to medical article talk page

Blue Rasberry (talk) 20:18, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Um, actually a bot put a different template on talk pages, and the template given above (as well as the discussion added to the introduction) contains the adjustments made after the discussion below. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:05, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Considering the Trip database

why is this happening? This Trip database identifies primary sources ... why are we encouraging new editors to source incorrectly? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:44, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Can someone explain a) where it came from, b) why we are encouraging the use of primary soures, and c) how I can get that bot to not visit TS talk? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:52, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

It does seem a little self defeating to have a banner advising MEDRS which gives one of the suggested links for sources to a repository that lists both primary and secondary sources. I followed the link from another page , and Cochrane Reviews do seem to be displayed first, but lower down in the results there are primary sources. There is a side menu on the right with options to narrow the search results to systematic reviews etc. Maybe the link could point to one of these narrowed search results, as the links in template giving PubMed search results do above. Nice template btw not sure who made it, but thanks for going to the effort. Now we just have to hope that people will read the talk page before adding their primary source ... =D well might dissuade some people anyway. Lesion (talk) 17:04, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

The discussion happened on this talk page in May. I think it's an awesome idea and a great template. Thank you all concerned. But I also agree with Sandy that we should be pointing to reviews, meta-analyses, etc. and not primary sources. Is it possible to tweak the TRIP link as Lesion suggests? --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 17:21, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Not sure what others are seeing, but for me the Trip results are pre-sorted in decreasing order of evidence quality. That seems to be exactly what we want: to find the best available evidence that relates to the topic. We might narrow it to publications in the past five years as with this. A few cautionary words in the Trip discussion might be worthwhile, but I don't see a fundamental problem.LeadSongDog come howl! 18:24, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

The first 50 results on my test search were all secondary. Fifty-one onwards RCTs start popping up. It's still awesome. Really thank you. But if it were possible to eliminate primary sources altogether, that would be super awesome. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 18:46, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Does this look better? The categoryid list seems to enumerate the article types to include. Some experimentation will clarify what each of those values means. LeadSongDog come howl! 20:14, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Yep. I looked at the first 120 and they were all secondary from 2012 & 2013. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 20:26, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

I think the template is great, and it is probably one of the best ways of encouraging wise editing. I have nevertheless noticed that in the case of Huntington's disease it makes a strange thing saying potentially useful sources of information about Huntington%26%2339%3Bs+disease . I suppose it will not be the only case. Can it be fixed?--Garrondo (talk) 20:23, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

• I agree with SandyGeorgia that this system has problems and will give primary sources sometimes but the intent is to standardize a process which will usually send people to good sources. Anyone who is willing to start at Trip and do research is someone that I would assist guiding if they had trouble understanding MEDRS. I would love to hear more criticism if others have any. I like this template but would like all problems with it documented. I am posting a link to this so that the problems Sandy and Garrondo found will be recorded. Here is the template's talk page - Template talk:Reliable sources for medical articles. Blue Rasberry (talk) 20:30, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Why is this thing being installed by bot, and does anyone know how to make the bot STOP ??? I don't have time to sort it ... but this seems to be another chapter in the Build An Encyclopedia Via Bot While Making Editorial Decisions By People With Brains Harder and Harder. I do not want this misleading info on talk pages of articles I edit; if someone wants to deal with primary sources on another article, or if the list for a particular article is sound, they can install it on talk-- why is it being done with automated tools? The links for the articles I primarily edit are not generally articles we should be encouraging new editors to use, and it is not hard to see that this blanket referral of articles will lead to problems with new editors who use sources inappropriately. Again, those who want to deal with that can and should by adding the link, but will someone PLEASE stop the bot (preferably the person who started it)-- this should not be an automated task. Editorial discretion should be used. The template is labeling frequent primary sources (simply because free full text is available) as sources we should be using ... I can't wait to deal with new editors on that. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:25, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

If it's just the Trip link that is causing concern, would it be sensible to remove that link from the template rather than stop the bot doing this task. The PubMed links seem OK to me, and suspect with some tweaking the Trip link could work the same. Lesion (talk) 22:34, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

It's not the only one causing concern-- the PubMed links are going to anything that is free full text even when not reviews, and in every case I have checked is returning sources that shouldn't be used, or returning nothing. The concern is that a bot should not be adding this to talk pages ... it should be a matter of editorial discretion. We should not impose bad sources on talk pages in an automated fashion-- it will cause problems with new editors who push a POV, or don't understand DUE weight, or don't know how to correctly weigh sources. This Is A Bad Idea. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:37, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

There's no absolute reason we should discourage new editors from editing say, a FA or a GA ... any given user has as much a right to approach such an article as a neglected stub. A banner of advice about sourcing policy could be argued to be more needed on pages that are likely to attract edits based on primary sources ...

Having said that, (whoever made this template) are the links functioning as intended on all pages, and if not, could this be fixed at all ? Lesion (talk) 22:40, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Where did I say my concerns were limited or restricted to FAs or GAs? I am seeing this on every article I edit. The advice is wrong; it is listing sources are useful only because they are free full text available ... which has nothing to do with ... anything. The question is, why is this being installed by bot? If some editors determine the links are appropriate for some articles, they can add them. They are not appropriate for the articles I edit, and since they are being installed based on a transclusion of an infobox, my next recommendation will be to remove the blooming infoboxes which force us to link to inaccurate information anyway. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:46, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

It seems to me that the chances of anybody actually using those templates are pretty low. When I try to visualize the sort of person who would click on that link and then systematically start reading things in order to improve our article, I come up empty. So it seems to me that all of this is kind of moot -- we're really just cluttering the talk page with more stuff that nobody will look at. Looie496 (talk) 22:51, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Okay so I started this template. Consensus for it was developed on this page as linked above. TRIP database shows secondary sources first (they are in green and they label these as secondary sources). I am sure we can get rid of the primary source if people wish. Pubmed does a good job of linking to secondary sources. If you are seeing stuff that is not secondary sources in these pubmed links please let me know. Discussion for improvement can occur here as well Template_talk:Reliable_sources_for_medical_articles

Yes there is not going to be free content for every search. But not everyone has access to full no free sources and thus why it was added. Sorry about the strange text in the name. I have fixed it by changing PAGENAMEU to PAGENAME.

With respect to building an encyclopedia by bot these edits are not being made to the main space of any article and they of course never will be. This is simply to help editors find sources. All content edits still require humans.

What we link to can be adjusted. Is it a bad idea to try to direct people to high quality searches for evidence? I fo not think so. This is better than a google search which would otherwise be the default. Nowhere in the evidence box does it say that an editor can through away their brain and just use whatever is provided blindly. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 23:00, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

By the way template does not properly handle apostrophe's in article titles. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 00:15, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

The out-of-place apostrophe in your comment is amusing.  :) -- Scray (talk) 01:52, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes and I do not use them properly either :-) We have the ability to just show secondary source at TRIP. I have update the template so that it ONLY lists secondary sources here . Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 05:08, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I disagree with SandyGeorgia and Looie this time: the template even if not 100% perfect in the sources it points out, can be a good start point for interested users. Moreover, it has the advantage that it gives a link to MEDRS at every medical talk page, and also says how to find potentially useful (bolded mine, but maybe there is a way to remark that they are only potential). I would say that damage the template can bring is minimal, whereas benefit still has to be seen (although as Looie says it will probably not be huge).--Garrondo (talk) 06:34, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Have bolded "possibly useful" to decrease potential confusion. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 06:49, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

This seems to be a case of throwing out the baby with the bath water. While imperfect, I think the advantages of this template outweigh the disadvantages. It is important to note that the template also includes a link to relevant review articles listed in PubMed before the Trip link. As already mentioned several times above, ideally the Trip link should also be filtered to return only review articles. Boghog (talk) 08:15, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Has already been changed to ONLY show secondary sources as per the request here. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 08:22, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Opps, sorry. I obviously didn't read the entire thread. The major shortcoming of the template now appears to be fixed. Thanks for taking care of this. Boghog (talk) 08:29, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for, at least, the correction to remove the primary sources from the list (which was a surprising oversight that leads to concern about how many experienced eyes are following WT:MED these days). Using a bot to recommend sourcing is still sub-optimal for a multitude of reasons I don't have time to outline today, but which I am certain editors will experience once the university term starts. This discussion was split to my talk page: At minimum, I do not want automation taking over on talk pages where real brains, real eyes, and real editor discussion is needed, and anyone who thinks POV pushers and unknowledgeable students won't use these lists to advantage has perhaps not spent enough time editing articles where same dominate. Please stop the bot addition to talk pages and allow those editors who can ascertain that the list is useful to manually install the template on talk pages of articles they watch. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 11:20, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

If students and POV pushers started using secondary sources exclusively it would allow more productive conversations to begin a lot earlier. Doubt it will solve the issues with students by any means as they have mostly revolved around plagiarism and misrepresentation of sources. WP:MEDRS already recommend source types and the links we are providing is to sources that potentially meet MEDRS requirements. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 11:30, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

More to the point, where were the knowledgeable eyes on WP:MED issues when a template was designed and installed via automation that was recommending primary sources on talk pages? I am glad that part is fixed, and hope my point is made-- this has taken unnecessary time and is something that I am quite surprised to see no one picked up on earlier. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 11:45, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

IMO it is precisely for articles where students and other people without prior knowledge on wiki policies where it is specially interesting: as I have already said, it both provides them with a link to MEDRS and a link to some sources which in average are of far higher quality than those they usually use when they end up here. I would say however that it will be specially useful in the less developed (and less watched) articles, since it is in them in which it is harder to check refs but I neither find any convincing argument to think it will be harmful.--Garrondo (talk) 11:47, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

The secondary sources all came before the non secondary sources. And each were marked clearly by what type of source they were. The reference box gave no guarantee that the sources linked to could be used without the application of proper editorial judgement and it still dose not. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 11:51, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Have the primary sources been removed now, or not? The template language still indicates they are there:

For a list of review articles from the last 5 years at PubMed, click here (limit to free articles or to systematic reviews)

Part of the problem was that the inclusion of "free articles" resulted in primary sources. If that has been addressed, the template text is wrong. If it hasn't been addressed, we still have a problem. The language (and the "or") is confusing ... is it reviews only? Is it reviews "or" free full text (which was the problem before that yielded primary sources). Please clarify the text. Also, since the template was not subst'd, will the corrected text show on articles, or does the bot need to fix them all? <groan> ... In addition to the problem of "who is minding the store" these days, since no one apparently noticed during the bot test that we were recommending primary sources on article talk pages. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 12:00, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

From what I understand it has been fixed and language is correct: now you can choose to see all kind of reviews, only free reviews (systematic or not), or only systematic reviews (free or not). --Garrondo (talk) 12:10, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

if that is the case, then perhaps someone will correct the template wording: I attempted a fix, but the text is now redundant. If we have removed free articles that were not reviews, the wording needs to reflect that. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 12:13, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Per "Part of the problem was that the inclusion of "free articles" resulted in primary sources" I do not see any "none review articles" when I click on this. These are free articles that are reviews articles and are from the last 5 years. It has always been like this. This click has NEVER yielded primary sources.

Per "since the template was not subst'd, will the corrected text show on articles". Um this is a template. It does not need substitution. Any change we make in the main template automatically flows everywhere it exists. This means we can change the wording in one spot and it is changed on all pages. I am happy to adjust the wording to clarify it. Just wanting to keep the template from getting to long. Suggestions appreciated.

Per "we were recommending primary sources on article talk pages" We were never recommending primary sources. All the secondary sources were clearly marked and the template specifically links to WP:MEDRS which emphasis that we should use secondary sources. The TRIP link has been FIXED to reduce this small amount of room for error. And this correction has rolled out automatically to every talk page on which this exists being that it is a template. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 12:20, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I agree with SandyGeorgia that this tool is bad and has lots of problems but it is also the best that the entire world and the entirety of all work done by all of humanity has to offer. Some people at the National Institutes of Health - an organization which is not involved in this and which has no official relationship to this - volunteered their time away from work to develop this project as an experiment to check the public's interest in accessing available medical resources, so I feel that there is some good will and respectable guidance in this project from beyond this board. This is not supposed to be the solution to fix the problem of access to information, but it is supposed to be a step towards identifying the best way to help users find sources for this project's 20,000 articles. I am not convinced that this tool providing easier access to scholarly articles is going to result in an increase in the ratio of bad contributions to good contributions, even if many times the articles shared through these links are inappropriate for Misplaced Pages. However - SandyGeorgia's argument is valid and we do not have the ability to predict what could happen, and this could result in a surge of bad content being added. My opinion that this is worth an experimental run, and that we would notice if people starting saying things like, "I followed the link, so anything I found is appropriate to add to the article." I would like to see the day come when all governments and all research organizations feel an obligation to provide the public and taxpayers with the medical information which all people have a right to access, but that day is not here and I am willing to make compromises to get a little problematic access when the alternative is restricting access more than we must. I really, really, appreciate SandyGeorgia's criticism and I would like anyone else with concerns to state them as best they can. Ideas for what kinds of links might be appropriate to share - or saying that none at all are appropriate - would be most welcome feedback. Blue Rasberry (talk) 12:28, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I already deal with "I found it on pubmed and it is peer review therefore you must let me use it" when they are talking about a "12 petri dish study" they are trying to use to support that X cures cancer. If people started with a review article from the last 5 years at least we could than begin discussing how to best paraphrase the content in question and balance it with other high quality sources. Maybe we could develop some more excellent editors to make up for the many who have faded away over the years. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 12:39, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Judging the impact of this proposal

Additionally we will be looking at the number of the TRIP link generates so we can determine if anyone uses them. If the answer is "no one" than of course we can pull them. I however sort of like having a link to WP:MEDRS on every article talk page. I know I post it on enough IPs talk pages. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 12:24, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Disagree with the view that this kind of thing clutters the talk page. I like the templates on the talk page, and the more the better. It sets the tone for behavior on the talk page not being a forum, and give a professional feel to each page. The support by the wikiprojects, the assessments, and now links to potential sources for their research... It all has the potential to encourage new users to see what[REDACTED] is all about and how they can get involved. Visit a page with minimal talk page headers etc and you will often see the discussion in a poor state. For me, the first thing I do when looking for new sources is go to pubmed, enter the search term and then filter for reviews, so I will probably be using these links regularly considering they do exactly that. The restriction on sources from the last 5 years also removes temptations for people with MEDDATE issues. Lesion (talk) 12:36, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm glad things are advancing here (tip of the hat to Blue Rasberry's reasoned post above), but anyone who thinks "last five years" works in many/most cases perhaps hasn't had the pleasure of dealing with student editors on obscure stubs like klazomania. As rasberry points out, we'll need to see the consequences of this template in practice, and we will likely see it once the next university term starts On the articles I edit, the links are not helpful. As another example of the drive for automation (where our infobox forces us to link to articles with known inaccuracies), I hope editor knowledge and discretion and discussion are not replaced by automation and bots. Editors knowledgeable in given topics know the best sources: if we see issues as a result of these lists, I hope we will adjust (although in my experience, once something automated like an infobox is installed, it is difficult to gain consensus to remove them no matter the issues and inaccuracies). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 12:49, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I think this template is useful (sorry Sandy!) as it does what MEDRS advises wrt a PubMed search for recent reviews on the subject. If the students I've run across had used this, they'd have got off to a better start. The Trip results for Asperger returns a case study as the first result so something's not quite right there. Although the template might be lost within the other talk page template clutter, it is something we could point newbies at to help them with their first sourcing queries. I don't see the bot addition of this template as nearly as bad as the bot-automated edits of article text. The problem doesn't seem to be in the queries the links execute (which are the sort of queries we recommend). Human brain is required to review the query results. Sandy, if you were advising someone to read the literature for TS, isn't the suggested PubMed search a good place to begin? -- Colin° 13:09, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

To Sandy: for me, MEDDATE is probably the most flexibly interpreted aspect of MEDRS. Agree last five years is sometimes difficult, but rarely impossible, related to the nature of the subject and how much research interest there has been in it. I will not remove a secondary source that is not too far outside 5 yrs old if it is doing a good job and I can't be bothered/can't find a more modern source. I would move that MEDDATE becomes more of an ideal target rather than an absolute inflexible rule, and maybe increase to 10 years to help on the topics with fewer reliable sources ... but I've seen how hard it is to get any changes to MEDRS. When you mention inaccuracies in infoboxes, do you mean links like emedicine? As I understand it, not all fields in the infobox have to be populated... can just remove a particular link and leave an explanation on the talk page as to your reasoning. "Editors knowledgeable in given topics know the best sources" whilst sounds perfectly logical, to me has hints of article ownership. Highlighting sourcing policy on the talk page for anyone who visits that page is a good thing... as pointed out above, better a well meaning editor uses these links than google.

To Colin: PubMed marks "a case report and review of the literature" as a review. Also occasionally it will not mark a review paper as a review. This is more issues with PubMed, or how journals supply metadata about their publications I think. Lesion (talk) 13:21, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes, but that doesn't seem to be the case here. The link Case study of man with Asperger syndrome highlights impact of late diagnosis and lack of intervention on risk of offending doesn't seem to work but this seem to be the same thing. Which is a blog post regarding this paper: Asperger syndrome and arson: a case study. So a blog about a case study. No review in sight. Colin° 13:54, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Weird... hopefully things like that won't be too common... Lesion (talk) 14:04, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

The site in question also states "In addition to the case study, the authors also briefly summarise the literature in relation to ASD and offending. From this review and the reflection on the case study, they conclude that late diagnosis and consequent lack of intervention can increase the risk of offending" But would still say not a great source. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 14:23, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

@Colin: No need for apologies-- the editors I befriend are typically those who aren't afraid of disagreement :) :) Yes, when I viewed the first links, there were many inaccuracies, errors, primary sources-- unaware if all have been corrected yet. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:29, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

@Lesion: By inaccuracies in infoboxes, I am referring mostly to Medline, although there are others. When infoboxes are forced upon articles, at least we should retain the editorial discretion to remove parameters that contain known inaccuracies in individual instances (in line with our WP:EL guideline-- why should that guideline not apply to infoboxes?), but that is often hard to do. I could give a list of everything wrong here. The concern is that automation and automatic editing is replacing knowledge, discussion, and discretion, and that has been a factor in infoboxes, use of automated tools, numerous other concerns across Misplaced Pages.

On the five years, in the topic area I edit, it is often necessary to go much older than that to find a review.

On the issue you raise of "own", we routinely weigh the quality of sources (impact factor of the journal, known biases and criticism of authors or obscure journals, and many other factors). We shouldn't replace discussion, discretion and knowledge with automation. We will see how this works in practice once the new university term starts. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:34, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

When I click on the TRIP link for autism I get NICE followed by 14 Cochrane reviews all from the last 3 years, AHRQ, DARE and than more Cochrane reviews. Yes there is an error in the Asperger's search. Nothing is perfect. The rest of the sources provided look fairly decent though. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 13:32, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

We could have a year parameter within the template so that people can stipulate how many years they wish it to go back. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 13:48, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

You need a longer signature, James, with "* Doc James is not responsible for erroneous query results on external websites" :-) -- Colin° 13:57, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

=D Lesion (talk) 14:04, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

The usefulness of these links will depend upon the topic. Pick a big issue and you will get lots of good stuff, but pick something obscure and you might not get anything at all due to the filters. Continuing the example above, the first pubmed link yields only 4 hits. Re. the 5 yr limit, might be good include a link with no date restriction, agree, but would be good to link "in the last 5 years" to MEDDATE maybe? Or too many wikilinks already ... To further address the concerns, maybe tweak the wording "Here are links to possibly useful sources of information about" to "Here are some automatically generated links to sources that may be useful" or something. Lesion (talk) 14:04, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Feel free to adjust yes. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 14:24, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Another thought, instead of having the link to search results with free full text, is to link to the resource requests page, if people are paywalled out of the best sources this is a good link for them to know about. Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Resource Exchange/Resource Request. Lesion (talk) 15:26, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

In the last 10 days there have been 82 referrals from these links to TRIP. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 16:21, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Back to basics - discussion of simple infoboxes

(tangent from above discussion) Nothing wrong, imo, with a minimalist infobox like this: angular cheilitis. ICD-10 and 9 codes only. Of course, in this example there are no other fields included simply because no-one has included then rather than there being any identified inaccuracy in the links. Lesion (talk) 15:29, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

There's loads wrong with that infobox. And I've raised this before at WPMED. 99.99999% of our readers couldn't give a **** about ICD or MESH codes and will not benefit from following the links to them or to eMedicine, etc, which nearly all fail our EL policy. And all this irrelevant crap is at the top of the page as important as the lead sentence and lead image. I'd be happy with a lead captioned image and move everything else to somewhere collapsed at the bottom of the page. Colin° 14:30, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

(after ec) Ditto-- there are mountains of problems in the infobox links forced upon us, they usually fail EL guidelines, but when I've attempted to get them removed in the past, some editors have argued they are useful in spite of the inaccurate info. (Frustration over this kind of brainless automation that impacts article quality has boiled over for me to this issue of Sources by Bot over Brains, which is also a current issue in an ArbCom case-- that technically minded editors are prevailing over those who actually know sources and build content is likely to be the last straw for me in here ... I take great care with accuracy and nuance in articles, only to find my work undermined by technical issues like faulty infoboxes and now an automated search which may return dubious results depending on the article and would be better employed by real editors rather than bot.) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:55, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Being encyclopedic is not the same as writing what readers want? As to the placement, I think infoboxes tend to go in the lead on most[REDACTED] pages. Perhaps you are describing an encyclopedia wide issue more than something confined to this wikiproject? E.g. pages on chemicals are particularly bad for this kind of thing, Potassium chloride. The links to emedicine etc could be moved to the EL section where arguably they belong, and where ELNO would apply to them as well (and therefore lead to their not being listed at all) ... I've not thought of this before and it seems wrong, but that is probably just because I'm used to seeing that stuff in the infobox. Infobox doesn't really bother me, it's pretty iconic of most[REDACTED] pages and gives a professional look again imo... Lesion (talk) 14:51, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Perhaps ??? LOL ... for sure ... please see WP:RFAR-- infoboxes have been the source of dissension and editors being chased out of here for years, and have finally boiled over to an arb case-- where curiously, classical music editors are being targeted, while some haven't even noticed that many of us medical editors hate them as well for even more serious reasons. Sorry we have gotten off on an infobox tangent here, but it is the same issue-- are we editing by brain or by bot in here? The technical-minded editors (who don't typically build content) have been successful in forcing their views upon those who do build content, do know sources, and do recognize problems that occur because of automated and automatic editing, via things like automatic links in infoboxes. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:00, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

That insanely long infobox on Potassium chloride gave me the idea that we could make the ICD codes into a collapsible section in the infobox? Lesion (talk) 14:53, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

please don't-- that just masks the problem. Some editors (@Eric Corbett:) have tried to compromise with intransigent technical-minded editors by allowing collapsible sections in infoboxes, but collapsible text is contraindicated by WP:MOS for accessibility and mirror reasons. It's not a good practice to hide something that is not useful-- it's better to eliminate it. The compromise of collapsing infobox info was forced upon some articles as a compromise, but it just masks the problems-- another problem being that infobox info is often uncited, often WP:UNDUE, and often inaccurate. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:04, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Just throwing ideas around. It didn't occur to me before that infoboxes were a source of problems. Sure I noticed emedicine gave some weird info on one occasion. So, I sense that some people would want the infobox reduced to an image and a caption, with no following ICD codes etc or ELs. Since the title of the infobox is mostly the same as the title of the page, may as well scrap that too... then you are left with just an image and a caption ... so basically there would be reason to have an infobox at all, and instead just have an image embedded in the lead.

I agree that in some cases the ELs in the infobox might be inappropriate and fail ELNO... and maybe they should be in the EL section if they are included at all.

I disagree that ICD codes should go entirely. This is an attempt at an international standard and we should give this info to be encyclopedic. Potentially they could be moved somewhere else in the page, but I think a collapsible section in the infobox is a valid option. Don't see why mirror sites should discourage this (I thought we didn't like mirrors anyway?). Lesion (talk) 15:26, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I would imagine an infobox to contain information in the line of that listed on Template:Infobox medical condition, i.e. short bits of information about the subject of the article. External links should indeed go under external links (personally I found those links to be very useful when most[REDACTED] articles were little more than stubs, nowadays it is rare for them to provide much more information than[REDACTED] itself, especially in the case of medlineplus). --WS (talk) 15:33, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I am generally in favor of the infobox we have for diseases even though most were created before I arrived. Emedicine is sometimes useful and easily accessible even though it has issues. Pubmed is not always right but is easy to read. ICD codes help structure content as does MeSH. It is not like we have huges amount of content in these boxes. I do not think attempting to summarize the article in a infobox is either a good idea or possible. Most conditions have many causes, treatments and preventions. These are all nuanced discussions that are not properly summarized in a couple of words. Numbers and links fit well in boxes prose does not. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 15:42, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

The MeSH and ICD codes often verify the names of the condition in question.Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 15:47, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

(edit conflict) :FWIW, I'm another of the small minority of users who likes to be able to consult ICD and MeSH from a standardized place in the article. I'd argue that: we make articles for the widest possible range of users; the information is genuinely encyclopedic; it doesn't take up much space. Quite where in the page it should appear is another matter. Personally, I share many of the concerns expressed above about compulsory infobox entries based on unnecessary metadata priorities over content and presentation. 86.161.251.139 (talk) 15:53, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

A few quick thoughts:

• WP:External links does apply to links in infoboxes.
• Emedicine (and Medline) links were moved to the infobox a few years ago on the grounds that they were wanted in most articles, and that this was an efficient place to stick them. The location is especially helpful if it means that the article need not contain a spam-bait section labeled ==External links== at all. If they aren't wanted in particular articles, the correct solution is complete removal, not moving to the ==External links== section. I would expect that they aren't wanted now for most well-developed articles, and that they are wanted for most stub- and start-class articles.
• Some of our readers are specifically looking for ICD codes. I've seen them requested on talk pages when they weren't present. Also, it's handy for some of our translation efforts.
• Collapsing two lines in an infobox (the ICD-9 and ICD-10 codes) isn't going to save you much space, but it is going to create WP:ACCESS problems for readers with disabilities. The "compromise" of collapsing infoboxes is IMO a bad and discriminatory compromise. Either have one or don't, but don't have one that only some users are able to view. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:56, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
  • I mostly agree with WhatamI, and point out that the MedlinePlus article on TS is *awful* and made worse by the fact that many letters have been written to the NIH (or NIMH? I frequently mix them up) advising of the inaccuracies which have stood for ... I dunno ... maybe ten years ? I think most of our infobox issues could be solved by allowing editor discretion in infobox links and avoiding automation. If links in an infobox aren't adding content beyond what is already in the article, or breach ELNO, or have known inaccuracies, editors should be able to come to consensus to delete those links. In the past, consensus overruled whenever we attempted this. The problem with infoboxes isn't the box per se, but when editor discretion, discussion and consensus is disallowed in the interest of standardization and automation. I don't mind the ICD codes, but I sure do mind linking to articles with known and easily demonstrable inaccuracies after I've carefully and with nuance added correct text to an article (no, tics are not uncontrollable, no credible TS researcher would use that terminology; no GTS did not first describe Tourette's; the "gene has not been found?", no credible researcher doubts that TS will be found to be polygenic, and on and on ... how dumbed down does the writing have to be? It is dumbed down to the point of inaccuracy.) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:38, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
    • I don't recall seeing any bots adding Medline or Emedicine links. Have you got a diff handy? If so, we might want to have A Talk with a bot operator. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:16, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I think what was suggested was that simply because there are fields in the template then editors may feel obliged to fill them regardless of the qualities of the EL. Not so much automation but "automatic" editing by living editors. I've never seen a bot fill out an infobox either, but I could be wrong. Lesion (talk) 21:52, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Pretty sure that there are bots populating {{Infobox City}} and its kin from online gazetteers. Conversely, Wikidata is systematically harvesting data from infobox parameters. If there is bad data likely to go in, it may be better to populate it with a hidden comment such as <!-- Please leave this parameter blank, per talk page discussion of 32 August 2099 --> in order to discourage bots and humans from thoughtlessly filling in a problematic value.LeadSongDog come howl! 22:25, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

All, I'm not (yet) an active member of this community, but I feel compelled to chime in for a couple of reasons. First, I lead a small team that maintains User:ProteinBoxBot, a bot for maintaining infoboxes on gene and protein pages ({{GNF_Protein_box}}), and second, I recently proposed starting a similar initiative for disease infoboxes. I'm very much in favor of clearly indicating corresponding identifiers (ICD, MeSH, etc.) because it unambiguously establishes what topic the article refers to. (To take an extreme example from our gene/protein work, 9 different genes have at one time or another been referred to as "PAP", including MRPS30, PAPOLA, and PDAP1, so noting the exact gene and protein identifiers is important.) However, our bot definitely respects {{nobots}}, and I would expect that any other bots working on disease infoboxes should as well? Is this a solution that has been tried for cases where humans want to override the general rule? Cheers, Andrew Su (talk) 22:56, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm not sure that you'd want a general nobots as the solution, since the anti-vandalism bots might respect it inappropriately. But the more relevant point is, the links that are problematic don't seem like the links that any bot would ever be adding. ICD or MeSH codes work in all languages and provide basic data about the subject. An eMedicine article is just an online article from a more or less decent English-language website. Adding that by bot would be akin to using a bot to add external links from some charity's website. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:07, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Got it, on that point you'll get no disagreement from me. Of the ones currently listed as parameters for {{Infobox disease}}, I would not object to dropping eMedicine, DiseasesDB, and GeneReviews. I'd be open to being convinced otherwise, but those are links that I don't recognize as being authoritative sources... Cheers, Andrew Su (talk) 00:13, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Add medlineplus to that list as well; emedicine and genereviews could be appropriate for the external links sections in many cases, diseasesdb and medlineplus I think could go away completely (Would be nice to have a bot migrating all the id's from the infoboxes to wikidata, so all hard work on adding these links is not lost, whether it is decided to keep them or not). --WS (talk) 07:19, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

I think we need to be careful to not allow these differences of opinions regarding infoboxes to over-shadow the much larger issue facing WP:MED. Here we are more than 12 years out and less than 1% of all medical articles have passed peer review (196 out of 26,350). The number of new GAs/FAs in the last 6 months is 4 or 5 with a couple of them only tangentially related to medicine. A number of previous GAs/FAs, while they retain the title, have fallen out of date and additionally would no longer pass current criteria due to extensive primary sourcing. While readership is amazing and growing I would not call the quality of our content a rousing success. The number of people actively editing medical content remains small and efforts to recruit have as of yet had limited positive impact (with certain efforts having a negative one). Anyway chronic obstructive pulmonary disease is poor quality so back to work... Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 01:43, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

We just have to hope that Wikidata will take away a lot of maintenance work from the editors thereby freeing up their time for actual article work. A lot of things like categories and templates could be managed globally and are actually pretty time consuming to keep consistent and up to date. The VisualEditor will hopefully also attract more editors. I actually think that not having to look for interlanguage-links has freed up about 15 minutes of my time I spend on Misplaced Pages per week. --Tobias1984 (talk) 07:54, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

I guess the overriding question is what do we want these boxes to contain: 1) a summary of key features of the disease in point form 2) information pertaining to classification and a couple of links to sources. We could also have both but that would be too much IMO. I support choice number two. Would be happy to see a RfC created on issue if other wish. Our fellow French Wikipedians are having the same discussion here Attempting to get consistecy acress languages is not something I am going to attempth though. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 09:03, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

I think WAID's point is important: "The location is especially helpful if it means that the article need not contain a spam-bait section labeled ==External links== at all." However, it could be argued that an article is incomplete if it does not have an EL section? What about a new template which lists DiseaseDB, emedicine, etc links inside the EL section? If they are wanted and don't fail ELNO that is...

Per James' point above I would think choice (1) would be more ideal, but a more minimalist choice than suggested by Wouterstomp. I think an infobox could consist of: A title, an image, a caption, ICD code, and a descriptive surgical sieve term (although I can see a few arguments developing, so may need more than one term). -- Lesion

See Misplaced Pages talk:WikiProject Medicine/Archive 24#Helpfulness of data in infobox where we discussed this at length. Also last week's Signpost Infoboxes: time for a fresh look?. I've noted in the earlier discussion that the classifications by ICD are often completely useless to a normal reader and the codes are of course just random numbers. If the lead paragraph hasn't informed the reader about the article subject, then it isn't doing its job. That some editors find these codes useful tells you everything about why they are there. We are forgetting our readers. I'm not convinced there is anything about a disease that (a) is general enough to be in an info box and (b) not better handled by the lead paragraphs if it is that important for the reader. I suggest the codes go in a box in the "Classification" section of the article, or at the end if there isn't one. The external links to eMedicine/etc nearly all fail WP:EL and can be deleted. I agree with James that sometimes they provide a plain English and reasonable accurate resource for readers: but Google finds them too and nobody but nobody is going to follow links called "neuro/386 derm/438 ped/2796 radio/723". It is not our job to link to these sites and we do a bad job of it. I do agree there are more important things to spend hours debating. Let's just delete them all and move on :-). -- Colin° 09:48, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

How about if we add DMOZ to the infobox than we can get rid of the EL section all together per "we are not a collection of ELs". We could also get rid of emedicine and ADAM at the same time. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 09:54, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Why do people recommend DMOZ ever? It is just another user-generate list of external links with all the issues that entails. It is pretty dead too. We should focus on providing content ourselves. The professional medical organisations provide links and can control their quality much better than we can or DMOZ does. -- Colin° 12:01, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

DMOZ gives us someplace to send people who want to do external links. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 12:12, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

If we're not having a problem with excessive links in an article, them we don't use DMOZ. There are often better options, like adding one or two good links ourselves.

Colin, I think you're too focused on the well-developed articles that you frequent. If our article is a stub or even start-class, then an Emedicine link is not only fully compliant with the EL guideline, but usually a welcome addition. We have 20,000 articles in that assessment status. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:15, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

WP:EL is a long policy but I can't find any text that says our view on what is a good link is dependent on how well-developed the article is. Indeed, it makes it quite clear that our judgement is based on "what the article would contain if it became a featured article". The problem with the infobox link vs an explicit external link is that judgement and commonsense are not applied -- they are added simply because the template has a parameter -- and also that the link text is meaningless codes rather than something the reader would understand they want to click on. -- Colin° 11:58, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Deleting them after Wikidata has gathered the codes would be an option (Wikidata is all about authority control). But I agree with Andrew that identifiers are important also in Misplaced Pages, but in my opinion they could also go to the bottom of the page similar to the VIAF and other codes (e.g. bottom of Anders Celsius). Are there any studies about what average people look for in a medicine-related infobox? It would be good if a decision could be made based on data rather than argument. --Tobias1984 (talk) 10:04, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

I would not have an issue with creating a box to put them in, in the section on classification which IMO should occur under diagnosis generally. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 11:01, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Catching up, multiple ... yes, delete all mentioned from infobox, but that includes Medline, which is awful.

Could someone please give me a clue stick-- what is "Wikidata" referring to in these discussions? Found, Wikidata, another WMF venture, hopefully better planned than the new notifications system or the new Visual editor, but not likely ... probably behind all the current problems driving poor editor behavior on issues like infoboxes. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:12, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

However, it could be argued that an article is incomplete if it does not have an EL section? What about a new template which lists DiseaseDB, emedicine, etc links inside the EL section? If they are wanted and don't fail ELNO that is... — Preceding unsigned comment added by Lesion (talk • contribs)

It can NOT be argued that an article is incomplete if it does not have an EL section-- quite the opposite. The absence of an EL section in a Featured or Good article is desirable, as it indicates the article is comprehensive and there is nothing left for an EL to say about it. Stubs may have ELs, but we gradually hope to migrate articles away from them. Please do NOT create templates of ELs-- they are notorious for causing problems, and the presence of absence of ELs is a function of how well developed the article is.

On DMOZ, I am one of the editors who has long advocated inclusion because it gives us a place to send the insistent and persistent who want to create link farms-- we can tell them DMOZ already contains all of that claptrap. Eliminating DMOZ results in increased editing for those of us ... who do all the work in here ... because we have to deal with more editors wanting to add useless links. If consensus is to eliminate DMOZ, I won't strongly object, but it has served a purpose in my editing. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:35, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

@Tobias1984: No idea how you would define an "average reader" or whether the concept would be helpful. We do write for a broad range of general readers, some of whom we know to be health professionals. 86.161.251.139 (talk) 13:45, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

@SandyGeorgia: Wikidata has been running for quite some time now. The fact that you just discovered it means that it is doing something right. It stays in the background and currently only manages the interwiki-links (which were a disaster in the pre-Wikidata times, but still have some issues left). I don't think that Wikidata is driving any kind of editor behavior. Quite to the contrary it has given all the people focused on data a place to add information outside of the Misplaced Pages infoboxes. If this project decides to get rid of e.g. the MESH-codes then nobody will be unhappy because their favorite bit of information is stored on Wikidata with a ton of information that will never appear in any Misplaced Pages. Not having to deal with that data tsunami will free up time from other editors to write better articles. So the whole project is actually to the benefit of those two types of editors. --Tobias1984 (talk) 16:21, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

MeSH terms change... Would Wikidata be able to update appropriately? 86.161.251.139 (talk) 09:24, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Hi 86.161.251.139! Updating wouldn't be a problem. We can also store different versions if that is something people want. We store for example ICD-9 and ICD-10 separately, but only the most recent revision. We could even go so far and store revisions separately if somebody could make a strong case that that data is relevant. --Tobias1984 (talk) 09:46, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Hi Tobias1984, thanks for the reply. If Wikidata really could update MeSH terms regularly, as changes are introduced , that would be great IMO. (Regarding MeSH term histories, I don't have an opinion on this: the MeSH browser lists previous indexing and the NLM has started to provide detailed information for recent years .)

IMO, up-to-date MeSH links are genuinely useful on Misplaced Pages pages. In reality, we're not writing just for a profilable "average" user, but for a wide range of general users, many of whom who come to Misplaced Pages as an orientative first port of call. These include, school and university students, doctors with their patients, and a wide variety of professional people, ranging from biochemists to economists, and from translators to statisticians, etc etc... For some of these people, ready access to the term in the MeSH browser straight from a Misplaced Pages page may feel natural and convenient. And the MeSH (and ICD) terms also provide independent information about how the topic of the page is classified. In my view, that's genuinely useful encyclopedic information. 86.161.251.139 (talk) 11:12, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm not advocating banning ICD and MESH codes, but they simply can't be justified as of "lead section" importance. As I commented in the previous discussion, the ICD classification of some diseases (like Tuberous sclerosis) is negative information: the reader is worse-off from reading "Phakomatoses, not elsewhere classified" than if they'd just read our article text. Reality is complex and very few things lend themselves well to a hierarchical classification system. -- Colin° 12:07, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

A compromise would be to make sections of the infobox collapsible. A section called "Identifiers" or "External Links" could be hidden by default and looking at the codes would just require one mouse click. I also think that the way they are presented now is not really benficial. Most other infoboxes have a couple of pieces of information apart from external identifiers. The diseases infobox is a real exception to that rule. --Tobias1984 (talk) 12:25, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

As others have observed, this is all part of a wider ongoing debate about infoboxes (eg ). IMO, it would be far better for WP metadata to be independently harvestable, so that infoboxes can be there for readers rather than bots. (And I agree with Colin that MeSH/ICD info should be readily accessible options rather than the main course.) 86.161.251.139 (talk) 13:12, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

@Tobias1984: And, as already pointed out several times on this page, collapsible text breaches MOS and accessibility. It was tried in some cases simply and only because no other compromise with intransigent technical-minded editors was possible (the subject of an active arb case); we should not have to stoop to the level of hiding text in infoboxes that shouldn't be there to begin with. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:14, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Re. EL, I disagree. I take the long view. Eventually there will be a category of media on commons to link to, learning materials on wikiversity, etc. I point out we have templates to link to these in the EL section already. Just because some EL are bad, doesn't mean they are all undesirable...

Re. ICD, I also disagree that we should loose these just because most people will not know what they are let alone find them useful. There is so little international standardization in medicine, I think we should support efforts like this, even thought they have some problems. Editors are also readers, and even if a minority of readers use ICD links or want them in there, I think this is reason enough to keep them. Lesion (talk) 13:48, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

On EL, if you disagree, that would have to be taken up at WP:EL or WP:LAYOUT. Here on WP:MED, we should conform to existing guidelines. Wikiversity is an external link (of dubious reliability) and it is not necessarily included on well-developed articles, nor should it be, nor will it be in every case. Again, please do not create more problems with automated/automatic editing by creating useless templates, that are almost always used incorrectly or abusively. (Actually, I do like ICD codes as well ... ) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:54, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

I understand what you are saying, and what is reflected in the policy about EL, that there is no reason to have EL which provides what the article is already providing, and therefore well developed articles are likely to need less EL, but I think it does not reflect consensus to suggest that the perfect article would not have any EL at all. A FA is great, but there are things it doesn't cover, by virtue of being a[REDACTED] article and FA status, such as extended media related to the topic or "how to" learning materials. I would add to this desirable list of potential ELs something that is directed specifically at patients rather than readers of encyclopedias. Lesion (talk) 14:04, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Aside for the record: WP:EL is not a policy. I hope everyone participating in these discussions is aware of the distinctions. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:16, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

re layout, last time I checked (fairly recently), the 2 example templates I pasted here are supposed to go in an EL section... they are auto right aligned to allow them to sit comfortably around a bulleted EL list on the left. Lesion (talk) 14:06, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Please see WP:NOT, specifically WP:NOTHOW. (I am not aware of any FA off the top of my head that has no ELs, but most certainly minimization of useless Els DOES reflect current practice.) WP:LAYOUT says where to put ELs; WP:EL covers what to include. When sister links are included, they go in ELs. That doesn't mean they should always or necessarily be included on every article. To say that they are "supposed to go in an EL section" is a misunderstanding of our guidelines. Many of our "sister" (sexism alert) links contain info that is SO bad that they will automatically fail ELNO, and should be shot on sight. I'm reminded of the time Slp1 (talk · contribs) and I were dealing with a persistent POV pusher on the article stuttering. When he couldn't get POV and promotional, commercial, COI material into that article, he moved it over to a sister link, where it stood, and then tried to link it back to the Stuttering article with a "sister" link. "Sister" links are external links, and when their (typically horrible) information fails to meet our EL guideline, they should be shot on sight. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:22, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

That was rather my point,[REDACTED] is not a how to manual, which is partly why wikiversity was created, and why there is a template available to link there. I'm not suggesting that we should put these links automatically in every article ... like I said to take a long view ... eventually (and ideally imo) more articles would have learning materials available (and of higher quality) to link to. Anyway we are going off on a tangent. My point was that (1) it is not necessarily a goal to eliminate all ELs, they should be given a fair assessment for their quality and not deleted to get rid of the whole EL section, and (2) templates containing ELs already exist, and are intended where appropriate to go in the EL section, where I suggested emedicine links could be moved from the infobox, into a EL template with fields identical to those which would be removed from the infobox. Why not include some hidden text as part of this template which states directs to EL policy and states that not all these fields have to be filled. E.g. the corresponding article on emedicine has aspects which are inaccurate and a consensus develops to not include it. It is a valid suggestion, and I think would alleviate some of the issues people are raising about infoboxes. Lesion (talk) 17:10, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Because in practice, all that will do is move the infobox problem to a template. That "not all fields have to be filled" will be ignored by the intransigent, bot-happy, technical-minded editors who don't know, understand, or engage the content issues. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:20, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

I have not generally found this to be a problem at medicine-related articles. If you see a Medline link that you think is worthless, then you remove it and mention the reason on the talk page, and 90% of the time, that's the end of it. It may be more hassle at a heavily watched page or on a controversial subject, but in my experience, 90% of the time people don't care when an external link is removed with any plausible-sounding reason.

As for the ICD codes, some of our readers want those numbers. They don't want "the links" necessarily (although providing the link is the fastest and easiest way to make the numbers verifiable), but people do actually ask for those code numbers when they're not present. We need to keep them because they are content that our readers (not editors that you consider second-class) actually want. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:37, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

WhatamIdoing, we are discussing info boxes in the lead, not whether to abolish ICD codes altogether. We are in this mess because info boxes have become a dumping ground for data points and because they are in the lead. It wouldn't be nearly so much of an issue if info boxes sat at the bottom of the article, though the external links issue remains. Colin° 17:39, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

WhatAmI, that you have not "generally" found it to be a problem doesn't help the "specific" situation that I tried to delete inaccurate links from the infobox on TS and was overruled by consensus. I have tried again, now that there is more awareness, and am happy to see that there is now a different consensus evolving and a better understanding of the issues than before. Again, moving the same problem to a template elsewhere doesn't remove the problem: there is no reason to be linking, for example, to that extremely inferior medline TS article anywhere. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:58, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

While I agree a tiny number of readers find ICD codes useful, if we didn't have them and somebody suggested adding them, would anyone really think the lead was the place? It is the opposite of the right place for codes of interest to very few readers. Our WP:EL policy is quite clear that external sites must exceed "Featured Article" standards of comprehensiveness and reliability. If any of these sites in our infobox meet that (and many don't) then they deserve to be linked properly by name, not some obscure code no reader would guess to click on. I feel the DMOZ response is just to make someone go away and be a problem to somebody else. If you actually look at the site, you'd never think of sending a reader there. Colin° 14:45, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

DMOZ is crap; for that reason, it's exactly the kind of place to send the typical editor trying to use our ELs for advocacy :) :) I'm not strongly attached to any position wrt DMOZ or ICD codes; I am strongly against adding more useless templates of ELs or including by default anything in the infobox. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:17, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

This matter has been discussed at WT:MED previously. I am not convinced that ICD and other technical codes are of any value to a general encyclopedia, but Doc James insists that he finds them useful. These codes certainly don't need to be in/near the lead section. I would be happy to see them removed from articles, or as a compromise moved down to an "External links" section. Axl ¤ 21:34, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

I have added very few ICDs as most are already there. So others must find them useful to. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 00:09, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

People add the ICDs (and other codes and external links) because the infobox has parameters for them. No other reason needed. To assume that those adding them also "find them useful" is not valid. This is the main problem with info boxe templates from an editor-point-of-view: it encourages the unthinking accumulation of stuff. And the main problem from a reader-point-of-view is that it is in the lead and screws up the layout of the article when long. Colin° 07:35, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

No, people add the ICDs because actual people want those numbers. I'm not "assuming" that people find them useful; I'm telling you that I have read and responded to actual, direct requests from real people to please provide those numbers when they were not already present. I personally don't need those numbers, and you apparently don't need those numbers, but some of our readers need them enough to figure out how to ask for them. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:06, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

I made a comment further up but it seem to have got lost. WP:EL does not permit mediocre external links as long as the article is crap too. All external links on all articles have to meet or exceed the quality we'd expect of a featured article on the topic. And the links we do add are hidden in a code like ""neuro/386 derm/438 ped/2796 radio/723"". Absolutely nobody is going to click on those links. Especially not after they clicked on the ICD ones above and got negative information. So really it is time to get the broom and sweep them away and move the category codes out of the lead. Colin° 07:35, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Here is your reply:

• Emedicine is not generally considered to be a mediocre link.
• The label on a link is not what determines the quality of the link. If this bothers you, it can be changed in the template.
• To understand how the community actually interprets ELNO #1, you will have to read the archives for the guideline. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:06, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

1. So what. Doesn't change the fact that it should only be added if it is a fantastic link, and infoboxes encourage brainless addition of all links possible. 2. No it can't because a proper link would take up more room than the info box can give. 3. I don't believe you wrote that. That's quite an unacceptable situation for such a clearly worded and unambiguous guideline point. I found an archive comment of yours where you claim IAR is invoked on crappy articles. So I suspect this is a wee bit more like WhatamIdoing's opinion than community opinion, as otherwise it might be written into the guideline. I do accept, however, that you have vastly more experience than me. I think that it is more like CBA than IAR than makes people not remove such links.

What I find incredibly frustrating is this project has spent thousands of words arguing for the presence of utter nonsense like "ICD-10 K13.0 ICD-9 528.5, 686.8 MeSH D002613" in the prime position on our medical articles. Of the thousands of people who read our articles every day, what percentage do we think find value in these hieroglyphics or follow the links? I'm willing to bet that to two decimal places it rounds to 0. Until wikiprojects get real with the nerdy data only they love and start focusing on readers needs, infoboxes will continue to be a problem. Colin° 19:37, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Colin, I'm going to suggest that you click here for the list of the most common contributors to that guideline. This will do the same for its talk page. This will do the same for ELN. After you've looked at those, then perhaps we'll continue this conversation about the usual way that ELNO #1 gets applied. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:33, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

If in order to understand a law one has to read the committee minutes of the lawyers who drafted it, then it is a badly drafted law. And if you think that hanging about the talk pages of our policy and guidelines gives you an accurate impression of Misplaced Pages and its community, then you are mistaken. I've seen before where you comment that you or I have mostly written some guideline or other as if that settles the argument. It is an argument from authority. If you want people to understand what the community has decided about EL policy, make sure the EL text is accurately worded to reflect that community decision. The EL aspect of this isn't really the most interesting one to me. Emedicine could be all brilliant prose and it wouldn't change my point. Infoboxes cause unthinking external links and codes to be added in the prime position of the article. And those links are done in a way that absolutely guarantees that nobody will even think to click on them. And if they did click on the, the first few are two obscure categorisation pages that for nearly all our readers was a waste of their time. Let's have people read our articles, not send them off somewhere else as the very first thing we do. Colin° 11:11, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

I have been unable to get a consensus to make changes in the past. The too-strongly worded line is very convenient for experienced editors when they encounter a newbie. EL does not exist primarily to tell regular editors what to do. EL exists primarily as a weapon against spammers and fanboys.

But now let us discuss this particular website: Emedicine articles almost always comply with the strict letter of this poorly phrased "law". Desirable links provide "a unique resource beyond what the article would contain if it became a featured article". An FA should not contain a detailed explication of differential diagnosis. An FA should not contain information about doses of drugs. Emedicine articles almost always contain both of these things. Therefore, Emedicine articles meet ELNO by providing "a unique resource beyond what the article would contain if it became a featured article". WhatamIdoing (talk) 14:41, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

Wrt WP:EL reason to exist, this is an unhelpful opinion but explains your responses above. Let's move on. You make a good case for emedicine appearing as an external link with a good-quality hyperlink text at the end of our articles in the appropriate section (though it is a US-focused website aimed at healthcare professionals, so not without its problems). It doesn't make the case for it being the prime position in the lead of the article or for us to hide this "unique resource" behind the cryptic "neuro/415" link. Perhaps that's a code like ICD. Oh, wait, I'm not a healthcare professional so I don't know what ICD is either. We've just got a box full of random numbers and letters. Let's click on eight of them. One of them probably meets WP:EL much of the time. Medline Plus might make a great link for the Simple English Misplaced Pages but not here and is also US-focussed. The others are websites providing very little information at all and only really of interest to healthcare professionals. And if we haven't categorised the disease in the opening sentence or two, then we've failed. Colin° 19:59, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

Is your definition of "prime position" something like "thing I automatically ignore"? I don't usually read infoboxes, beyond glancing at the picture (if any) and its caption, unless I'm specifically looking for some detail that is well-suited for display in that format. If I am searching for that kind of detail, then I don't really want to go digging through the whole article for it. I don't believe that I'm unusual among editors in this regard. Do you find yourself reading infoboxes?

Perhaps rather than telling us what you don't want in the infobox, why don't you tell us what you do want to see in that "prime position"? WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:32, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Infoboxes - any consensus for changes?

So, as I see it there are few Qs that ppl are raising here. Would be good to move towards a clear consensus on each issue:

1. Should ICD links be kept?
2. Should ICD links stay in the infobox if they are kept? (if no please state where)
3. Should MeSH links be kept?
4. Should MeSH links stay in the infobox if they are kept? (if no please state where)
5. Does EL policy apply to the EL in the infobox?
6. Should the ELs stay in the infobox? (if no please state where)
7. Should anything else be added to the infobox?

My opinions on these issues are:

1. Yes - seems most people here want to keep ICD links
2. Yes - for want of anywhere better to put them
3. Yes - I think some people find them useful, and it is encyclopedic to incude them, same as for ICD codes
4. Yes - for want of anywhere better to put them
5. Yes - If an EL fails the EL policy (by consensus), it should not be included, i.e. they do not necessarily need to be populated just because there is a space for them.
6. No - I say move them to the EL section
7. Potentially Probably not - but only if EL get removed and there would be more space. I do not support a brief summary of the disease, per James' comment it is not so easy to summarize the etiology of a disease into a few words. Would also require a massive effort, first to alter the infobox disease template with new fields ad second to update infoboxes for every page. I don't see a bot being able to do this so it would be by hand. A simple surgical sieve term has less effort involved, but would still require a lot of work. I ask myself is it worth it? Would anyone be willing to do this? Agree that editors' time would be better spent improving content. Lesion (talk) 18:28, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

• Think this (7.) would be a huge blunder. It would inevitably lead to a host of issues (cf WP:CLASSICAL etc). As Lesion says etiology, pathogenesis etc are often unclear, brief descriptions simplistic etc, etc. Whatever their failings, an advantage of the current infoboxes is their standardization (and "opt-in" entries). 86.161.251.139 (talk) 19:02, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

True, the advantage of keeping the infoboxes as they are is that we don't have to do anything. It's a very valid reason imo. Lesion (talk) 11:11, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Mine:

1. Don't care.
2. Don't care.
3. No MeSH in the infobox: again, in the case of TS, the link has contained inaccurate info for as long as I have been on Misplaced Pages.
4. In the case of TS, it belongs nowhere-- it is unhelpful and inaccurate.
5. EL is not a policy, it is a guideline, and it applies everywhere, so yes.
6. No, but if some/any links are kept as possible parameters, editor discretion, discussion and consensus should apply to which ELs are in the infobox-- nothing should be automatic, nothing should be added via automated tools. A given link/brand may be accurate for one condition and not another. Further, the question is formed incompletely: inaccurate links shouldn't be added anywhere (neither the infobox nor the EL section-- the process of consensus applies everywhere).
7. No.

SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:38, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Keep the ICD/MESH codes and their links but in a new template box ("Disease categories" or something like that). This can go in the External links section. Remove all other external links from info box as they encourage mindless addition rather than thoughtful policy-based inclusion of relevant links. There never was any key data of lead-importance in the info box disease so it can just be deleted and replaced with a captioned image. This change could be done by a bot initially -- the category code stuff is just moving things around. The other external links would really benefit from being replaced by meaningful names rather the code. This could be simply the name of the external web site and the article title but would probably be better done by scraping the web page title -- something that would need a fairly intelligent bot. I agree there is no point in editors doing this mass change by hand. We could, though, deprecate Infobox disease and create the new one, as a step in the right direction. Colin° 20:29, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

I like the idea of a classifications" template box. MeSH is useful for PubMed searches (not for the definitions themselves, per Sandy's TS objection above). The key info is imo: 1) the actual heading (and entry terms), and 2) how it fits into the tree. Query: Why not blue-link the MeSH heading itself rather than the ID/tree number? I could also see an argument for linking to the NCBI browser with the PubMed search builder rather than the browser we use now (though I'm not you can do that with an ID). 86.161.251.139 (talk) 22:18, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

I don't recall seeing Sandy complain about MeSH. Just to make sure we're all on the same page, this is MedlinePlus and this is MeSH. Sandy's TS complaints appear to focus on the MedlinePlus patient-oriented page, not on the MeSH category tree for PubMed search terms. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:18, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Sorry if that wasn't clear. Sandy mentioned MeSH here: . I agree that the MeSH descriptions/definitions are often imprecise, but the whole point of MeSH is that it's a controlled vocabulary (of descriptors) for use in PubMed searches etc. Linking to Entrez rather than the MeSH browser would seem to make sense to me, but I don't know if that would be technically feasible. 86.161.251.139 (talk) 15:46, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

yes, I did mention Mesh ... sorry, I'm having a hard time keeping up here ... busy IRL. The MeSH article on TS still includes the "significant distress or impairment" qualifier from DSM-IV (cited to a 1994 source), which was removed long ago in DSM-IV-TR. That inaccuracy forced me to have to add text to the Diagnosis section with the corrected information, that otherwise would not have been necessary (or would have been better placed in History of Tourette syndrome, which Colin and I are going to write someday when we have a free moment). For gosh sakes, how many years does it take for MeSH to update info? PS, I do now have DSM-V and will be updating the entire suite of motor disorders (an article we don't even have yet!) hopefully within the month.) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:27, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

That's one reason why, imo, they'd be better located outside the infobox, in an alternative "template box", per Colin's suggestion . 86.161.251.139 (talk) 16:32, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Mine:

• Should ICD links be kept?
• Should ICD links stay in the infobox if they are kept?

Personally don't mind if they are kept or not, probably some readers will find them useful; so I would say keep them but at the end of the article.

• Should MeSH links be kept?
• Should MeSH links stay in the infobox if they are kept?

Same as for ICD's

• Does EL policy apply to the EL in the infobox?

Yes; medlineplus and diseasesdb should probably be removed altogether; whereas emedicine, omim and genereviews potentially include details beyond what would be provided by a[REDACTED] article.

• Should the ELs stay in the infobox?

No, should go in the external links section

• Should anything else be added to the infobox?

I would find it useful to include basic facts (prevalence or incidence; treatment: surgical/medical; main symptoms, etc.) Would need a lot of thought to get this right, and might be something we could achieve using wikidata in the long run.

--WS (talk) 10:58, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

How would you do this? Put the ICD code in plain text in the infobox, and then repeat the same information, but this time with the link, under ==External links==? That sounds to me like the worst possible solution. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:18, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

No, delete them from the infobox, sorry if that was unclear.--WS (talk) 16:00, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

1. Should ICD links be kept? Yes
2. Should ICD links stay in the infobox if they are kept? Yes
3. Should MeSH links be kept? Don't care
4. Should MeSH links stay in the infobox if they are kept? Yes
5. Does EL policy apply to the EL in the infobox? Yes—see WP:ELPOINTS #2
6. Should the ELs stay in the infobox? Yes—see WP:ELPOINTS #2
7. Should anything else be added to the infobox? Yes—the medical specialty (or specialties) most closely connected to the disease. This has been discussed previously but no one got around to implementing it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:11, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

I am of the same opinion as WAID generally. Am happy to keep MeSH but we could also remove it and use it as a ref to support the names of the condition in question. The reason why the medical specially has not been added yet is we do not have a good source and many pertain to a number of specialties. There however is usually one or two main specialties though. This change is also probably fairly low on the priority list. I could see including the "prevalence" as there is good data from WHO for more than a 1000 conditions but not the others mentioned by WS. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 15:49, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Could I get you physicians to think outside of the disease model? Pleeeeeeese ... try to imagine the edit wars that will break out if you try to add something like prevalence to an article like autism. This Is A Very Bad Idea ... and encapsulates everything that is already wrong with infoboxes that has ended up at Misplaced Pages:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Infoboxes. You cannot summarize nuanced or controversial issues in an infobox! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:55, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Agree it would be disastrous to put controvertible (or simplistic) information in the infobox. @James: I think we need to remember that MeSH is an indexing system that is relevant for bibliographic searches. 86.161.251.139 (talk) 16:19, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Re. previous consensus to include the medical specialty in the infobox-- I think I remember this, but not sure... The fact that no-one has done anything is compelling-- it might just be too difficult. Any constructive addition to the infobox would need to be very carefully thought out and have willing volunteers to do the work. Adding the specialty-- how useful is this? Firstly many diseases are multidisciplinary (e.g. diabetes), so was this decision to put only the main specialty involved (potential for arguments?) and secondly, the talk page is already tagged with the wikiproject e.g. neurology/dermatology etc. I know this is not quite the same thing as putting the specialty in the infobox, but I think we should be weighing the potential benefits against the amount of work involved, when editors might better spend their efforts building content... Lesion (talk) 16:52, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Hooray (for the final sentiment expressed :) :) By the way, because of time constraints, I unwatched Marfan syndrome over a year ago. In trying to figgerout who's who in here among editors I've not met before, I see you've been holding down the fort over at Marfan. Thanks for work in the trenches !!! (For years, we dealt with the unsourced addition of Michael Phelps there.) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:05, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

I think that a prevalence item would be useful for identifying rare diseases, but otherwise it doesn't seem important to me. The answer needn't be numbers; you could say |prevalence=Rare disease or |prevalence=common (e.g., common cold) or even |prevalence=Most common form of cancer (e.g., non-melanoma skin cancer). You can summarize complicated things in infoboxes: IMO the only sensible entry at Autism (where I personally would leave it blank) would be |prevalence=Disputed.

Lesion, the only reason nobody's added the parameter is because most of us aren't admins and don't know how to program templates. For most diseases, it's not at all difficult to identify the primary specialty: infectious diseases, cancers, heart diseases, lung diseases, kidney diseases... There are actually very few where the disease truly requires a multidisciplinary approach involving more than two specialties. A patient with diabetes might see many healthcare providers, but fundamentally that disease "belongs to" the endocrinologists. The problem isn't figuring out the specialty for most diseases; the slowdown that Doc James mentioned is figuring out a source that could be processed systematically for thousands of articles at once, rather than individual editors adding the information to one or two articles whenever they wanted to. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:48, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

I object in the strongest possible terms to any of these suggested additions to the infobox (prevalence, specialties, etc). They are nothing but an invitation for trouble, of the same type that led to the current arb case. I can just imagine when, for example, someone tries to add chiropractic as a treating specialty. Or acupuncturists. Or what would we do about psychologists being added to every disease imaginable, since they fancy that talk therapy works for anything? We can't assume that infobox parameters are or will be handled reasonably by reasonable people and based on reliable sources: they aren't. That is exactly why we now have an arb case. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:05, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

It sounds like you're beyond the ability to AGF where infoboxes are concerned. WhatamIdoing (talk) 14:44, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm not reading that at all, WhatamIdoing, but rather the voice of experience. Even the simple rare/common attempt at categorising prevalence fails when one considers that this is the International English Misplaced Pages, not the US Misplaced Pages. So how does someone deal with a disease that is very common in much of the world but extremely rare for many of our readers: by writing prose. "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong". These boxes work for the atomic weight of elements, but the attributes of diseases and treatments are often more complex than that. Colin° 15:54, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

Really agree with that (prevalence figures, by definition, depend on the population within which they're estimated). 86.161.251.139 (talk) 16:29, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

I agree that complicated things are complicated.

Sandy says "We can't assume that infobox parameters are or will be handled reasonably by reasonable people". That's the opposite of AGF. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:35, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

They may be "handled unreasonably by reasonable people". In the distant past, I've added fields to infoboxes templates because they are there. That was stupid and unthinking of me. And to deny the existence of unreasonable people, or the particular attraction of infoboxes for such people, is simply to deny reality. It is claimed above "WP:EL exists primarily as a weapon against spammers and fanboys" - it seems many of our guidelines are concerned with unreasonable people. Are all the people who contribute to that guideline also "beyond the ability to AGF"? Of course not. So let's just be practical about this. I'd be interested to know which "medical specialty" tuberous sclerosis fits into, or how having yet another field of interest only to physicians is improving our infobox. -- Colin° 11:07, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Infobox parameters that are open to debate tend to be honey-traps for controversial gf edits, polarized discussions and, regrettably, edit-warring. A drain on our human resources... 86.161.251.139 (talk) 09:14, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Saying it twice doesn't make it any more factual. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 10:36, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Colin, the answer to your question about Tuberous sclerosis is in the ICD code: Phakomatoses are central nervous system disorders that have dermatological components. Therefore the primary specialist to follow a patient with TS will be a neurologist, and if you wanted to be more complete, you could add a dermatologist. Whether one needs, for example, a nephrologist depends on the individual case. You could, alternatively, say that it is a multidisciplinary disease, on the grounds that multiple body systems could be involved.

I do not understand why you say that this information is only of interest to physicians. In my mind, the primary purpose of this field is to answer the very much patient-oriented question, "What kind of doctor should I see, if I want to consult a specialist for this condition?" WhatamIdoing (talk) 14:58, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

I am not comfortable with the idea that we are here to guide patients to physicians. Misplaced Pages is an encyclopedia, and not a whole lot of other things. Per our terms, "the content we host is for general informational purposes only, so if you need expert advice for a particular question (such as medical, legal, or financial issues), you should seek the help of a licensed or qualified professional." Telling patients who to consult isn't our role. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:27, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

The ICD code is no help whatsoever. The term "phakomatoses" is from the 1920s and pre-dates both genetics and our understanding that TSC is a multi-organ disorder of extremely varied penetrance and severity. That this outdated term is is used in ICD10 says more about those inventing hierarchical categorisation systems than it does about the disease (they need to find a name for the node on the arbitrary tree they have created). I don't know how healthcare works in the US, but in the UK one can't simply turn up at a consultant's door saying "Misplaced Pages says you are the specialist I need". What kind of doctor should I see: a GP. It is a gross oversimplification to put TSC in any speciality. The first specialist the parents of an unborn child might see is pre-natal cardiology. And the first speciality a thirty-year-old female with previously undiagnosed TSC might encounter is pulmonology (if that's the right word). The question really is why are we trying to over-simplify something that is complex. The answer is to find something brief enough to fit in a little white box up the top-right of our article. That's not a good answer. Colin° 15:59, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Agreed most people go through gatekeepers in primary care before they see a specialist, and this weakens the argument that the specialty is useful info. Still potentially encyclopedic though... What about a surgical sieve term, does no-one like this idea? Similar implementation problems with any constructive change to infoboxes... arguments about how to classify things (already starting here?) ... need to change the template ... need to program a bot to help fill out the new template fields.

Having said this, I like idea of a classification template with ICD and MeSH, this would take these "codes" out of the top of the article when most people will not be interested in them. Also support moving EL out of infobox to EL section, potentially in a template or just an old fashioned bullet list. So far the only thing everyone has agreed upon is that EL policy extends to EL in the infobox, and since this was already part of policy, there is nothing to change based upon that individual consensus. Lesion (talk) 16:33, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

I agree that we can't have it both ways: either it's useful for non-physicians or it's not. If I had a family member with an odd disease, I'd probably want to learn more about it and I would probably want to know whether or not the GP was doing reasonable things. A Misplaced Pages article is a lousy way to make a medical decision, but it's a great way to learn basic information about a disease, like whether or not TS is basically considered a neurological disease. Learning that might help me understand why what looks to me like a skin disease resulted in a referral to a neurologist rather than a dermatologist, for example. This is basic information, not medical advice. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:13, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

There is also a proposal at wikidata to add a medical discipline property: Wikidata:wikidata:Property_proposal/Term#medical_discipline. Would be good to coordinate between the two, so the data could be reused in the infoboxes. --WS (talk) 15:17, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

@Wouterstomp:, that link goes nowhere? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:46, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, fixed now; needed a second wikidata:. --WS (talk) 15:54, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

I forgot to ask at the beginning of this thread: is there any reason we are keeping ICD-9 codes? Lesion (talk) 13:57, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

ICD-9 codes are still used for some purposes (see ). 86.161.251.139 (talk) 15:57, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Splitting it up

Here's a quick mockup of what we'd get if we split the box into two. The second box would presumably go under ==Classification==, a section that is (1) about how the disease is subdivided (e.g., subtypes of leukemia in the article Leukemia), not about how the disease relates to other diseases, (2) normally the first section, and thus immediately underneath the existing infobox, and (3) not present in a majority of disease-related articles. Given that there's no place to put it in most articles and it takes up more screen real estate, I'm not very excited about this option, but I can't say that I really care much one way or the other. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:20, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

the suggestion was to put a potential separate classification template "at the bottom of the page" (EL section?) rather than in the classification section. Assume the same objections to these codes being in a prominent position will still be raised against it being in the classification section. Moving the ELs out of the infobox would leave just an image and a caption, arguably no need for an infobox at all. Getting rid of the infoboxes entirely I do not think reflects consensus, meaning that we need to keep at least some content. Unless there are constructive additions (potentially things like specialty involved, surgical sieve term) then both EL and ICD/MeSH codes surely can't be removed? Lesion (talk) 10:36, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes I think these classification codes should go at the bottom along with some of our other grouping templates and Commons links and the like. The argument for that (beyond the fact they are just random letters to most people and so don't belong up top) is that we put wiki categories there too. So one may hopefully see some correspondence between the two. Potentially, given the room there, one could consider spelling out the category hierarchy words rather than just showing the terse code. Then at least it would provide some information, even if I feel these categories are rather arbitrary bureaucratic constructs. And yes the thing in the top-right of the article would just be a thumbnail image with caption rather than a collection of external links hidden behind truly random letters and numbers. Hallelujah. Remember that Misplaced Pages:Manual of Style/Infoboxes says "The use of infoboxes is neither required nor prohibited for any article. Whether to include an infobox, which infobox to include, and which parts of the infobox to use, is determined through discussion and consensus among the editors at each individual article." The info box on the mock-up above contains no information (except the image and caption, which don't require an infobox). See Misplaced Pages:Disinfoboxes. -- Colin° 11:01, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Respectfully, that's just an essay. I don't think there is any consensus to remove infoboxes entirely from medical pages. I potentially support removing ICD/MeSH and/or other EL out of the infobox. If I had to choose to move out ICD/MeSH or the ELs, I would leave the ICD and the MeSH codes, I think they are more encyclopedic. Lesion (talk) 11:19, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Agree that MeSH/ICD links would be better placed at the foot of the page. Regarding Colin's point about spelling them out, I feel that could be good for MeSH, where the heading itself provides a PubMed entry term. By contrast, it seems both impractical and undesirable for the multiple ICD codes (see, for example, Cancer). 86.161.251.139 (talk) 11:56, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

IMO Wikiprojects are probably the last sort of people who should have final say about what goes in an infobox or whether an article needs one at all. Our guideline on the subject makes no mention of projects, just editors on articles. By definition, the members of a wikiproject form a special-interest group that makes it hard for them to appreciate how irrelevant their special interests are to 99% of the actual readers. The railway project think that entry/exit figures for the last five years, to five significant figures, with deltas to four significant figures, is of key vital infobox importance. But they probably look at our box and say that at least theirs has some information in it. I agree that this project doesn't seem keen to make any changes. -- Colin° 12:39, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

I am happy with simply leaving them as they are. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 15:29, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Proposed template at bottom

For what it is worth, here's a crude mock up of the bottom of Tuberous sclerosis. It includes the already present navigation templates and categories. Note how it fits nicely here :-) I've shown all external links for comparison with above, without judgement as to whether they are suitable.

External links

• Medscape Reference
  • Tuberous Sclerosis
  • Genetics of Tuberous Sclerosis
  • Dermatologic Manifestations of Tuberous Sclerosis
  • Tuberous Sclerosis Imaging
• MedlinePlus: Tuberous sclerosis
• OMIM: #191100 TUBEROUS SCLEROSIS 1; TSC1 and #613254 TUBEROUS SCLEROSIS 2; TSC2
• Diseases Database: Tuberous sclerosis information

Categories: Genes on chromosome 9   Genes on chromosome 16   Autosomal dominant disorders   Genodermatoses   Rare diseases

Colin° 12:39, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

It does look nice, but how much work would be involved per page? Can a bot do all these tasks unaided? Remember how many pages there are. What has been done is expanding the ICD tree, but apart from this it is moving content around that we already had ... ignoring for a moment whether this is desirable to move or not, I am thinking of effort vs benefits here Lesion (talk) 13:16, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes, using a bot would be the only viable way of doing this and this should be no problem to do this way. --WS (talk) 15:13, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Colin, it looks good, but bear with me as I'm thinking aloud. Most folks (hopefully) know that Misplaced Pages is 99% garbage, and some use it only for a reference site to locate other sources. Even I do that for searching medical info, unless I can see an article is FA-- I go straight to the bottom to look for sources. I'm wondering if this will just encourage those who go straight to the bottom to explore the faulty MeSH, Medline etc articles which, in the case of TS at least, are inaccurate. In the case of TS, most of those links do not belong in the article, period. Do we have consensus at least here that we don't *have* to use anything, regardless of where we put it? Because my efforts to remove bad links in the past have been overruled here. I'm afraid your proposed template will give them even a more "official" air of accuracy. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:10, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

So far everyone agrees that EL policy applies to the EL currently in the infobox (correct me if I am wrong...has been a long discussion and I have been in and out of it). I think on a case by case basis, according to consensus, any given EL is included or not included, and this decision should be based on EL policy rather than simply blindly wanting to fill out the fields in the infobox. Whether EL policy applies to ICD / MeSH links is another matter ... you could argue that they are EL links they are actually links, but as someone said somewhere above, this link is the easiest way to verify the code is correct. I would want to include them routinely regardless of their potential problems in any single case, otherwise not include on any page. I think ICD/MeSH should stay in all cases, they are encyclopedic ... but I am open to the idea of their location being moved, I just question the benefits for the amount of work involved. Lesion (talk) 13:26, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

And that is the same logic (re MeSH) that has forced me to keep inaccurate info in the TS article for as long as I've been on Wiki, although MeSH can't be bothered to fix info that is about 15 years wrong. Then if we are forced to keep it, let's add it some hidden code or text somewhere, so our readers don't have to read inaccuracies. One must not have significant distress or impairment to be diagnosed with TS, and many people with TS have no impairment and are not bothered by their tics-- this was addressed over a decade ago, but MeSH is still wrong. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:31, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

What Wikiprojects decide is not gospel (even when they think it is) and of no greater weight than per-article editor consensus. The guideline on infoboxes (and I'd include any such box regardless of location) makes it clear this is for each article to decide on a field-by-field basis. So if the consensus is that TS MESH category is not just unhelpful but wrong or misleading, I think you have a case for excluding it. Possibly best done by commenting out the wikitext so that any good-faith wikignome that comes along to add it gets the message. I wouldn't call the ICD/MESH links "external links". They are codes/categories with in-place hyperlink references which I think we all invoke IAR to combine. There is an argument we should accept those categories even if we disagree with them. There's a limit to how much of this imperfect world we are allowed to fix on Misplaced Pages :-) Colin° 13:49, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

This is MeSH ... something to do with how PubMed searches for synonyms of the keywords you enter in a search ...someone explained this diffrence somewhere above, I'm not the best person to ask, didn't know what MeSH was before this conversation, just about was aware of ICD before I came to[REDACTED] ... but these are things that an encyclopedia should concern itself with. Do you mean Medlineplus when you are talking about inaccurate info? (e.g. ). MeSH is just a list of terms, I don't see how it can be drastically wrong... whereas a Medline plus is a patient advice type enclopedia, with v few references. I can see how MedlinPlus could contain questionable and undesirable info as an EL, but I don't really consider MeSH to be an EL, it's more part of the classification. Lesion (talk) 13:54, 23 July 2013 (UTC) Just saw above where you specifically criticized this example of a MeSH link. Lesion (talk) 13:59, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

MeSH and ICD are really quite different. From a practical standpoint, the controlled vocabulary of the Medical Subject Headings indexing system is a useful tool for PubMed searches , and are especially convenient when making specific ("efficient") searches on particular topics. While the alpha-numeric codes are only of organizational significance, the MeSH headings themselves (and the synonymous PubMed entry terms) really are useful. On the other hand, the alpha-numeric ICD codes actually are of some relevance both to patients and professional (epidemiologists etc). That's one reason why I feel it's a good idea to link to MeSH entries via the heading and to ICD via the codes
For example (formatting apart):

• MeSH term: Cancer
• ICD-10: C00—C97

(Also, you'd scarcely want to have a template for tabulating 98 ICD-10 codes plus another similar bunch of ICD-9...) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.161.251.139 (talk) 15:40, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

86.161.251.139 (talk) 15:35, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Looks good, would support using this template. --WS (talk) 15:29, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

If we leave the content in the infobox than the template is not needed. It is not like our infoboxes are overly long thus I see no need. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 15:37, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

The terseness of our info box is the problem, as well as the issue of external links already covered. Our infobox is unhelpful for nearly all our readers. Proper external links, each justified per WP:EL, is much more useful and belongs at the end. And a bigger wider box gives us a chance to make the categorisation codes provide some information rather than meaningless codes. Colin° 10:17, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Even if MeSH remains in the infobox, per James, I feel the meaningless MeSH codes might readily be substituted by a bot so as to link to the actual heading - eg Leukemia, hairy cell. As I've argued elsewhere, I also feel it might be more helpful to link to Entrez (eg Leukemia, hairy cell) rather than the MeSH browser we currently use. That's because Entrez pages for MeSH terms incorporate the PubMed search builder tool , letting you use the term directly in ways that the MeSH browser doesn't. 86.161.251.139 (talk) 16:29, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

I would much rather see all the Emedicine stuff on a single line. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:02, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Once removed from the constraints of the infobox, with its meaningless terse code, people can format the external link how they like. Colin° 10:17, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Infoboxes: Moving data to Wikidata

Independent of the outcome of this discussion I think it is important that the data is copied to Wikidata first. The various codes ensure that the interwiki-links are set right, that duplicate articles can be flagged, that duplicate codes can be flagged, etc. In addition we are starting this: links between genes/proteins, diseases, and drugs. So please give us just one or two more months to acquire the data. So everyone can check on the progress I made this table which I promise to update once a week: d:Wikidata:Medicine_task_force#Data_aquisition_progress. --Tobias1984 (talk) 08:27, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

There is no clear consensus to change anything at this point. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 09:56, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes, strongly support this. In the long run, I would imagine wikidata to provide a much better interface for accessing these data, e.g. as a tab on a[REDACTED] article or something similar and preference settings for if you want to see infoboxes at all or not. In the short run, it also makes it easier to move any parameters outside of the infobox, you could set up a template such that if you add it, it automatically takes the value from wikidata (e.g. you could add {{ICD_box}} to the end of the article without having to specify the codes there). --WS (talk) 11:08, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Alzheimer research article

I happened to see Misplaced Pages:Articles for creation/Alzheimer's Disease and Prions - can someone save it? - it has been there since 2012. XOttawahitech (talk) 14:48, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Should probably be deleted. There are statements like "Prions have been discovered to be extremely deadly, resulting in diseases such as Parkinson's Disease and Huntington's Disease." supported by a primary research mouse model and a paper on yeart . Last time I checked yeast neither get Parksison's nor Huntingtons. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 03:20, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for responding Doc James. Could you please clarify your comments – are you saying that:

• The article is poorly written and does not describe the research accurately?

or that:

• The research itself is flawed?

The reason I brought this up here is that as it stands this is the only Alzheimer research-related article I can find on wikipedia. See Category:Medical research. Thanks for any feedback. XOttawahitech (talk) 15:11, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

The first. What about Alzheimer's_disease#Research_directions and Alzheimer's_disease_clinical_research? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 16:05, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks Doc James, I have added both of your suggestions to Category:Medical research. As far as Misplaced Pages:Articles for creation/Alzheimer's Disease and Prions is concerned, since you say it is poorly written why should it be deleted instead of improved? XOttawahitech (talk) 15:17, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

Would be easier to start from scratch IMO. Could probably be summarized in a couple of sentences. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 15:31, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

Sorry to say I'd have to second that. 86.161.251.139 (talk) 16:34, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

The AFC should be abandoned, we have Alzheimer's disease clinical research (which may be a mess, but whatever), write the correct text there. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:31, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

That article was actually published in mainspace as a student project, then months later the user requested deletion. When I noticed that the article was deleted in mainspace I asked why to the admin and they replied here). Student #67 on the course page. Biosthmors (talk) 13:51, 23 July 2013 (UTC) And Biochemistry of Alzheimer's disease exists, FYI, Ottawahitech. Biosthmors (talk) 13:53, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Looking for data

I am trying to figure out two values:

1. How many edits occur to medical articles in X amount of time. We used to have this page but it no longer works. And we have this page but it seems to only list articles beginning with A
2. Second value I am trying to figure out is how many people are active in this project and has this value changed over time? We have this list here but it does not say how many have edited in the last 3 months (would love to have a bot to figure this out). We also have this catagory which lists 453 users but same issue we have no idea how many article (once again maybe a bot)... Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 12:12, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

On the second, that list is fairly useless (so is the category, since some editors don't clutter their userpages which such). I took my name off that list years ago, when I got too busy at FAC, and never re-added it. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:03, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes realize that it is not perfect. Neither is the number of edits to medical articles as one is not sure how much represents vandalism and the fixing of such. I am sure the numbers of editors is less than many image. This might be additional justification to be careful with the education program as there is not a free army of teachers aids to "mark" the students work. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 15:37, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Any where I'm involved, WP:EDITCOUNTITIS comes in to play, since it typically takes me four edits to make one post :) :) If your goal is to get a handle on how many active editors are doing most of the work on medical articles, I don't think any automated tool or list can give you that, but I agree that the number is far less than most people realize, most of us know who those editors are (you, for instance), we are not enough to keep up with basics, and certainly not enough to be taking up time with "pie in the sky" notions. That is my concern about the direction this talk page has taken. I got the new DSM about a week ago, and instead of updating an entire suite of articles as planned, I've spent a lot of time here on things that in the long-run are not going to make a dent in the 95% of articles on Misplaced Pages that are horrible and won't be fixed with icons and lists of sources and such. Sorry to be a pessimist, but I'd like to see more engagement of problematic issues "in the trenches" before discussions/decisions that take time away from the precious few resources we have in here. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:50, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

1. It is often possible to revive stuff that died on the Toolserver if you find a technically minded person. If you want accurate numbers, then you probably want to sort through the main medicine-related categories to find articles that haven't been properly tagged for WPMED first. A list can be generated automatically.
2. Active WPMEDers and active editors in medicine-related articles are not the same. Many editors work solo. If you want WPMED folks specifically, then I'd use the page histories for WPMED pages as a source of editors' names. Again, you probably want someone who can sit down with a database dump and process all of this automatically for you. If you don't have any friends who can do this, then asking for help at VPT or BOTREQ (a home for tech folks, although it wouldn't require a bot) might be your best option. You could also try the Meta pages about the Toolserver transition as another possible source of help. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:55, 20 July 2013 (UTC)
   1. We used to have a page that listed every new edit made to Wikiproject medicine. Does anyone know if it still exists or how to return it to life? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 15:03, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

You mean this?: --WS (talk) 10:34, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

Ataque de nervios

A real doozy, and a tribute to Misplaced Pages. Claimed to be in the DSM (really?), largely sourced to non-reliable sources, and so full of copyvio that it will take a major effort to clean up. Too bad we can't just shoot these kinds of articles on sight-- I don't have time to fix it. Found it by checking the contribs of the typical student edits I see on Latah, another doosie that takes more time than it's worth. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:37, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

Shouldn't culture-bound syndromes also be of interest to WP:ANTHRO? For example, Jumping Frenchmen of Maine, Dancing mania... 86.161.251.139 (talk) 10:22, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

Perhaps, but I'm not sure they'd be of much help. Can anyone who has a full copy of the DSM let me know if ataque de nervios is classified there as stated in the article? The source does not verify the text. That article needs to be massively cleaned out because of copyvio, etc. Same editors at Latah and others, breaking references, adding unsourced text, adding non-MEDRS sources, all have similar userpages, so I will take it to WP:ENB, since I don't have time to do anything else for now. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:37, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

I don't have the DSM-5 to hand, but it is listed in the DSM-IV as a dissassociative disorder NOS.Slp1 (talk) 13:51, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Dunno, but it was listed independently in Culture-bound_syndromes#DSM-IV_list_of_culture-bound_syndromes. 86.161.251.139 (talk) 13:53, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

OK, did my homework, filed at ENB, found the university involved, lots of articles impacted, don't have time to do any more today. Thanks Slp1 and 86 ... I may get around to cleaning up 'Ataque' if I have time ... copyvio an issue there. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:38, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

Well, that took all morning ... found the course syllabus, what next? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:48, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

Hmm... "Culture-bound syndromes rarely found in Western society are explored..."

I notice Medical anthropology has yet to receive a rating on the importance scale by WikiProject Anthropology. I'll notify the project of this thread at WT:ANTHRO. (Btw, here's a draft that hasn't seen the light of day of another culture-bound syndrome listed in DSM-IV: ... notable topic tho')
86.161.251.139 (talk) 15:05, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

Beyond irritated to know that a Misplaced Pages sysop is behind this. These very bad articles have been hitting my watchlist for several terms, and until yesterday, it didn't occur to me that student edits-- much less overseen by an admin-- were behind this. What a waste of my time. I get the most obscure, bizarre, and wondrous wiki experiences via articles that claim a relationship to Tourette's ... I hope someone else will deal with this, because this is just beyond frustrating. Doczilla gets free volunteer TAs, and I get a timesink on my watchlist. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:12, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

Seriously, no wonder so many of us give up in here. Doczilla SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:57, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes I have just trimmed more than 30,000 bits of text from sudden infant death syndrome. Before I got involved there did not appear to be a conspiracy theory that we had left out. Every blog got to weight in along with every 1960s primary source. Sigh. Pubmed and emedicine are often better than the garbage we have :-( Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 15:18, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

But was there an admin behind the poor editing in that case? This comes back to my concerns about "pie in the sky" addition of things like icons to articles. What we need is an army of editors to shoot poor text on sight, remove the tons of very bad info we have in every article-- we are so far from being in a place where an open access icon means anything. We have boatloads of garbage in here, and I doubt that a few of us will ever be able to address even 5% of it. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:29, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes excellent points. Havn't look that close to see if an admin was involved at SIDS but I do not think so. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 15:32, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

Problems with class editing Misplaced Pages

This content was formerly at the head of the section titled - "Ataque de nervios". Blue Rasberry (talk) 19:31, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

A professor and admin, user:Doczilla, hosted a class at a university in which students were encouraged to edit Misplaced Pages. Some months later, some Wikipedians asserted that the content which students added was low quality and copyright violations.

A complaint was made on the education noticeboard here - Misplaced Pages:Education_noticeboard#Attention_needed_on_several_articles_and_users. The class syllabus is here; this is unorthodox as participants in the program are encouraged to have an on-wiki syllabus.

It is my opinion that this professor did everything in good faith and as in so many other cases at even the best schools, some students seemed unable to practice report writing with competence. Misplaced Pages:Competence is required. Blue Rasberry (talk) 14:33, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Blue Rasberry, I am becoming uncomfortable with your refactoring of talk page edits here, and you taking on a role of providing something attempting to look like an "official" summary, while jumping the line. Please refrain from refactoring posts and jumping the line to add your summaries after the fact to what was a developing situation when the first post was written ... feel free to add your conclusions at the bottom of the section. The role you've taken on here is adding to a budding feeling that this WikiProject is increasingly part of an off-Wiki venture, with editors who are paid for their time valued above volunteers' contributions and concerns, and I don't think that's what you intend. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:55, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Also, you are adding links to talk pages that will disappear by the time the sections archive: permalink. Since you seem to be building records, may as well make them permanent. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:47, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

I moved my summary from the head to a subsection. I hope that this addresses that concern of yours. I am not intending to have a overriding voice, but rather want to make the conversations immediately accessible to people who do not know the backstory. I find that most discussions become inaccessible after they reach a certain length, especially when they co-exist on multiple boards or in multiple places, and when the nature of the problem is not known until after some research. I am moving this discussion so that it will not be "jumping the line". I will address some of your other concerns on your talk page and you can bring them back here in their own sections, if you like. Blue Rasberry (talk) 19:31, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

I have changed the section header (yet again) because Doczilla's classes do not appear to have been affiliated with the Misplaced Pages:Misplaced Pages Education Program. I think perhaps this form of curating talk page threads is best avoided. Choess (talk) 02:03, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Request for help from AfC

There is a draft article at AFC that needs a lot of help - Misplaced Pages talk:Articles for creation/Kowarski Syndrome. The subject appears to be legitimate but the article is quite far from acceptable. Basically the writer needs a mentor, preferably someone familiar with WP article standards, MEDMOS, and the subject or at least the subject area - genetic disorders. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 18:48, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

There are some secondary sources at google books. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 20:53, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

the submitter of the article, who is the eponymous researcher of this syndrome, has requested further assistance to get his article accepted at #en-wikipedia-help . I think the questions remaining to be answered are for me:

1. is the Bioinactive growth hormone syndrome sufficiently well known enough to justify an article?
2. if the syndrome is well known enough, is it most well known as 'kowarski syndrome' or bioinactive growth hormone or similar?

I have searched biomed central/highwire and similar but find only limited results and don't have the expertise in this field to know if appropriate, so I have advised the submitter it would be better for someone experienced in this area to make the call about accepting the article into mainspace - can anyone assist? Best regards --_nonsense ferret 14:52, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Pornography-induced erectile dysfunction

The Pornography-induced erectile dysfunction article was created the previous hour. The topic doesn't look as though it is notable enough for a stand-alone article, and rather looks like it should be regulated to the Erectile dysfunction article...with WP:MEDRS-compliant sources of course. Flyer22 (talk) 19:05, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

Merge to ED, if there's a decent source, otherwise send to AFD. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:10, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

Clearly, the term "erectile dysfunction does NOT imply "that these men have a problem in their penises". Robinson & Wilson fails MEDRS. Imo, AfD it. 86.161.251.139 (talk) 20:35, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

And I guess you'd be hard pushed to find recent MEDRS, at least on PubMed... See:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=%28erectile+dysfunction+OR+erectile+dysfunction+OR+impoten*%29+AND+%28erotica+OR+porn*%29+AND+%28review+OR+review%29
86.161.251.139 (talk) 21:30, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

Discussion at Talk:Pornography-induced_erectile_dysfunction#Delete_or_merge?. 86.161.251.139 (talk) 22:12, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

Discussion at Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Pornography-induced erectile dysfunction. --MelanieN (talk) 20:52, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Reverse triiodothyronine

In early June, a new editor created a very long, and I think well-written, article on the hormone reverse triiodothyronine in his sandbox. I was concerned that he might be writing it to promote a non-standard view of the importance of this thyroid hormone, relative to two others, and told him so. But I know no endocrinology. I hope that someone with knowledge of this field can have a look at it, and guide him as appropriate. Maproom (talk) 16:02, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

Wow, 336 references! Anyway, the editor has been working with two experienced Wikipedians, so I think he or she is getting plenty of good advice. Looie496 (talk) 16:12, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

I have invited the editor to move the work into article space. Axl ¤ 21:16, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

Ah, many / most of the refs are primary sources from the 1970s. It is not in a generally accessible style or wording. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 23:32, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

That many old primary sources, and the overcitation, and the inaccessible prose, are all suggestive of WP:SYNTH. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 10:46, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

My attitude is that the principle of avoiding primary sources should really only be applied to articles about large topics that are aimed at a general audience. I believe that articles on subtopics (for example, causes of Parkinson's disease), or articles about highly technical things, ought to be able to use primary sources as needed. In short, the more "in the weeds" the topic, the more freely it ought to be able to use primary sources. I'm not asserting that this article strikes the right balance (not having read it), but I do think there is a balance to be struck. Looie496 (talk) 15:01, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

I agree with Sandy that this article is poor. If the use of primary sources was the only issue maybe but this article requires huge amounts of clean up. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 14:53, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

You know you are going to enjoy reworking an article

when one of the ref names is just "Candida". Lesion (talk) 20:35, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

? AndyTheGrump (talk) 23:56, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

=D =D =D Lesion (talk) 10:22, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Allegheny County Medical Examiner

Hi all, this newly created article has been nominated for deletion, given that it serves a major metro area (Pittsburgh) and has had 2 recent very notable experts as ME I thought it should be created. Please share your thoughts here: Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Allegheny County Medical Examiner and constructive additions to the article are always welcomed. Thanks in advance! _{⧐ Diamond Way} 05:10, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Why all the caps in the name of the article? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 03:00, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Perhaps it's the job title. Proper names should be capitalized. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:47, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

Posttraumatic stress disorder

I was hoping an editor or two familiar with WP:MEDRS would be able to give an opinion on whether sources for the inclusion of material requiring service dogs as treatment are appropriate. Talk page has some details. Thanks. Yobol (talk) 19:23, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. Unfortunately, one of the two references has nothing to do with the topic, and the other, while a review, on the particular topic in question only found a cross-sectional study of 9 people that cannot prove anything. I'll address it on the talk page. Hildabast (talk) 01:52, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

User:32cllou

User is attempting to replace the conclusions of a 2011 review with one from 2006 as per here with a review from 2006. Thoughts? As it is an active area of research I consider the 2011 review more uptodate. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 01:24, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

I had not been able to find supporting text/information promoting fish (Jmh649's cited reduction of cancer risk due to fish consumption) from Jmh649's reference. He has now provided that supporting text.

There is no scientific doubt that eating fish also means consuming many chemicals and metals known to promote cancer, as noted in the "~old" 2006 Am. Cancer Society Guidelines (which are regularly updated IF there's new info).

As for new data, note that consumption of fish and mussels recently also yields significant human exposure to radiation ]], which is known to initiate and promote cancer.32cllou (talk) 05:12, 24 July 2013 (UTC)32cllou (talk) 05:22, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

PS, my concern was prompted by the reports showing the radiation plume from Japan has grown and strengthened tremendously since the nuclear meltdowns. Fish bioaccumulate, of particular risk importance, polonium-210.32cllou (talk) 05:31, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

Proposed addition to MEDRS

I proposed an addition to MEDRS on how to determine a journal is probably not reliable . Comments welcome. Yobol (talk) 12:09, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

This is based on an assumption that non-MEDLINE-indexed journals that meet PubMed's criteria are of lower quality, and that's not the case. Because of a variety of constraints, it can take years to get into MEDLINE, and the constraints aren't necessarily about quality. They're not rejects: it's just one of the alternate routes into PubMed. Same for PubMed Health - the systematic reviews that come in as full text through our system are not poorer quality, they're just not necessarily published in journals (such as NICE reviews). I do know that a lot of people have an interest in perpetuating negative assessments of open access publishing, but that doesn't make their claims justified. There are many journals that are MEDLINE-indexed that would come lower down on measures of quality than some PMC journals, and vice versa. But a journal that falls really below the line would not ordinarily get through either system. "Predatory" ones don't get into either. This has much in common with commercial encyclopedia publishers finding reasons to badmouth WP. Hildabast (talk) 15:40, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

I like your addition (second revision) in general and approve of helping editors discern reliable from unreliable journals. But I would add that MEDLINE is just one major indexing service. There are other major indexing services that are also indicators of reliable, high quality journals: Scopus, Science Citation Index, and Social Sciences Citation Index, for example. Thanks, --Mark viking (talk) 15:54, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

If additional indexing services are going to be used as indicators of quality, it would be helpful to have links that show on what basis they assess quality of journals they index. Hildabast (talk) 16:00, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

I know these indexing services from consensus positions in academic journal AfDs; they are mentioned in the article WP:NJournals on journal notability guidelines. Scopus has this page on content selection. Science Citation Index has this page on content selection, which also applies to the Social Sciences Citation Index. --Mark viking (talk) 17:00, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

I think the last sentence of that is the most important (or at least the most useful). When I have doubts about a source, the first thing I do is to look in Google Scholar at how often it has been cited, and who has cited it. Bad sources generally don't get cited by anybody except their authors. Looie496 (talk) 19:04, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

It would be optimal to keep this discussion together, in one place, which would be the link above (to the talk page of the guideline in question) ... I'm seeing info repeated here and there. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:28, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

Perspectives

Hilda raises the bar high! In several ways... Which is really exciting, imo. At the same time, I think we're all aware here that we need to find solutions that work (as MEDRS largely has, despite limitations) within our particular community editing environment where guidelines are used not only to provide a positive guide but also as a mechanism to defend against misguided additions. In practice, to keep the bar at a reasonably acceptable level. And all this without discouraging potential contributors to this project where (as in others) the decline in numbers of committed editors is such an obvious concern.

The reasons commercial enc publishers are able to badmouth WP clearly don't depend only on the theoretical limitations of our guidelines (example). We just don't have the human resources (or even individual library facilities) to cover everything that needs doing... let alone to achieve levels of best EBM practice which can feel painfully elusive. I'm tempted to ask whether a different approach is also required, beyond guideline mechanisms. Involving closer collaboration? Including perhaps more radical collaboration with (and within) NIH/NLM. For example... just off the top of my head... maybe online help desks providing academic librarian services ranging from non-free pdfs to evidence-based responses on literature searches and review quality. Obviously not primarily staffed by Hilda! Just saying... 86.161.251.139 (talk) 18:22, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks - I think! ;) But my main purpose in this discussion was exactly that - some of the ways we are trying to meet that need at a macro-level, is by selecting out good quality information that people can access, is through OA stuff in PMC Journals, and via Bookshelf & PubMed Health - including things like the NICE guidelines. Yet, MEDRS is arguing that it is not good quality unless it is MEDLINE-indexed. It won't be on Scopus or anything else, either, necessarily. So this advice is systematically rejecting high quality content that is ideal for Wikipedians. We can't provide the kind of service that you mention, because it would be against the licensing terms we have to adhere to. But we make it available through resources like PMC / Bookshelf / PubMed Health. At PubMed Health, we're literally curating. Hence things like NCI's evidence-based PDQs, NICE being there and so on. In the US, there's a national network of NLM libraries where you can get that support, though. And librarians everywhere are always worth asking for access to medical journal articles. They often have access to some or can get them. Hildabast (talk) 16:44, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

I doubt anyone could present a case for compiling clinical guidelines, say, on the basis of journal reputation... My understanding is that the MEDRS approach to the provision of medical information derives directly from Misplaced Pages's broader approach to its "encyclopedic" remit: in short, a verification strategy of identifying sources that are potentially reliable, applying good editorial judgement, and addressing discrepancies, viewpoint questions and other issues by reaching informed consensus in talk page discussions. Obviously, quite different from the world of systematic review... And necessarily so, given WP's volunteer community basis.
So, yes, I certainly do appreciate the potential to Misplaced Pages of initiatives such as PDQ , PubMed Health etc. I also feel that we need to be looking for ways (both in our guidelines, and perhaps outside the box too) to make quality medical editing here straightforward and even attractive. Whereas WP has little difficulty in attracting informed contributions on popular culture, areas such as medical editing seems to rely on the patience of a small population of regulars. 86.161.251.139 (talk) 14:56, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

Doc James (Jmh649)

I worry that Jmh649 is misleading Misplaced Pages/Cancer ] to say eating fish reduces the risk of getting cancer. He also purposely omits known risk factors (processed meats, and fried or charbroiled foods).

 "Limit consumption of processed and red meats.

   • Choose fish, poultry, or beans as an alternative to beef, pork, and lamb.

   • When you eat meat, select lean cuts and eat smaller portions.

   • Prepare meat by baking, broiling, or poaching rather than by frying or charbroiling."

Please comment, or join in Cancer Talk].32cllou (talk) 19:51, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

I have collapsed the extended content-related detail that is duplicated at Talk:Cancer so that we do not have this content discussion in two places at once. 32cllou appears to be notifying WP:MEDICINE of a content dispute at Talk:Cancer and inviting editors to join. I think this notification is a good idea and hope other editors do join the conversation there. Zad68 20:03, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes further input would be helpful. User keeps making changes without consensus. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 23:47, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Anatomy latin redirects

Hi, I've been meking use of a lot of the anatomy articles lately and I was wondering if it would be possible to organise a bot run to create redirects to all the articles with latin equivalents in their infoboxes from their latin names? --U5K0'sTalk_{Make WikiLove not WikiWar} 13:24, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Hi U5K0, that should certainly be possible, saving you a lot of work. The most important thing would be to have a reliable and comprehensive source for the Latin names. The Latin interlanguage links could be of use, but I don't know if they are present in enough articles. If you have a list of Latin and English equivalents that could be of help. --WS (talk) 14:45, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

This has been proposed similarly in the past here -

• Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Medicine/Archive_31#Questions_about_categorising_redirects

and at other times people have talked about Latin names for articles.

• Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Medicine/Archive_30#Redirects_from_Latin_terminology
• Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Medicine/Archive_13#Head-louse_infestation
• Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Medicine/Archive_35#Renaming_skin_diseases
• Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Medicine/Archive_32#I_did_a_title_error

I do feel that people searching for Latin terms should be able to find the right articles. I am not sure how this should be done. Blue Rasberry (talk) 19:35, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

I do not know if it can be of any help but... During the last year of so I made a couple of thousands my self. I tagged them with {{WPAN|class=redirect}} and a list can be found here . There are also some abbreviations, English synonyms and so on, but I would say 90 % are Latin nomenclature. If somebody where to make a bot would it also be possible to add the Latin terms as also known as on Wikidata entries e.g. add Extremitas proximalis ossis femoris under Upper extremity of femur .

If you are looking for list over Latin terms you might want to talk with Wimpus. He is very into this as well and can might help you out. I hope this can be of any help to you. Kind regards JakobSteenberg (talk) 13:56, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Terminologia Anatomica (TA) is the international standard on human anatomic terminology.

—Wavelength (talk) 16:20, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Yes, but there are several editions (although there are minor changes) plus Nomina Anatomica (again, in several editions). I do not know how many of these are available online/digital freely for this kind of use. I am not arguing that anything else but the latest version of TA should be in the infoboxes but I think we should have (in an ideal world) redirects from all the terms although it is mostly minor different spellings for a minority of the words. So if a bot solution is possible why not do them as well? With changes in nomenclature there will still maybe 100 years later be textbooks or atlases that uses the obsolete term (since lets be honest; most textbooks are somewhat inspired by others). If we include all official terms (even the obsolete) the user have a better chance of finding what he or she is looking for. Again, this an ideal world scenario but with bots it might not be that more work.

If older versions should also be on wikidata under also known as I do not know. Kind regards JakobSteenberg (talk) 16:58, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

NicoBloc

NicoBloc (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) seems spammy, is this product notable? -- 76.65.128.222 (talk) 22:51, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes should be deleted as spam. Have posted for deletion. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 23:19, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Symptom stub needs template

• Orofacial pain -- this stub needs a template, but which?

• Template:Digestive system and abdomen symptoms and signs -- tempted to put it in this template, would be OK for the "oro" stuff, but the face is not really part of the digestive system...
• Template:Symptoms involving head and neck -- sounded better from the title, but it is virtually filled with neurologic terms. We have about 4 links stuck in the "other" section, but apart from that the template is about brain rather than head and neck generally. I note that epistaxis and post nasal drip are also on Template:Respiratory system symptoms and signs (I recently moved the latter there). Does anyone have any objections to me starting to put H&N signs and symptoms into this template, or is it intended to stay as mostly brain? Lesion (talk) 00:36, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

Sourcing question

Hi! I'm new to the medical side of editing and was directed here with a sourcing question. I'm working on Birt-Hogg-Dubé syndrome and was told by Zad68 that I should avoid MedScape as a source. However, the information I got from there is either too new to have been included in a review (late 2012) or only talked about obliquely in a review. Since the information is just two sentences, would I be better off citing it to the primary source, citing it to MedScape, or removing it? Sorry if I'm not making sense - I'm still learning all the ins and outs of MEDMOS and MEDRS. Thanks in advance for the advice. Best, Keilana| 21:28, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes I remember conversations like this one and there were concerns that Medscape wasn't reliable. It's not a resource I choose to use but I'm curious what others might have to say about it... Zad68

If the disputed content is only 2 sentences, what is wrong with the oblique mention in the review? Oblique mention sounds like it might only be a few sentence too? Another option is to look at the papers which cite the primary source, some of those may be suitable to support the same content... Lesion (talk) 21:36, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

As an aside, "Birt–Hogg–Dubé" should use endashes, not hyphens, per WP:DASH. Axl ¤ 21:48, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

Oops I didn't know that! I thought it was the other way around, sorry Keilana. Zad68 22:02, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

But, sometimes it's OK to use short dash in article titles, as in Drug-induced lichenoid reaction, correct? Lesion (talk) 22:23, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

I would discourage you from using the term "short dash". The term "Drug-induced lichenoid reaction" uses a hyphen. There are a few types of dash of various lengths. The hyphen is not normally considered to be a type of dash.

When the title of a medical syndrome is derived from the names of two or more people, the names are joined with endashes. When one word is used to modify the second, such as a noun modifying a verb, a hyphen is used.

Article titles should always be consistent with article text. Ideally, there should be redirects from potential titles that have misused dashes/hyphens. I have moved this article to the correct title. Axl ¤ 09:57, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

The most important point is this: if you don't get it right the first time, someone can fix it later. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:49, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

My apologies, dashes confuse me. Keilana| 16:44, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

• My impression is that Medscape doesn't pass MEDRS muster (I don't think they're MEDLINE-listed or rigorously peer-reviewed), but the articles are often simply republished from a reliable source (a peer-reviewed journal). When that is the case, the journal citation is at the top of the article. -- Scray (talk) 01:15, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

Hmm, okay, would it be acceptable to cite a primary source in this case or should I just remove the information entirely? Keilana| 02:33, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

What is the contentious text and reference? Axl ¤ 10:04, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

Medscape is a reliable source for some kinds of statements. Just about anything is a reliable source for some kinds of statements. These are the two statements:

mTOR functions in pulmonary angiogenesis and protein synthesis; loss of these functions may be the cause of pulmonary cysts in Birt-Hogg-Dubé patients.

Smokers with Birt-Hogg-Dubé have more severe pulmonary symptoms than non-smokers.

That last item looks to me a bit like saying the sky is WP:BLUE: smokers have more severe pulmonary symptoms than non-smokers in every disease. So I'd be inclined to accept that with any source at all. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:49, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for the input! Keilana| 16:44, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm not so comfortable with using Medscape for discussing causes (the first quote) ... if it is not covered in any review, consider WP:RECENTISM and WP:NOTNEWS. Agree with WhatAmI on the second statement (not sure it is even needed, sorta d'oh). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:17, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

Hmm, okay, I'll keep an eye out for a review but until I find one I've taken it out. Thanks for the input! Keilana| 19:43, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

You didn't give me the reference so I just tried looking at the website. It looks like registration is required so I haven't read any of its articles. The home page looks like it is mainly a medical news website with a small part allocated to medical journals. If the first statement is from the medical news section (i.e. not a peer-reviewed secondary source), it is not appropriate for Misplaced Pages. With the second statement, while I agree that smokers tend to have more severe pulmonary symptoms than non-smokers, I am not convinced that it is self-evident. Would all readers arriving at the page know that? Could the pro-smoking lobby challenge the statement? If the statement is indeed so obvious, it should be easy to support with a suitable reference. Axl ¤ 19:50, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

• I'm going to repeat my previously stated opinion that for obscure or technical topics with a small literature, it's generally okay to use primary sources if no recent review is available. This should be done cautiously, particularly if there is any chance that the material can be seen as contentious. The main reason for using reviews is to avoid "cherry-picking", and that can't easily happen when the literature is small -- there aren't enough cherries. Looie496 (talk) 14:56, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Using primary sources to build an article is not desirable...if there are no secondary sources at all, topic is not notable, if there are only one or two secondary sources, this should give us an indication of the weight we should give the topic, and arguably should not use primary sources to expand the article beyond what content the secondary sources can support, as this would be undue weight. I feel there is no requirement to use primary sources in either case. Lesion (talk) 15:22, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

On rare occasion I've cited a primary source, but only in conjunction with a secondary source that references it, using the primary source to fill in some bit of detail that wasn't covered in the secondary. I can't think of a good reason to cite an "orphaned" primary source (unsupported by a secondary source that cites it) basically for the reasons Lesion laid out. Zad68 00:43, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Looie496, I respectfully disagree. While the prevention of cherry-picking is certainly a good reason to avoid primary sources, it is not the only reason. Primary source information is more likely than secondary source information to be subsequently refuted. Most importantly, Misplaced Pages is a general encyclopedia, not a medical textbook or a review of the literature. As such, if a statement cannot be supported by a secondary source, it is probably not important enough to be included in Misplaced Pages's medical articles.

In the case of orphan diseases, I believe that all such legitimate diseases would have secondary sources about them—in specialist textbooks if nowhere else. (Even many illegitimate diseases such as Morgellons have secondary sources.) Axl ¤ 09:14, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

There is a big difference between "using primary sources to build an article" and "using primary sources to add a detail to an article primarily based on secondary sources". Out readers expect certain basic facts, like prognosis, symptoms, and treatment. These are not always interesting to every author of medical texts or review articles. The fact that the reviews in front of you don't choose to mention prognosis, or only give it one or two words in passing, does not mean that you should ignore this.

Additionally, this is a collaborative project. If someone adds an apparently accurate and uncontested fact and cites a decent primary source—one that is strong enough to support the weight of the claim, even if it's not the platonic ideal of a medical source—your options are really either to upgrade the source yourself or to leave it alone. We don't benefit from removing accurate, relevant, appropriate, encyclopedic facts simply because the stuff under the little blue number isn't perfect. The references list is not an end unto itself. We promote reliance on secondary sources because we want accurate, relevant, appropriate, encyclopedic facts, not because we want a list of references unsullied by primary sources. If we can get accurate, relevant, appropriate, encyclopedic facts with the occasional primary source included, then that's okay. WhatamIdoing (talk) 14:56, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Am so glad to "hear" what you say on this, WAID. It's the most sensible explanation yet, thanks. --Hordaland (talk) 15:54, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

"Out readers expect certain basic facts, like prognosis, symptoms, and treatment. These are not always interesting to every author of medical texts or review articles." Medical textbooks always describe those features. Review articles may take a more focussed approach.

"The fact that the reviews in front of you don't choose to mention prognosis, or only give it one or two words in passing, does not mean that you should ignore this." I agree. It means that you need to find another source.

"If we can get accurate, relevant, appropriate, encyclopedic facts with the occasional primary source included, then that's okay." On what basis do you decide that the fact is "accurate, relevant, appropriate and encyclopedic"? If no secondary source states this fact, it is much less likely to fit those criteria. Axl ¤ 23:09, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

This is a perennial issue: if and when and how to cite primary sources, particularly in medical articles. There's almost always a proposal at WT:MEDRS arguing that the guidelines against the use of primary sources should be relaxed or enforced more leniently, and at the same time there's almost always a proposal arguing that the guideline should be made tighter and more restrictive against them. MastCell has written a lot on this, in fact in this current discussion on his User Talk he sums it up pretty well, answering a question about when should we know it's OK to use primary sources: The best answer would be "use common sense", but that doesn't fly in this environment. So we've settled for more prescriptive and restrictive guidelines, which is probably the lesser of two evils As a result of my own experience trying to do content development, I've ended up with a view pretty much in line with Axl's. There are times, occasionally, when I run across what looks like a really good and useful primary source, and as much as I'd like to use it, I don't, figuring "It'll be in a review article in six months or a year or so." It'd be great if we all had the same level of competence and common sense as WAID and MastCell, but we don't (I sure don't), and IMHO overall the project is better off with not opening the Pandora's box of primary sources. Zad68 23:55, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

We should be using recent high quality secondary sources which includes some review articles. But this is not a blanket statement that we should or must use / contain the conclusions of all secondary sources for the article to be GA or FA. It is simply a rough guide. Common sense must be used regardless of what policies / rules we create around sourcing. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 01:40, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Axl, I am willing to believe that some medical textbook, somewhere in the world, will have described those basic features. Every medical textbook will not do so for every single medical condition that is mentioned within its pages. Particularly where rare diseases are concerned, sometimes a medical text merely mentions it as a passing example, without elaborating on all the details.

We decide that basic information like a general overview of prognosis, symptoms, and treatment is "relevant, appropriate and encyclopedic" for Disease X because we know that they are "relevant, appropriate and encyclopedic" for every disease. This is no different from saying that the century an old book was published in or the year that a historically important person was born in or died in is "relevant, appropriate and encyclopedic". We don't need a secondary source to prove the relevance of these basic facts for this case, because they are always "relevant, appropriate and encyclopedic".

Accuracy requires having a source that is strong enough to support the claims being made. That source may or may not be a secondary source, depending on the type of claims being made. If your source is strong enough to support your claim, then you don't need another one. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:19, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Agree with Zad68 and Axl-- on what basis do we decide if something is accurate if it is unreviewed? Often when someone is pushing a primary source into an article, there's an agenda.

For purposes of discussion, klazomania is an example of an article that I rewrote to retain limited use of primary sources after students had been in there-- it is such an obscure topic that there is little written, but it is mentioned in the TS literature, so I kept some of the descriptions students had added from primary sources. On the other hand, if I had written it myself, I wouldn't have used those sources (I'd have gone to a library to find a book). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 12:57, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

On what basis do you decide that something about a BLP is accurate, if the alleged fact doesn't appear in a review article? Assessing the reliability of sources for medicine-related claims does not require a dramatically different process from assessing the reliability of sources for other subjects. Consider the usual questions:

• Does it have a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy?
• Is it published by a reputable publishing house, rather than by the author(s)?
• Is it "appropriate for the material in question", i.e., the source is directly about the subject, rather than mentioning something unrelated in passing?
• Is it a third-party or independent source, with no significant financial or other conflict of interest?
• Does it have a professional structure in place for deciding whether to publish something, such as editorial oversight or peer review processes?

If you've got positive answers to those questions, and no reason to believe that any other source contests it, then you may assume that it is accurate. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:04, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

DSM-5 article

There's an IP who keeps inappropriately linking to political correctness at the DSM-5 article. See here and here. Flyer22 (talk) 06:24, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

Note: Help came along here. Flyer22 (talk) 10:59, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

Warned user in question. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 19:29, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Life and Death in Assisted Living

PBS will be running Life and Death in Assisted Living on Tuesday July 30th: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/pressroom/frontline-propublica-investigate-assisted-living-in-america/ I am sure the program will have information that is of interest to certain wikiprojects – but which ones? Can anyone help?(I am posting here because this project is listed on the talk page of Assisted living which has not seen any obvious activity since 2011). XOttawahitech (talk) 20:58, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

See Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Alternative medicine

and Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Deaf

and Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Death

and Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Disability

and Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Dyslexia

and Misplaced Pages:WikiProject First aid

and Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Genetics

and Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Health and fitness

and Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Homeopathy

and Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Medical genetics

and Misplaced Pages:WikiProject National Health Service

and Misplaced Pages:WikiProject National Institutes of Health

and Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Neurology

and Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Neuroscience

and Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Nursing

and Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Pharmacology

and Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Psychology

and Misplaced Pages:WikiProject World's Oldest People.

—Wavelength (talk) 01:10, 28 July 2013 (UTC) and 01:56, 28 July 2013 (UTC) and 14:29, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks Wavelength, I will have my hands full adding this notice to all the above wiki-projects and also to this one which I just discovered. Hope I will not be accused of canvassing(?). XOttawahitech (talk) 18:52, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Pornography-induced erectile dysfunction

I mentioned this article above, at #Pornography-induced erectile dysfunction. As is clear, it's now up for deletion. Flyer22 (talk) 00:20, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Low back pain nominated for GA

FYI, Low back pain is now nominated for GA and looking for a reviewer. Zad68 00:51, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

AHRQ Health Care Innovations Exchange

Hello, I am the Web Content Manager for the AHRQ Health Care Innovations Exchange. I work for Westat, the contractor that manages this project on behalf of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. The site contains more than 800 innovation profiles that describe quality improvement programs that have been successfully implemented at various health care organizations and hospitals throughout the United States. I would like to find out how I can use the collection to enhance articles about specific health care providers and topics such as EHRs, chronic conditions, patient safety, etc. All of the material on the site is public domain. The profiles contain evidence ratings that provide information about the strength of the correlation between programs' results and the implementation of specific innovation programs. The site publishes new profiles every two weeks and updates older profiles annually. I believe there is a lot of worthwhile information here that can be used to enhance Misplaced Pages articles, including health care stubs. I understand that profiles in the AHRQ Innovations Exchange collection are considered primary sources and that secondary sources are preferred, especially with regard to undue weight. However, each profile in the collection contains a "Context of the Innovation" section which provides historical material that could be useful for articles about hospitals and local health providers. The "Results" section could also provide primary source material that supports major themes in some articles. I would like to use the collection to contribute in a manner that conforms to Misplaced Pages standards. I am new to Misplaced Pages but feel there is value in making this government-funded content more available through open source platforms. I would like the community to consider how these resources could be used to update articles. I am eager to meet more people working on this project and learn more about Misplaced Pages best practice in general. Please contact me on my talk page if you have any suggestions, or I can provide more information. Also, can someone take a look at my edits to the main AHRQ Health Care Innovations Exchange article. I tried to reduce the PR language that someone else had posted and provide category headings that would tell users what type of content they could find on the site. I thought this was a step in the right direction for this article, but my edits got reverted along with edits on other pages. I understand why some of the other reversions took place but do not understand why my edits on this article are not considered beneficial. Thanks FieldsTom (talk) 15:46, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm not the best person to field this question... but I guess, if you haven't already done so, you need to take a look at Misplaced Pages's conflict of interest guide (full guideline here). 86.161.251.139 (talk) 22:22, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

This is my assessment -

• It seems that what you have is a set of hundreds of reviews of local health care providers (at the organization level) in the United States. This includes hospitals and medical centers of various types.
• Your reviews are connected to the US government and might be called part of the "official record" of where taxpayer dollars allocated to regional health projects go. I do not understand entirely, but it seems that these reviews have some "official" status and that probably constitute part of the reporting of how tax dollars are distributed. That is, an organization probably is getting federal funding to deliver health care, and in exchange, they are reviewed in some way to report to the federal government and to taxpayers how money is spent. If these reviews are intended to be accountability of that kind, then that would mean that they are good enough for taxpayers and the government and probably also the best reviews that exist of their sort, so I would say that they are good enough for Misplaced Pages.
• I do think that you should review conflict of interest rules but it seems to me that you are neither promoting AHRQ, the site you are referencing, nor are you promoting the organizations in the reviews. Access to these reports would just increase transparency of projects done by people who report to the central government. Still - mind the rules at WP:COI as everyone will tell you. Be transparent yourself and thanks for coming to this board.
• The content which is to be shared could really help Misplaced Pages. As a precedent, there is a Misplaced Pages article on practically every high school in the United States. See WP:High Schools. It is my opinion that local hospitals and medical centers are at least as worthy of Misplaced Pages articles as high schools, and I would like to see articles on them developed. I would also like seeing articles on regional health projects developed.
• As personal advice, whenever you make a post, try to summarize your point in the first sentence. This is an international board and honestly people get distracted. If you have a question ask it immediately, then give background and context. If people can form an opinion more quickly then they are more likely to respond. If you fail to get a response that more often means that the issue seems too complicated to address, and not that there is lack of interest.

Thanks. I support what you are trying to do and think that you are going in the right direction. I would suggest sharing an example and continuing to probe for feedback. Another place to go is Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Hospitals, and perhaps to any regional WikiProject for any given review that you would share. Blue Rasberry (talk) 13:09, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

WP:MEDCOI might be interesting. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:54, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Consistent referencing style

One of the requirements for GA/FA is that an article should have a consistent reference style. Are editors obliged to use the same referencing style of a well established article? And should we do anything about it if they wish not to? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 20:07, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

I do not feel that articles should require consistent reference style. A health article may use template:cite doi which gives one reference style, it may use a technical citation style for any science content, a humanities citation style for cultural aspects of the health condition, a journalist's citation style for other content, and Misplaced Pages:Cite4Wiki's style for more content. There is no benefit to forcing a single style onto different content. Citations are supposed to serve the reader and editors should not be forced to serve citation formats. Misplaced Pages:Ignore all rules if the rules are in the way of helping readers and enforce the GA guideline if it seems best for readers. Blue Rasberry (talk) 20:35, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Okay so the date order does not need to be consistent. If some refs are simply bare urls, some use template and some don't this should make no difference? If some contain links to pubmed and other ref do not. All that in your opinion is okay? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 21:03, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

No. All references have to serve the reader and thus must be complete from the point of passing GA. Bare URLs should never pass GA. The ideal URL should contain a URL if it exists along with traditional citation information including author name, date, title, and work. It does not serve the reader to omit URLs when they exist, and for papers archived in PubMed they always exist and should be required. The time and work burden of making proper citations does fall to anyone who wants an article to pass GA. It would be great if anyone who cited articles in PubMed to use Template:Cite PMID to avoid any appearance of a shoddy citation. Blue Rasberry (talk) 21:27, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

This is (perhaps unfortunately) not true. GA requires that material of specified types (and only those specified types) be supported by an inline citation to a (barely) reliable source. It does not require anything about the citations, except that, as a purely practical matter, the reviewer has to be able to figure out what the source is, because otherwise it's not possible for the reviewer to check that the source actually supports the material. "GA" means "meets the specified six criteria". It does not mean that the article is "good" in the opinion of any individual editor or reader. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:34, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

WP:Citing sources says "Misplaced Pages does not have a single house style, though citations within any given article should follow a consistent style". Bluerasberry's idea of a different citation format for different kinds of subject/source within an article sounds a complete nightmare. Why would anyone do that how would that help any reader or editor? This isn't GA/FA guidelines, it is MOS common to all articles. Simplicity please. The last thing we need is someone edit warring over whether a source is humanities so they can use one citation format over another. Also we only url-link the title if the source is free -- there are url-links for the PMID/DOI that serve for all such indexed articles. It does the reader no favours to follow links to a demand for $30 for three sheets of A4. :-) Colin° 21:35, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

According to WP:SOURCELINKS: "If the publisher offers a link to the source or its abstract that does not require a payment or a third party's login for access, you may provide the URL for that link." If substantially more useful text is provided than what's available from, say, PubMed I feel it can be worth linking despite the paywall. 86.161.251.139 (talk) 22:08, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Consistent citation formatting is a requirement only for FA status. See Misplaced Pages:What the Good article criteria are not#.282.29 Factually accurate and verifiable, third bullet from the bottom. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:28, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Self-consistent citation formatting is desirable for all articles, stub, start, GA or FA, per MOS. Picking fault with them is not be part of GA review criteria, but if one is improving an article to GA, it makes sense to do some spring cleaning if the citations are a mess. Colin° 09:24, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Per WP:MOS, style and formatting choices should be consistent within an article and per WP:CITEVAR, citations within any given article should follow a consistent style. These are basic fundamental common sense principles that apply to any type of document. Boghog (talk) 12:55, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Regarding:

I do not feel that articles should require consistent reference style. A health article may use template:cite doi which gives one reference style, it may use a technical citation style for any science content, a humanities citation style for cultural aspects of the health condition, a journalist's citation style for other content, and Misplaced Pages:Cite4Wiki's style for more content. There is no benefit to forcing a single style onto different content. Blue Rasberry (talk) 20:35, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

First, feelings aren't the issue here, because the GA and FA crit. require consistent citations for a professional presentation. But second, as Colin says, consistency is desirable for all articles for a number of reasons. For example, even at the DYK level, when odd or incomplete citation formatting is used, it is harder to verify that reliable sources are used. And, when approaching the GA level, why have to do a massive cleanup just because random citation styles were employed throughout when they could have been made uniform earlier? And so on ...

Next, the {{cite DOI}} and {{cite PMID}} templates can be user-filled and they return errors... I found so many of them (as in, the wrong article listed for a given PMID) when reviewing FACS that I regularly asked nominators to verify that every citation was correct before promotion if they used those faulty templates which, besides returning errors, result in inconsistent citations (different editors fill them in differently, and whenever you use these templates, you run the risk that someone earlier filled in the data incorrectly). The Diberri template filler which is routinely used on medical articles returns consistently well-formatted and accurate citations ... yet we mention it only in passing at WP:MEDMOS, which needs to do a better job at describing citation formatting. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:29, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

I think we should rather point to the reftoolbar, which has been enabled for all users for the last two years or so and does this without having to go to an external website. Will see if I have the time to update it. Only a bit problematic that the visualeditor does not have anything like it yet. --WS (talk) 13:28, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes, fixing the PubMed citation glitches in the reftoolbar that the Diberri filler seems to override by default would be good imo. 86.161.251.139 (talk) 14:17, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

By 'it' I meant the medmos documentation for referencing, not the reftoolbar ;-) --WS (talk) 14:38, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Sorry, thought we were talking about the cite journal pop-up, which is great but has a few glitches which Diberri overrides. 86.161.251.139 (talk) 15:47, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for comments, everyone. I acknowledge that I said something controversial and against Misplaced Pages tradition so I posted my thoughts here - Wikipedia_talk:Citing_sources#Reconsideration_of_WP:CITEVAR_and_consistency_in_sources. I do not feel that I am being radical but I do feel that it is different. Thanks for hearing me out.

• User:WhatamIdoing and User:Colin - thanks for clarification. GA does not require consistent citation formats; FA does. Currently this is recommended for all articles.
• User:Colin and User:86.161.251.139 - I disagree with you that toll access or paywalled content should not be linked from Misplaced Pages, even when there is no abstract. Colin, I feel that you are right that users should not click a link if it leads to the disappointment of a pay barrier, but I feel that it is worse to not share the link at all. Recently at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Medicine#Marking_articles_with_open_access_icon there was a discussion of some proposals to more clearly mark free and unfree links. I know of no good solution to this problem but some are better than others.
• User:Boghog You are correct about the policy you cite and correct about almost everything else you say, but you are completely incorrect in suggesting that common sense led to the development of all the competing citation formats and their uses. Please reconsider when you say that "basic fundamental common sense principles" would lead all sensible people to the same conclusion about how citation should work. I also acknowledge that you are expressing the majority and most popular opinion and that I am taking a minority (or totally fringe) stance on this.
• User:SandyGeorgia - When I said "I feel" then I should have said "It is my opinion that..." Sorry for the confusion. There is more confusion about GA criteria - you say it requires consistency and others say it does not. I also find problems with the DOI and PMID bots but I still feel that leaving citation generation to bots is superior to leaving it to humans. Correcting human messes is more difficult than correcting bot messes and if everyone preferentially used the DOI and PMID citations when possible then there would be fewer problems. Users should double check to see that they work and are correct. I was unaware that Diberri returns better citations that the citation bot does. Is that the case? Do you know why that might be?
• WS The Misplaced Pages:RefToolbar is awesome but it only generates a single citation format. I wish that it were universally acceptable.

Thanks and feel free to join at Wikipedia_talk:Citing_sources#Reconsideration_of_WP:CITEVAR_and_consistency_in_sources. Blue Rasberry (talk) 14:36, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

I never said "that toll access or paywalled content should not be linked from Misplaced Pages, even when there is no abstract". I was responding to your "It does not serve the reader to omit URLs when they exist, and for papers archived in PubMed they always exist and should be required". Not all PubMed-archived papers have urls -- they index papers that aren't always online. In that case, the url to the abstract is handy but isn't actually a link to the source. The fact that a URL exists doesn't mean we have to include it. There are sometimes lots of ways of getting to a paper via URLs. The DOI is the most universal. The PMID works for medical papers but you go via the abstract. A direct link to the publisher's page may be useful (though can break) but I would url-link the article title only if in addition to the DOI or PMID links, if it was free.

Let me be clear: the ability to easily distinguish freely accessible sources is vital to me, and shouldn't be lost simply because someone felt the need to add another url when often have two already. Colin° 15:02, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

What you say is correct and you have thought about this more deeply than me. I agree - emphasis should be on freely available sources, and if an "official" source is behind a paywall but an unofficial source is freely and legally available - such as by self-archiving or green open access - then Misplaced Pages should prefer to link to the free source rather than the official source. Blue Rasberry (talk) 15:19, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Agree with Colin completely, disagree that correcting human error is easier than correcting bot error (bot error is rarely corrected and is often a big mess), and don't know when the heck GA dropped citation consistency, whatevs ... believe it best to encourage all folks to do things right at any level ... SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:56, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

GA technically never had a requirement for properly formatted bibliographic citation. What it had for a while was people making up their own semi-secret personal criteria and failing articles that didn't meet them. The main GA folks are trying to produce a bit more consistency these days.

Of course, the best practice is for even substubs to have consistent and full citations. As we say, GA means a good article, not a great one. We'd all be happy if all articles exceeded the GA standards. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:57, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Agree with WhatamIdoing that GA has to set a threshold somewhere for what is vital for a good (but not necessarily great) article, and the format of citations is far down from the list of things that are really important. Colin° 22:08, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

IMO we need greater consistency in reference formatting. If a PMID is available it should be in the ref and cite PMID should be used. Using multiple different formats is a disservice to our readers and our fellow contributors as it makes text harder to edit and harder to verify. I personally think it would be a good idea to have consistency across subject areas. But at a minimum within an article. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 21:44, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

James, by "cite pmid" do you mean the Cite pmid template or the PMID autofill in the Cite journal pop-up (illustrated above)? I've heard the template affects page load times, and it seems to me far less flexible for editing than the pop-up (or, I think, Diberri). 86.140.51.65 (talk) 08:06, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

I mean the PMID autofill which gives a fill cite template such as seen in all the GA/FA's I have done. I have concerns with just having the PMID as 1) it is not in use across all languages. 2) I like to see the details of the reference.Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 22:37, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

To expand on 86.140.51.65's comments, as currently implemented, the {{cite pmid}} and {{cite doi}} templates are hardwired to format authors differently than what the diberri filler produces (diberri follows the Vancouver system author style, see this discussion for more details). The pop-up uses the deprecated coauthor parameter and also renders the authors differently than diberri. As many med project articles contain citations that have been produced by diberri's tool, adding {{cite pmid}} templates to existing articles (or using the pop-up) results in articles with inconsistent citation formats. One potential solution is to add flexibility to the {{cite pmid}} templates as proposed here. As already mentioned, using {{cite pmid}} increases page load times, but may still be acceptable for shorter articles that don't contain many citations. Boghog (talk) 09:46, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

So perhaps it would be nice to have the page pop-up working with the diberri parameters? But if I understand correctly that may not be feasible now, and if even if it were it might be a big job for a potential volunteer... Imo, some intuitive solution like that would be a good thing to facilitate consistency, and the current choice is not really so very new-user friendly (a relevant consideration). 86.140.51.65 (talk) 11:26, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

As mentioned here, getting rid of the deprecated coauthor parameter generated by the pop-up is on the "to do list". However further modifications would be required to return Vancouver style authors. The present tools generate an inconsistent mixture of different citation formats. In an ideal world, each tool would be flexible and allow users to generate citation templates that match the preexisting sytle in each article. Boghog (talk) 12:20, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Just from a WP:MED perspective (imo!)... In an ideal world, we'd have one simple "on-page" autofill tool that returns Vancouver style well across articles that are primarily biomed. Plus, presumably, manual options for bespoke referencing and accessibility solutions for people with particular disabilities. (Personally, I don't mind changing basic styles between, say, science and humanities pages, but being expected to adapt from one page to the next within the same subject area seems an unnecessary hassle...). 86.140.51.65 (talk) 12:37, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

In an even more ideal world, perhaps we could just have a user setting for the reference style, with[REDACTED] (or wikidata) storing enough information (using autfill functionality) to display them in any style you would like. --WS (talk) 13:33, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

I agree that when the PMID or similar is right, it should be used. However, there are many occasions when for example, a publisher has provided incorrect information (happens very often with Cochrane reviews for example, which will frequently not have the right version of the review lodged with PubMed - and we correct it at PubMed Health by using a different system to overcome the publisher issues, but not at PubMed). Or when the publisher has provided an incorrect linkout to the article - or it doesn't say it's free full text (perhaps because it was after an embargo and the publisher is not keeping it up-to-date). I get frustrated when I've carefully curated a link so that it's right, and then someone comes and changes it back to the inferior/incorrect one by enforcing a standard without realizing it's lowering the quality of the citation. Hildabast (talk) 19:25, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Why not report the link errors directly to PubMed so that the problem is fixed on their end? Boghog (talk) 19:47, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

PubMed can't fix the broken links - they come from the publishers. They are reported back to the publishers, but it's up to them to fix them. Nor can PubMed change the citation data that publishers send either - it is their data, but NLM does a lot of QA and works with the publishers constantly. For Cochrane, for example, I did tackle them on their policy of not providing all updated abstracts - see here - but that took a lot of time. And it doesn't fix the problem retrospectively - it will be 20 years easy at this rate till all Cochrane abstracts are right in PubMed. The dating is misleading at the publisher's website too (and in their recommended citations - but again, that's publisher data and only they can change it). We've tried to make the "vintage" of the Cochrane review prominent. I'm collecting up ideas though, about suggestions to consider that might help make really accurate citation - including to free full text - easier for WP editing. Hildabast (talk) 10:53, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Kinetic proofreading

I know this article, "Kinetic proofreading" , has been on Misplaced Pages for awhile, but I am wondering if someone here can check its accuracy. It uses a lot of jargon and is therefore hard to follow. Also, there is no project banner on the talk page. ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 06:36, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

This article is probably more within the scope of WP:MCB than this project. In any case, the lead was almost incomprehensible even to a chemist ("naive thermodynamic bound", huh?) . I have edited the lead so that it is hopefully clearer. Cheers. Boghog (talk) 08:36, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Foie gras and human health

The Foie gras article contains the following

A recent study demonstrated oral amyloid-A fibril transmissibility which raised food safety issues with consumption of foie gras over "concerns that products such as pâté de foie gras may activate a reactive systemic amyloidosis in susceptible consumers". Foie gras as an amyloid-containing food product hastened the development of amyloidosis. Amyloidosis may be transmissible, akin to the infectious nature of prion-related illnesses. However, a correlation between foie gras consumption and these diseases has not been confirmed.

It seems the human health concerns are sourced to this article and its coverage in popular science publications. There has been some to-and-fro about whether this material should be included. Wise eyes would be appreciated. Alexbrn 07:52, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

A more recent review than those sources states: " is not uncommon in cattle, geese or ducks, and AA amyloid can be found in pâté de foie gras . Amyloid-containing foie gras induces AA amyloidosis in susceptible mice , so AA amyloidosis can theoretically be transmitted to humans by the same route; thus, such food might constitute a hazard for individuals with chronic inflammatory disorders such as ." We could replace that paragraph with a sentence from that secondary source, User:Alexbrn. Biosthmors (talk) 14:09, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

I was part of the to and fro. I was glad the issue was brought to this noticeboard, but apparently User:Alexbrn decided to disregard the feedback here. Any advice on a next step? petrarchan47tc 18:12, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Well, no - I didn't disregard it ... in fact I used the 2010 to replace the old article content as suggested. But then when another editor (Zad68) raised the concern that this animal-based material wasn't strong enough sourcing for human health information I reconsidered, agreed with the concern, and removed this content altogether. In think if we're going to include some content on the human health aspects of foie gras, we need good, strong, WP:MEDRS-compliant sourcing. Alexbrn 18:25, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Rehabilitation center

The article Rehabilitation center is currently devoid of content - it used to be a re-direct to the disambiguation page Rehabilitation. Can someone help start this article? Thanks in advance, XOttawahitech (talk) 21:29, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Why not leave it as a redirect? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 21:31, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Health in India

This help request has been answered. If you need more help, you can ask another question on your talk page, contact the responding user(s) directly on their user talk page, or consider visiting the Teahouse.

Currently with reference to health in India , there are two article - Health in India and Public health system in India . But , they dont have a specific structure .Requesting help from Wikipedians to help in formulating a structure or outline .

Commons sibi (talk) 16:20, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

You've already notified (one of) the relevant WikiProject(s); there's no need to simultaneously call for help from all over Misplaced Pages. The articles seem rather well-structured to me. One deals with health issues in general (which would include an overview over the public health system), the other focuses on just that system. Huon (talk) 18:39, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

ePlasty

There's currently a deletion debate regarding ePlasty (formerly known as Journal of Burns and Wounds, Journal of Burns and Surgical Wound Care, and Journal of Burns). It would be great if people could help assert if the journal meets WP:NJOURNALS (or failing that, WP:GNG). Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 18:24, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Proposed deletion of Non-verbal leakage

The article Non-verbal leakage has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

Utterly unsourced for over three years; not even enough content for readers to comprehend what it is.

While all constructive contributions to Misplaced Pages are appreciated, content or articles may be deleted for any of several reasons.

You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{proposed deletion/dated}} notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the article's talk page.

Please consider improving the article to address the issues raised. Removing {{proposed deletion/dated}} will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. In particular, the speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and articles for deletion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion. Aɴɢʀ (talk) 19:44, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

New dental editor

We have a new dental editor. Have not looked that closely at their edits but a few are concerning. Some are removing infoboxes with no explaination. Other include changing the "cause" heading to "etiology" . Have provided feedback but they do not seem to have read it.Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 21:54, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

I'm sure the editor in question is aware of the existence of their talkpage, since they have blanked it in the past. I also have seen a change in behavior since I questioned their repeated use of the same source, and now there is a variety of sources... so I think the advice is being seen, just with no response. This is fine, all editors are volunteers after all and need to define their own level of involvement. On the whole, edits seem constructive. Removal of infoboxes is possibly an artifact of visual editor bugs? Lesion (talk) 22:20, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

This is great, because our dental pages are seriously neglected. This edit summary proves she's listening and responding to messages. The infobox blanking is a VisualEditor misfeature: a template is one "character" and it's much too easy to accidentally backspace over it. They're trying to come up with solutions, so feel free to suggest any you have. As for not replying on the user talk page, the WMF's research shows that most new users have trouble figuring out how. There is no "reply" button. They don't know what page to reply on. It's a mess. WP:Flow will solve this, but not until next year. WhatamIdoing (talk) 14:56, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Agree, many pages are a mess. There seems to have been some activity building dental pages in Misplaced Pages's early days then interest has died out... WP:DENT is basically inactive now. As for oral medicine topics, most seem to have been started as stubs by WP:DERM from dermatology textbook sources, so it's a very nice area to work in if you prefer building articles from scratch. Lesion (talk) 15:21, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Blog post about Misplaced Pages

I have a new blog (at Scientific American) and did a brief post about Misplaced Pages. Hildabast (talk) 10:56, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Thanks Hilda. Wish you were coming to Wikimania :-) Next year in London hopefully. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 11:41, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Acupuncture

Could use some eyes on Acupuncture. Some editors are trying to elevate some unsupported or poorly supported explanations to the level of "theories". A lot of the material in the section on "Proposed mechanisms of action" is not supported by sources complying with WP:MEDRS, and the most widespread explanation, the placebo effect, is played down, probably violating WP:NPOV. Dominus Vobisdu (talk) 18:47, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

1. ^ Cite error: The named reference Diet11 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
2. Kushi LH, Byers T, Doyle C, Bandera EV, McCullough M, McTiernan A, Gansler T, Andrews KS, Thun MJ (2006). "American Cancer Society Guidelines on Nutrition and Physical Activity for cancer prevention: reducing the risk of cancer with healthy food choices and physical activity". CA Cancer J Clin. 56 (5): 254–81, quiz 313–4. doi:10.3322/canjclin.56.5.254. PMID 17005596.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)