Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Medicine: Difference between revisions

WikiProject Medicine

Project Page
WPMED Newsletter and signup
Manual of style (medicine)
Identifying reliable sources (medicine)
List of participants
Popular pages
Assessment (Log)

How to help:
Article alerts and resources for editors
Articles for cleanup, deletion, and orphaned
Patrol recent changes and sort stubs
Requested articles

Categories:
Project
Articles by quality and importance

Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/WikiProject used

Would anyone else like to commit to getting a (consistent) top-500 page view article, or several, up to GA status for 2013 (see Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Popular pages for a list)? And to commit to doing as many good article reviews as nominations, say "Yes". Happy Holidays! Biosthmors (talk) 20:12, 23 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Malaria as a co-nominator and pulmonary embolism. Yes. Biosthmors (talk) 20:12, 23 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• if I finish the GA I'm working on currently then yes... lesion (talk) 21:06, 23 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• I too think malaria would be a good target. Basalisk ^{inspect damage}⁄_berate 01:39, 24 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Misunderstood. Yes excellent idea. I will be working on a bunch this year. On asthma now Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 02:22, 24 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• I could go for recertifying Aspirin as GA, esp since you suggested it would not meet those standards as currently written. I'll choose a higher-need target, at some point. -- UseTheCommandLine (talk) 03:47, 24 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Pain. It's time I got back to work. (I'll have a go at reviewing, but it's pretty new to me.) --Anthonyhcole (talk) 07:29, 26 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Circumcision's GA review will be underway in the next week or I'll <fill in something appropriate>. Zad68 21:16, 26 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Mouth ulcer was in the above popular pages list, rated B class. I took out all the primary sources and fleshed it out a bit. It's maybe ready for GAN soon. lesion (talk) 08:26, 27 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Can I suggest an additional task for this...the ratings are really out of date for many articles on this list, I guess the people expanding them did not update the ratings. Up to date ratings would make it clear which articles are truly stub/start class and maybe would benefit most from being raised to GA status...lesion (talk) 21:05, 28 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Thanks for the suggestion. It would be nice to have completely accurate rankings, but for our purposes I think a glance and a guess do a mostly satisfactory job. I think article rankings are only there to suggest priorities, but not to be a priority above us from actually improving content, which readers care about. And page views are a useful (albeit rough) guide on what people care about. I wish we knew which articles were most likely to be read from top to bottom, and what their shared characteristics are. Just my two cents. Thanks again for your work on Talk:Fecal incontinence/GA1! Biosthmors (talk) 03:54, 29 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• delirium would be an important one to work on...and one that some of us can add our expertise from our individual areas of interest/work (e.g. me/psychiatry) Casliber (talk · contribs) 13:00, 29 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

We have an editor removing well sourced text here [1]. Comments appreciated. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 03:19, 24 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The relevant text of the article currently reads, "The Roman Catholic Church officially only accepts natural family planning in certain cases, although large numbers of Catholics in developed countries accept and use modern methods of birth control" and there hasn't been editing there in two days. Does that seem satisfactory? Zad68 15:01, 27 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Yes more or less satisfied. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 15:13, 27 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Great, just wanted to see if there was still a need before going through the effort of starting a RSN or RFC. Zad68 15:25, 27 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Why do we have case study (which says it's also case report) as well as case report? Sumbuddy missed something; who can fix it? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:18, 27 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The case study article is (almost) purely medical. This is quite a focused article and I'd favour keeping it that way - perhaps it would benefit from a new title such as case study in medicine ? There's already such an article for psychology (case study in psychology). The case study article, although broader in scope, is mostly about its use in social sciences. Perhaps it should be similarly retitled (case study in the social sciences)? FiachraByrne (talk) 01:45, 27 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The (social sciences) case study article has little or nothing to do with a clinical case report. "Case report" is the common name for the clinical variety and is good as it stands. Could the current Case study page perhaps be restricted to the social sciences (titled something like Case study (social sciences)?. IMO, Case study is not WP:MED material: I've commented on the article talk page, Talk:Case_study#Scope.3F. —81.151.194.238 (talk) 19:25, 27 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I've posted an alert about this discussion at WT:WikiProject Sociology. —81.151.194.238 (talk) 20:15, 27 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Personbally, I don't see a need to retitle the Case report page. On the other hand, I feel the WP:MED template could well be removed from Talk:Case study. The present thread makes me note that the Case series page needs expansion (for instance, there currently seems to be no mention of the case-only [2] study design anywhere on Wikipedia [3]). —81.151.194.238 (talk) 13:36, 28 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Someone just added the Diseases DB to tic: [4] The information contained there is not even remotely correct. For example, tic is listed as part of TS only, completely ignoring the number of comorbid conditions where tics may be present (samples, Tic#Differential diagnosis, tics are present in autism, tourettism, and a number of other conditions).

Diseases DB does not appear to rise to the level of WP:RS, much less WP:MEDRS.

1. Why are we including it in our standard infobox?
2. In cases where it is clearly incorrect, why don't we just revert it? I am going to remove it from this article as it is grossly incomplete, inaccurate and misleading.

SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:12, 28 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Sandy decided to retire today, for the explicit reason of admin misconduct, a topic of discussion being raised at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Editor Retention. Biosthmors (talk) 22:53, 31 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the headsup, Biosthmors. I have temporarily blanked my userpage. I encourage everyone else to consider doing this in recognition of Sandy's contributions to this project and to Wikipedia as a whole. JFW | T@lk 23:29, 31 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for the kind words, but I hope you will all join me in standing up to corrupt cabalistic admins who enable sockmasters to ruin this place for all of us. Content contributors need to stick together now more than ever ... it seems we can't count on either arbcom or the admin corp to care about socks and disruption. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:07, 2 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Comments requested here. I feel Kegel exercise is the less notable name, and a new article called Pelvic floor exercise should discuss this topic. Note Kegel exercise is in the list of popular pages list above. lesion (talk) 20:52, 28 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The use of the title "Iris" is under discussion, see Talk:Iris (plant) where the plant is proposed to be the primary topic. -- 70.24.248.246 (talk) 21:33, 28 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

There's a discussion here, regarding the use of primary sources. The talk page itself is quite messy at the moment, so I understand if you don't want to dive in there, but I think we should sort out the basic question, if and how primary souces can be used, and with only three editors discussing we won't reach an agreement. I would really appreciate your input. --Six words (talk) 08:33, 29 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

No primary sources should be used for medical content. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 08:42, 29 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

WP:MEDRS states: "Reliable primary sources may occasionally be used with care as an adjunct to the secondary literature, but there remains potential for misuse." I happy with the level of caution included in the statement. In general, if disputes arise in specific articles, it is probably better to remove the source (and the information if no secondary source can be found). In my opinion, primary sources are often suitable for the "History" sections of medical articles. Axl ¤ [Talk] 22:01, 30 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

You might find WP:USEPRIMARY worth a look. There are valid uses of primary sources even in medical articles, e.g., "He published a paper claiming that it works sometimes in petri dishes", but you may not use non-independent primary sources to de-bunk or challenge the conclusions of independent and secondary sources, or even to pretend that all these sources are equally valid (per WP:GEVAL). WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:51, 31 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for all your replies. The situation - in my eyes - is not one where using primary sources would be appropriate: it's about a cancer therapy that independend, secondary sources say is unproven and shows no promise (one source even calling it disproven). There are two or three secondary sources written by its 'inventor' who (of course) claims the therapy works, and there also seem to be a few in vitro tests and small case studies by other researchers that were 'positive'. I've been arguing that these studies cannot be used to counterbalance the independent secondary sources but as there were only four editors discussing this issue on the talk page, two for, two against using primary sources, and we were going in circles. Since then, other editors have joined the discussion, but of course additional commenters are still very welcome there. --Six words (talk) 09:14, 31 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Yes primary sources may be used in rare situations but one does not use primary sources to refute secondary ones which appears to be the situation here. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 10:50, 31 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

See Wikipedia_talk:Username_policy#Bad_block. Biosthmors (talk) 21:44, 30 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Not within scope of WPMED (it's WP policy), and as noted there it's 2-year-old issues. -- Scray (talk) 02:59, 31 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

It's common to want a list of refs in talk page discussions. If you use ref tags, though, either the refs are invisible to people reading the discussion, or you have a clunky whole-page section to manage.

There is a simpler method. Use this code:

{{reflist|closed=yes}}

and you'll get all the refs on the page above the template, and leave all the ones under it for another reflist template. If you add this to each section that has refs in it, then they can be archived intact, with all their refs displayed right there. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:56, 31 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Awesome. That'll save me a bit of coding. ([5]) --Anthonyhcole (talk) 04:02, 31 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

FYI, Aerotoxic syndrome has been proposed to be renamed, see talk:Aerotoxic syndrome -- 70.24.248.246 (talk) 06:04, 31 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

FYI, Rule of three (medicine) has been requested to be renamed, see talk:Rule of three (medicine) -- 70.24.248.246 (talk) 06:14, 31 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

WikiProject Medicine banner is added to Project Page, feel free to update it or remove it. Will be adding modified version soon.Thanks for creating such amazing project. AbhiSuryawanshi (talk) 09:05, 31 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

it looks good. 2 issues =(

• you used the caduceus, not the rod of asclepius (Rod of Asclepius#Confusion with the caduceus ; Caduceus as a symbol of medicine )
• could the E in medicine be the same size as the rest of the word? lesion (talk) 09:47, 31 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Looks great. Just need to fix the rod :-) Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 10:45, 31 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Wouldn't the Star of Life be a better look than just the plain Rod of Asclepius on such a banner? (One could replace the right caduceus with the the star, and leave the left one, as the caduceus is associated with medicine (as shown by the link provided) or the left one replaced with a red cross -- 70.24.248.246 (talk) 21:47, 31 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

For me, the star of life is associated mostly with emergency medicine rather than medicine as whole. Any of the 3 symbols would be appropriate really, I was just being pernickity... lesion (talk) 23:20, 31 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

the red cross was a symbol of a international relief charity no? They ended up replacing it with a crescent symbol in the parts of the world because of the crusades and because it was too linked with Christianity. International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. lesion (talk) 23:27, 31 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Yes we should stay away from religious symbols. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 05:54, 1 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

What about a Red Crystal with the rod inscribed within it? (The rod alone looks somewhat thin for a banner) -- 70.24.248.246 (talk) 08:17, 1 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

We are not a member of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement so the crystal, the cross and the crescent would all be inappropriate. I support User:lesion's suggestion: replace the caduceus with the rod of Asclepius, and make the final "e" lower case. Thank you for doing this, Abhi. --Anthonyhcole (talk) 08:57, 1 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks everyone for feedback, will update more versions of banner soon. :) AbhiSuryawanshi (talk) 19:21, 1 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• E is in small size.
• Religious symbols avoided.

any further corrections/suggestions?

AbhiSuryawanshi (talk) 11:43, 2 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I know I am criticizing someone's hard work...the ECG trace is good, not sure about heart as symbol...and the W faintly drawn on is good... Maybe try rod of asclepius and/or star of life? You are correct it is religious, but no-one is going to get bothered about ancient religious symbols, the cross or the crescent they might argue about.lesion (talk) 16:13, 2 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Hey, Thanks for feedback, and please feel free to criticize and suggest improvements :-) Will update new one with rod, then it will be easy to compare all three! Keep Suggesting, Keep Inspiring! :) AbhiSuryawanshi (talk) 17:11, 2 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I really like it. Great to have someone so good with graphics joining us. A great addition to the team. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 19:44, 2 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks so much for your effort, but unfortunately I can't say I like it. The red hearts and all red make me think of Valentine's Day. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:WikiProject_Medicine_Banner.jpg was more on the right track, with colors/design. How about something more like that with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rod_of_Asclepius2.svg? Thanks again for your effort. Biosthmors (talk) 21:20, 3 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I kind of like it. A W, Hearts, an ECG. This will reach the non medical group as well :-) Anyway he is working on a logo for Wiki. Med. right now which we supposedly need before we can apply to use the term Medicine and thus change our name to keep the WMF happy. He can work on adding the rods afterwards. The black and white one though does not really grab me. We need one that is more colorful and with cleaner lines IMO. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 21:31, 3 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

It's not important to me, but the convention is to silly case the first word and to sentence case what follows, which means a capital "P" and "M": WikiProject Medicine. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:02, 5 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Could some experienced editors please take a look at Conversion therapy and help clean it up? I think some new eyes may help. Insomesia (talk) 14:05, 31 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

[6] --Anthonyhcole (talk) 02:30, 1 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Above in #Diseases DB JFW encourages considering blanking one's own user page in honor of Sandy's contributions. I did. I started a thread at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Editor Retention and I would appreciate to see some admins from this project comment there (another user also started a related thread). I figure I should also go ahead and get User:Biosthmors/WMF Noticeboard live as Sandy seemed to have a bit of a reputation for caring about WMF activities. Biosthmors (talk) 02:51, 1 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Very unfortunate. It appears that the event which sort of pushed her over the edge was the recent blocking of long term content contributors without any prior warning. We spent so much time trying to attract new and competent editors. And than try to figure out how to turn new editors into long term editors. Maybe what we really need to do is figure out how to keep the long term editors we have. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 07:29, 1 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I am sorry to hear this. Sandy was excellent. ---My Core Competency is Competency (talk) 15:26, 1 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Sad news indeed. Although she is still posting on her talk page, so perhaps she has had a change of heart. Axl ¤ [Talk] 23:59, 1 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I'm Sorry friends, it's the first time I've done that. I was sick Sick SICK to death of dealing with socks, sock enablers, and corrupt admins. The sock is now blocked, this time, but this place has changed for me. I don't care anymore if they block me, I am not going to be silent ever again in the face of admin corruption and sock enabling. They made this place miserable, so that we spend all our time dealing with socks instead of building content, and I am mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more. I appreciate all the kind words here, and I'm sorry for the false alarm ... when they finally got off their ASSES and blocked the sock, I decided to come back and fight the corruption. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:06, 2 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

"I am mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more." <------- That sounds like a battle cry to me - a call to arms to "fight the corruption." Where do we plebs sign to join the revolution? Who is providing the weaponry? The best I can come up with is a few sticks and a couple of petrol bombs which won't be much match against the armoury of some of the lawless wikipedia admins.--MrADHD | T@1k? 00:21, 2 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Any where you see admins supporting disruption and failing to support content builders ... we cannot be complacent anymore. It has always been a problem; now it's institutionalized because so many have left. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:28, 2 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The difficulty is that many of us content types do not stray far from our content work and thus are unaware of all the issues occurring until someone shows up and makes mention of it in our little domain. Things need to change. Have made a proposal here that all blocks need to be proceeded by at least a warning Wikipedia_talk:Blocking_policy#Blocking_policy_alterations Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 07:39, 2 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Many thanks for following up with this. I hope something good comes of that discussion! Biosthmors (talk) 19:35, 2 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The Urethral sounding article was nominated for deletion back in 2007, and it's still an awful article. It and the Urethral intercourse article attempt to distinguish themselves from each other. But when you apply urethral sounding in a sexual context, as "urethral play," I'm not seeing in what way they are validly distinguished, except for the latter also seeming to cover accidental penetration of the female urethra, and I also ponder whether or not these two articles should be merged. Flyer22 (talk) 22:46, 1 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

No comments on this from this project? Flyer22 (talk) 01:13, 4 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think that they should be merged. One article appears to cover a legitimate medical procedure, while the other article is about a rather strange and unusual method of sexual intercourse. Unless I am missing something?--MrADHD | T@1k? 01:18, 4 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

There are a few pumbed hits for treatment of urethral stricture in males...otherwise seems like medicine is involved mostly to clean up the damage involved...agree merge urethral intercourse to a new section in urethral sounding, and covering the apparently substantial risks too. lesion (talk) 03:23, 4 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

What would it take to get some sort of indicator in the templating system for journal articles whereby one could look at an article's reference list and see, based on pubmed's data, whether a ref was likely to be MEDRS-compliant? Pubmed seems to be pretty good at adding that metadata, and it would be a huge boon to my recent review-article OCD if i were able to just look at the list and see which of the hundred+ references in a large article most need to be checked. -- UseTheCommandLine (talk) 01:29, 2 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This has been discussed a number of times in the past on this page and got a fair bit of support both times. All it needs is someone to make sure there is consensus and figure out how to do it. The idea I guess would be to create a field called "review" which could be populated by a bot with a yes or no based on pubmed. You have my strong support. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 07:45, 2 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

So where do i go to propose this? village pump? -- UseTheCommandLine (talk) 08:12, 2 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

That is a good question. I am not sure where would be best. As this would only apply to pubmed resources and pubmed is mostly medical consensus here may be sufficient. Maybe start a RfC here. Draft it in your user space and I am happy to review before it goes live. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 09:15, 2 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Superficially, this proposal looks reasonable. The bot looks for a "pmid" field, then checks for a "Review" tag on Pubmed. However there are potential pitfalls: references that don't use the citation template, journal article references that don't have a "pmid" field, journal articles that aren't listed in Pubmed, non-journal references that aren't in Pubmed. Also, this metadata shouldn't be immediately visible in the article, but only in the edit window. I would agree to limited implementation in, say, 25 articles, with a view to evaluating the benefit. Axl ¤ [Talk] 15:19, 2 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Agree with Axl. Also, sadly, PUBMED listings are inconsistent with how articles are tagged. I have run across cases of articles that are clearly review articles tagged by PUBMED not as reviews, and vice-versa, and also many review articles simply have no tag at all. The danger might be that if you see "review" you won't double-check it, or that if you don't you might assume it's a problem. Is the tagging consistency and accuracy high enough to make this useful? Zad68 15:23, 2 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

My view on the issues you (Axl) raise:

• references that don't use the citation template and journal article references that don't have a "pmid" field: one of my hobbyhorses has been to go around adding PMID information to articles when i see them. this seems like it's pretty important for end-users as a way to do further research, and i think we should be encouraging the addition of PMID information where it does not exist
• journal articles that aren't listed in Pubmed: as far as i'm concerned, if it's not indexed by pubmed then it's not MEDRS. it might still be reliable for other purposes, but not medical ones
• non-journal references that aren't in Pubmed: I'm drawing a blank on what MEDRS-compliant secondary sources would be that are not indexed by pubmed, other than say a proper well-referenced book chapter, and while these are sometimes referenced, i have found far fewer of them than primary or tertiary sources (such as textbooks). are there other types i'm missing?

Again, this would be as an aid to MEDRS cleanup efforts, where the goal is simply to indicate to one of us which references are most prominently in need of checking -- this in no way prevents us from checking those sources in terms of content and claims.

Please also see comments below re: feasibility of a limited pilot project

-- UseTheCommandLine (talk) 18:25, 2 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I haven't noticed a problem with Pubmed mis-identifying review articles, but I'll take your word for it. In any case, it is a good reason to evaluate the situation after a limited pilot exercise. Axl ¤ [Talk] 15:42, 2 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Per Axl and Zad68, while this has the potential to be useful, any such tool would have to be very careful in the way that it presented its data or conclusions. I often tend to work in some of the more contentious article areas of Wikipedia. I can say with certainty that if a tool gives a "(likely) MEDRS-compliant" checkmark as any part of its output, we will face advocates of fringe theories who will insist "This source got the MEDRS-compliant checkmark, we must use it in our article!". I strongly suspect that we will also get both fringe advocates and plain-vanilla naive editors who will insist that any reference that doesn't get the automated MEDRS checkmark must be removed. Finally, I fear that the same problem will repeat (and be an obstacle) when those cases get bounced up to WP:RSN. Eventually, instead of sensibly discussing the proper application of MEDRS – and acknowledging that there will be gray areas and edge cases that aren't resolved by lawyerly parsing of the rules – we'll spend a lot of time bogged down in discussing how to tweak the MEDRS-compliance tool algorithm.

I've just been over at WP:RSN banging my head against a situation where more than one participant in a discussion doesn't want to acknowledge that "This book is a reliable source" isn't actually a complete conclusion for Wikipedia purposes—any given source will be reliable for some statements and situations and not others. We don't want to inadvertently exacerbate such problems. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 16:02, 2 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

So I actually haven't seen mis-tagged articles on pubmed. is there any way you could post some links? What I was actually envisioning was, rather than a tag that says "likely medrs-compliant" would be something that says "pubmed tags this as a secondary source". not explicitly mind you, maybe just an additional symbol or a color change for the caret that jumps you to the citing sentence. just some kind of indicator for people doing RS reviews.

Of course this could be problematic if it were portrayed as "this is MEDRS compliant" and i didn't mean to suggest that. I don't know that this could be trialed in just a subset of articles either -- from my poking around, it seems like it would require an additional field in the citation template (which, as noted, could be named something innocuous, like "pubmed_type" and stay consistent with their XML definitions, rather than something more suggestive/problematic like "MEDRS"), and then it would ALSO require a modification of the definitions for how the citations are displayed. I imagine that you could just push an arbitrary field into there and add some javascript or css on the client side to view the field in a way that is useful to you, but that sort of thing is beyond me.

I had another idea though, which is that if we had some coordination with some php or javascript programmers, we could produce a client-side tool for this, whether via WP-user-installable-scripts or greasemonkey or the like -- let the person using the client retrieve the article type, via pubmed's Entrez API or something. This, again, is beyond my coding abilities, so we would definitely need some help, but if we could get someone interested in this it could be a really useful tool i think -- especially if it has been discussed before. Additional comment is of course welcome -- UseTheCommandLine (talk) 17:58, 2 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

It's not common to see non-reviews tagged as being reviews, but do a quick search on "review[Title]", and then limit it to just things tagged as "reviews". 40% of the hits go away. Most of these are probably older reviews or even things that aren't journal articles, but we're probably losing some legitimate reviews that way. And how exactly should you tag a publication that is a "case study and review"? Whether it's MEDRS always depends on how you use it, not just on its inherent characteristic. (See WP:USEPRIMARY for the basics.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:19, 5 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Another point that i failed to make upthread is that the overwhelming majority of problems i've seen with MEDRS compliance is a reliance on primary or tertiary articles for sourcing. That is a bigger problem than the potential for pubmed-mistagged articles, by an order of magnitude i think. I am sympathetic to the issue of contentious articles and misinterpretation there, so it's definitely important that the field names etc dont suggest more authority than necessary (thus "secondary article" or "article type" rather than "MEDRS compliant") but the issue of mistagged articles seems like it would be of, at best, minor importance. If we start encountering this as an issue in large numbers, it would suggest to me that:

1. we have make great strides in enforcing the secondary source requirement, so yay us
2. we should be in closer contact with the NLM people to let them know they have misclassified stuff.

-- UseTheCommandLine (talk) 18:07, 2 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding secondary sourcing requirement, Yes, and I have seen generally good enthusiasm for enforcement of their use lately from WP:MED. One of the reasons why I like contributing to WP:MED articles is that the sourcing is plentiful, easy to access, easier to evaluate, and you get support from fellow WP:MED members in application of WP:MEDRS.

What's so terrible about tertiary sourcing, at least for things like general overview information? WP:MEDRS talks about using textbooks.

Also, we can right now start simply adding extra fields to the cite templates. I'm pretty sure the renderer just ignores the extra fields, so you can put in "... |pubmed_type=review ..." right now, it just won't display.

Finally, I like the idea of producing tools to help us identify good sourcing. A few weeks ago I had actually proposed a "Journal Evaluation Tool" that had some of the elements you're talking about -- basically, automated pulling of information about a journal to help evaluate whether it would be useful. I can do some Python coding and have coded stuff for my own personal Wiki-use before, so from a technical standpoint I could have done the coding. Although there was sympathy for the general idea, it more or less got shot down because there was concern it would be used as a Yes/No source-evaluator without thought, and I abandoned it. I still like the idea of a tool that could help you gather the information needed to evaluate a source, but not do the evaluation for you. I imagine it could live on the toolserver or some place like that. Thoughts? Zad68 18:44, 2 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I think the problem with tertiary sources is that they don't always provide references themselves. From my perspective, you could make the case that if something is well-referenced as part of a textbook, then it's equivalent to a secondary source rather than tertiary. The issue for me always comes down to a sort of equivalent to chain-of-custody in the legal evidentiary process.

I can dink asround a little bit with python, but php and javascript make me break out in hives, and i don't know how to interface python with the browser. also, i am in school so don't have a lot of time to dig into coding. if this is of interest to you though, let's see if we can't come up with a proposal or RfC first? -- UseTheCommandLine (talk) 18:54, 2 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding the textbooks, I still think that they're perfectly wonderful to use for things like a general overview of something (let's say, the circulatory system), but they may not cover the most current scientific consensus on something (let's say, what the last three systematic reviews said about the effects of Drug X on heart rate), so if you're writing an article on Drug X, you'll use the textbook to give any needed background on the circulatory system, and the latest PUBMED systematic reviews for the most up to date scientific consensus on the drug's effects. Maybe WP:MEDRS could be updated to make this more clear if it's not.

I am interested... my previous attempt to go down this road asked generally, "What objective pieces of data are the most relevant things to pull in evaluating a source." I expected answers like: Is it MEDLINE indexed? What is the PUBMED type? Which journal is it published in? What is that journal's impact factor? Who published it? When was it published? etc... what else should we be collecting? Zad68 19:11, 2 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

i would argue against the inclusion of impact factor for a couple of reasons, but maybe this is a convo better had on our personal talk pages. I would say we should probably start an rfc there too.-- UseTheCommandLine (talk) 21:02, 2 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Yes a trial of 25 articles is an excellent idea. Who want to make a bot? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 01:02, 3 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Ooo oooo me me me pick me! I need help getting started and does one need any special permissions granted to them to make a bot? If so I need that too. Zad68 01:15, 3 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Wow Zad if you can make bots that would be wonderful. I in fact have a whole bunch of bot projects that I need help with. While send you more details. Yes one requires permission to make a WP:Bots. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 01:20, 3 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

So glad to see someone willing to tackle this. Related prior discussion at Help_talk:Citation_Style_1/Archive_1#.22type.22_field_in_template:cite_journal and linked from there. A few further thoughts: a database extract could be made which would be inclusive of all entries inside Cite error: There are <ref> tags on this page without content in them (see the help page). tags that give a pmid. Not all of these will be using {{cite journal}} etc. Lessons could probably be learned from reviewing the prior code on user:Citation bot and on user:Diberri's tool. LeadSongDog come howl! 04:36, 3 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

There are some problems with this proposal. I'm opposed to bloating templates with more metadata that don't concern our readers. The purpose of our citations is to direct readers to the source. Adding a "review" attribute, or "pubmed_type" attribute, that only concerns medical journals, just complicates things for all the non-medical articles and is yet another thing newbies have to get right. A Publication Type = "Review" isn't the only good type of source. There's also "Consensus Development Conference" and "Meta-Analysis" and possibly others. And there may be more than one publication type attribute on a PubMed indexed article. Conflating "Review = Secondary Source" is a mistake since determining whether a source is secondary always depends on the context: what text we draw from it. We need dispel the myth that our articles should be "ideally" be built from journal reviews. That's only one type of good source and simply reflects the ease-of-access that a minority of our editors have to online journals. For many of our articles on important big subjects, reviews are far too specialised and not nearly comprehensive enough. And unless one is writing an FA or working in a contentious subject, using or requiring the most recent and most academic of writings might be a hindrence to actually writing content.

A browser plug-in for hovering the mouse over PMIDs would perhaps do the trick and would work for templates and hand-written citations. It wouldn't suffer from the problem that an editor may include the wrong publication type for a give citation, due to copy/paste or perhaps deliberately. Every non-essential field in a citation template is a maintenance problem and a source of misinformation. Colin°^Talk 15:20, 3 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Darn you Colin and your sensible, thoughtful analysis! Don't you know how this works, we're supposed to just start coding and maybe figure out later what the requirements are.

Yeah, let's refocus on the real goal here, which I believe is having something to assist medical article reviewers evaluate the quality of sourcing in an article. I imagine the use-case for what we'd like is: You come across a WP:MED-scope article that hasn't seen serious development in the past four years and you decide you want to update it... or you even are looking at a new article created by an eager but inexperienced editor. You'd like something to help you go through the article's 123 references to see what kind of shape the article's sourcing is in. This kind of use case was the impetus behind the "Journal Evaluation Tool" I was considering a few weeks ago.

Instead of putting metadata tags in the templates themselves, let's consider a "Medical Article Source Evaluation Tool". It's an off-Wiki tool, you point it at an article, it sucks out all the sourcing in the refs and it gives you a table of all the sources and does its best to give you as much supplemental info about each source as it can. If there's a PMID it tries to pull relevant PUBMED data. If it's a book it tries to pull interesting data from Google Books. Etc.... The output would be something like we currently get from the "Checklinks" FA tool. It does not give you any up-or-down evaluation of each source, it just gives you the supplemental information you'd have to go get yourself by hand to do your own evaluation. Zad68 16:04, 3 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Another latent effort that should enter the thinking here is a check for retractions and other withdrawals. In a few cases we do need to cite withdrawn papers (e.g. Andrew Wakefield), but that is by far the exception. In most cases it should be a flag for further editorial action, if possible with a suggestion of a superceding source to use. I wouldn't much care about the means of doing so, except that structured data is much more maintainable than free text, particularly when we are talking of translating articles into eighty languages. If citation templates are the only structure we have for this, they'll have to do until something better comes along, even if that entails some bloat. From what I can tell, though, most of the template bloat relates to topic-navigation templates, which never did make much sense to me: they'd be better as seperate navigation articles rather than massive transclusions into every article in the subject area. LeadSongDog come howl! 16:30, 3 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The "external assessment tool" sounds pretty neat. I'd agree with Colin's cautions about adding anything new to the templates; these are already beginning to break on large pages, and any additional complexity for relatively limited benefit should be thought about quite carefully. Andrew Gray (talk) 16:49, 3 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe it could be added to this tool http://toolserver.org/~dispenser/cgi-bin/webchecklinks.py?page=Asthma Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 17:06, 3 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

There is an active RFC at circumcision, direct link is here: Talk:Circumcision#RFC. Your participation is always appreciated! Cheers... Zad68 03:05, 2 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Our article appears to have contained a fair bit of copy and pastes from a couple of years ago per [7]. I have reverted back to 2010. Could use more eyes and may be the creation of a bot to flag these sorts of issues before they sit without our article for two years. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 00:57, 3 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I gave an interview there about 6 months ago and they published a few comments here Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 13:37, 3 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

That's a good summary. Thank you for giving the interview. Axl ¤ [Talk] 10:04, 4 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Nice. --Anthonyhcole (talk) 10:29, 4 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Hi. I am currently in a fellowship and am interested in working on a project that contributes and surfaces information related to regional variations in standards of care by disease state. I have created a mock-up page, titled Hypertension in Scotland, that contains the type of information I am interested in working on in Wikipedia. I have realized that similar efforts are currently going on for HIV/AIDS by country (e.g. Category:HIV/AIDS by country). What's the best way for me to go about doing this? Thanks. GT67 (talk) 14:49, 3 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for posting here and welcome. First of all an in depth explanation of what you propose to do is probably the first thing needed. I am not sure what surfacing information means? Look at the link above are you proposing to create an article called Hypertension in Scotland than another called Hypertension in Wales, Hypertension in Canada, Hypertension in India etc? We typically have a main article and than subarticle based on our usual sections. Epidemiology in different places would be discussed in Epidemiology of hypertension, etc. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 15:17, 3 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I have talked with this user previously. By "surfacing information" he means that it would be good for users to be able to see standards of care in one place and compare it to the standard in another place. There need not be commentary or sources to back this; the sources for Scotland only talk about Scotland and for Canada would only talk about Canada, and users get to be surprised by seeing variations in the two places. In this model there is no system for discussing the differences overtly or pointing them out on Wikipedia because sources which do that would be much more difficult to find and format than the practice guidelines. A key aspect of this is that hopefully, sharing regional guidelines would be something which could be replicated in rote for multiple diseases in many regions. I believe that this user is able to replicate this kind of content if the Wikipedia community finds that it is useful. I also think that this could be the basis for starting discussions off-wiki about why there are regional variations in standards of care.

Another way to state the project proposal is that it is to collect a government's description of the standard care in a region, then describe in a Wikipedia article the care for that place only. This process is repeated for many diseases and regions. This is interesting only if there is regional variation in standards of care, which there are, and I think that users would be fascinated to see that differences exist.

I see these problems with this model:

1. Wikipedia often does not have high quality general articles on health issues, so developing articles on particular regional variations may not be a priority.
2. It is not certain that sources describing care in a particular region will be easily found. Knowing that sources exist would make engaging this project a lot easier.
3. It may not be easy to give all articles parallel structure. I would like to think that the information in one article, say hypertension in Scotland, could be compared with hypertension information for another region. However, this depends how easy it is to identify comparable information in the various sets of source data.

If this project were to proceed, I can imagine there being a section in the base article for a topic which was called "regional variation". This would link to a list of all existing articles on standards of care by region. This could be a lot of work requiring skilled workers, or it could be something which could be done by rote if the source data was understandable and if a model template existed.

About epidemiology - many regions track their own epidemiology. The one to which James linked is sufficient for the base article on hypertension, but there is data for many individual countries. No one has ever thought to add each countries' own statistics to Wikipedia because we had enough trouble just giving one global measurement. Undoubtedly this project would be forking each existing health article into a dozen or even a hundred more articles.

If it really were feasible to incorporate this sort of information into Wikipedia then I think that would radically improve the quality of health articles on Wikipedia in a way that only Wikipedia and not other communication platforms could deliver. The potential for interlinking in this way would be very difficult to do outside of Wikipedia and this is a novel and very creative idea. I think that this idea deserves consideration. Blue Rasberry (talk) 15:56, 3 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Sure a better example is here Epidemiology_of_obesity. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 16:31, 3 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

That is a much better example... wow, this is very close to the original proposal. I will have to think about that. Blue Rasberry (talk) 16:53, 3 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your feedback. I'd be happy to clarify further. Blue Rasberry has expanded on the key points well. I've learned that many countries view and/or tackle disease states differently, whether it be due to cultural, societal, economic or other reasons, and this type of information is not readily available for all to view in one standardized place. The mock-up article I created, is an example only, of the facets of information that can vary. To add to Blue Rasberry 's comments on 'surfacing information', perhaps patients and patients advocates at the local level of these regions would have notable resources that are available/visible to them that perhaps may not be to the rest of us. Doc James's example of Epidemiology of Obesity speaks to the notion of surfacing a facet of the regional standards of care and I've also seen the Management of Obesity article, which could potentially have the same notion of regionalization applied. I could also envision articles to fork into other facets such as Diagnosis by region as well. I've also seen the format used in the Category:HIV/AIDS_by_country, which stems from the Portal link of each country's articles page (see 'Health in China' in Portal:China page) and seems to mash together information into one article location. Both of these are great examples for structuring regional variations. I'd be interested to know which type of article structure would be deemed most editor- and user-friendly. GT67 (talk) 18:11, 3 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

IMO each subarticle could deal with national variations as it pertains to that subtopic. This would allow people to more easily compare different stats or practices in different countries. Typically this is too much detail for the main articles. These articles often already exist and could simply be added to. I am not a big fan of "disease in X" format as it is not clear how they would be linked in. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 19:51, 3 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

@GT67. Is it possible you could improve unwarranted variation? Biosthmors (talk) 20:54, 4 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

@Biosthmors. You bring up a good point. Surfacing information around regional variations in care may help discern where unwarranted variation exists. One could envision this sort of information to populate and look something similar to John Wennberg's work at the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care, but on a global-regional, scale. And one could argue that with this sort of information organizations, similar to the NCQA in the U.S., could potentially be a vehicle for improving some of these variations. However, determining the route cause of the unwarranted variation is debatable. GT67 (talk) 18:45, 5 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

@Doc James. I believe I understand what you have in mind. I'm going to mock-up some articles and see if the structure is on par with what you are thinking. Thanks. GT67 (talk) 18:45, 5 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Hi. I recently made a lot of redirects from Latin terms to medical (mainly anatomical) articles. So far I have not tag these redirects in anyway, but it would be smart if these where. That way other wiki-projects such as e.g. Wikidoc and similar projects outside of wikipedia could simply copy/paste redirects for medical subjects in the free-licens spirit without having to start from scrath. Also it would be possible to systematic review such redirects and so on...

A: Is there any tag I can put on the talk page of these redirect similar to the {{WikiProject Medicine|class=disambig} we have on disambigues pages?

B: If such tag exist or is created (I have absolutely no idee how this is done). Is there an semi-automated way to add this tag and perhabs {{R from alternative language|la}} resulting in Category:Redirects from Latin language terms to at least the redirects I made (I have more than 2500 on my watchpage; if my watchpage could be "loaded" into a semi-automated browser-thingy).

I hope my questions make sence otherwise please ask. --JakobSteenberg (talk) 00:00, 4 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This sounds like a good idea. You have populated Category:Redirects from Latin language terms with a large number of Latin terms which each redirect to a Wikipedia article. Many of these terms are still in use and all of them were used in recent English-language history so it is important that they exist on English Wikipedia.

The problem is that there should be some kind of record or accounting of these terms as with any other health page on Wikipedia, and to do that, there should be some kind of template on the talk page. However, there might not be an existing template which can serve this purpose, and also, you want a bot to apply the template to all of the items in the category because 2500 items is to many to do manually. All items in the category would have the same template applied to them. The template could be used as a tool to manage as a subsection of WikiProject Medicine, much in the same way that we have a cardiology task force and so many other things here. Is this a correct restatement of your proposal? If so, I propose the following:

1. This seems like a novel idea and a bigger than average project. Can other people say whether this is reasonable?
2. If this is reasonable and there is no existing template, then we should make one. Probably a task force parameter on the WikiProject Medicine would be best.
3. Once the template is created, I think we can ask someone for help getting a bot to apply the template to all pages within the category.

Thoughts? Blue Rasberry (talk) 17:06, 4 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

One apparently exist! With the code {{WikiProject Medicine|class=redirect}} this comes up.

Medicine Unassessed

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Medicine. Please visit the project page for details or ask questions at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Medicine.MedicineWikipedia:WikiProject MedicineTemplate:WikiProject Medicinemedicine articles ??? This article has not yet received a rating on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. ??? This article has not yet received a rating on the project's importance scale.

But should it be subdiveded as we do with e.g. the cardiology task force under the Medicine-category. Sub-categories could be Nomina anatomica, English synomyns and so on. I am only asking since I am not very interested in adding one category to the 2500 redirects and then go back an change it latter. JakobSteenberg (talk) 19:24, 4 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Anatomy is outside WPMED's scope. So that's all correct, except that you should be using {{WPAN|class=Redirect}} instead of {WPMED... to do the job for the anatomy names. We take the non-anatomy ones. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:26, 5 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

{{WPAN}} was not previously set up for the redirect class, but I just added that functionality...so {{WikiProject Anatomy|class=redirect}} will now properly categorize articles in to Category:Redirect-Class Anatomy articles.

Setting the technical aspects aside (they can be figured out later), there's a larger item to consider first: are you categorizing these redirects for ease of maintenance/keeping track of them, or to be a browsable part of the Wiki by readers. This differentiation would determine whether categorization should occur in the (article) namespace (as in categories like Category:Redirects from Latin language terms) or the Talk namespace (within Category:Redirect-Class Anatomy articles). You could also do both. Categorization by origin of term I believe is worth of inclusion in the (article) namespace, and it is not something to do within a WikiProject. But that doesn't mean you couldn't also add the WikiProject banner to the talk pages (but I would not create a task force-like categorization for this). You should read through Wikipedia:Categorizing redirects. I think #Categorization of multiple taxonomies is the most relevant section. Another question is, are there actual articles with titles using Nomina Anatomica that you would want to include in this category. In other words, should the category be titled "Redirects from Nomina Anatomica terms" or "Nomina Anatomica names of structures"? After you decide what the categories should be named (which would reflect their content), then we can figure out how to get the pages into the categories (ie via template or just adding the category). --Scott Alter (talk) 16:59, 5 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

First, thanks for the answers. Second, I must say this discussion just got a bit too technical for me but I will try to respond the best way I can. As an example of what I am trying to do I will use a {{WikiProject Anatomy|class=redirect}}, the common iliac vein:

I use Nomina Anatomica terms in my daily life meaning I use the Latin term instead of common iliac vein, so I set up an redirect from vena iliaca communis, because I do not know/can not remember the term common iliac vein but still would like to access the English Wikipedia. Lets say somebody comes along who (writes a program or whatever and) copies all articles tagged {{WikiProject Anatomy|class=}}, moves them to a different sites and improves them. They can however not take the redirects I made from Latin since these are not marked and hence impossible to find among redirects from common birds names and so on. Again, now I can not access the common iliac vein because I only know it by the term vena iliaca communis. The same goes with English synonyms. With this example in mind I would think the {{WikiProject Anatomy|class=redirect}} on the talk page would be sufficient. Would you agree?

However, since I am going to but this project-tag on lets say all anatomical redirects in the English Wikipedia. Would it be smart (for some reason I can not think of) sub-divide these into Latin terms and English synonyms?

I am not sure why anyone would go into a category such as Category:Redirects from Latin language terms unless they for some reason was going trough them to see if there are correct. So I would say no on the browsing part unless somebody have a good reason.

I hoped I brought clarity to at least some of your questions. JakobSteenberg (talk) 17:43, 5 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Usually, someone wouldn't try to do that. If you wanted all the anatomy articles, you'd copy all the files in the category tree under Category:Anatomy, which includes any redirect with a proper categorization (WP:DERM does it best). If you wanted the redirects, then you'd scrape anything that Special:WhatLinksHere turns up, like these for Common iliac vein.

A WikiProject is a group of volunteers. A WikiProject banner means that this or that group is interested in helping out with that page. It's not meant to provide useful information for outside users. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:05, 6 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Although you say you say the WikiProject banner tagging is sufficient for what you want, you description of potential use fits with the opposite. Stating that you "use Nomina Anatomica terms in [your] daily life" and are looking to categorize them all together to find easily, fits with creating a category like "Nomina Anatomica names of structures". You want the redirects to be categorized by nomenclature to be easily to find - not for maintenance of pages by editors (which is what WikiProjects are for). And rather than just categorizing the redirects, I'd imagine that including actual articles with titles matching the NA (or TA) name should be in the same category. Essentially, this would be a new hierarchy for categorizing anatomy articles, in which I think adding categories to the redirect pages themselves is the best way to go (not the talk pages, unless you also want to add them for WPAN to follow).

As an aside, how similar are Nomina Anatomica and Terminologia Anatomica? If categorization by anatomic naming scheme is going to be performed, I'd think going based off the most recent accepted scheme (TA) would be best. I'm not familiar with NA, but I found TA online. After seeing TA, if it is in the public domain or its copyright enables it to be reproduced on Wikipedia, there is another option. Similar to the ATC lists for drugs (ex ATC code N03) and ICD lists for diseases (ex ICD-10 Chapter IX: Diseases of the circulatory system), maybe Terminologia Anatomica can be expanded to include the TA terms linked to the common-name articles. If this is legal, it might be the best and most comprehensive way. --Scott Alter (talk) 03:22, 6 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I still must say that I have a bit of trouble following the creating a category like "Nomina Anatomica names of structures" with the tagging on the article page. Such a category would contain the same number of points as there are anatomical articles on wikipedia as every thing has a NA and TA name (cauda equina have however as en example kept its NA name in the TA system). But since such a list would not function as a dictionary, so I kind of fail to see the point.

With regards to titles matching the NA (or TA) name; all articles on should use be named by their TA name (I have only seen a couple of examples who are not, most likely created by non-native english speakers who use NA)

NA terms are already included in most anatomical articles (under Latin in infobox). Some are quite similar e.g. (TA) Greater trochanter vs. (NA) Trochanter major while other are miles apart.

But would it in any way be counterproductive to start adding {{WikiProject Anatomy|class=redirect}} and/or {{WikiProject Medicine|class=redirect}} to the talk pages of redirects? ...If any extra tags (perhaps on the article/redirect-page) should be added later then these are at least easier to find. In a way my original question is; should I just start to add these tags to litteraly a couple of thousinds redirect-pages as something to with the laptop in front of me wathing TV or would it be smartest to do anything first so I (or anybody else that matter) would not have to do it all over (I truly have no grand plan for changing the underlying structure to Wikipedia, just looking for a semi-productive mindless task to do while wathing TV). I hope, I at least partly aswered some of the return questions and made my thought clear and again thank you for replying. JakobSteenberg (talk) 16:00, 6 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Such a category would contain the same number of points as there are anatomical articles on wikipedia

What's wrong with that?

There is nothing counterproductive to adding the WPAN banner to redirects. It just won't be as useful to someone specifically seeking NA or TA names as the category would be. We create redirects for all kinds of things, including misspellings and odd capitalizations. As for adding thousands of banners, which sounds like a repetitive stress injury situation, if you could come up with a complete list, we ought to be able to find a WP:BOT that would actually tag them. For that matter, it could tag both the WPAN banner and add the category, if that's what we would like. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:55, 7 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Originally posted here[8], following up on this page per recommendations there.

Due to some unfortunate family circumstances I found myself reading everything I could find on percutaneous vertebroplasty a few nights ago. I added the best reference I found to the article and tucked it away on my watchlist to come back to later. A new editor came through shortly afterwards and, although the formatting was a wreck, he appeared to know what he was talking about. I engaged him, and he turns out to be an expert in this area (although definitely not in wikipedia editing). We're talking by email.

Rather than hand him a stack of policy pages to read I think it would be much more efficient to show him an exemplary medical article and say "Do it this way" (filling in policy as needed). What would you suggest for a unusually good article on a medical procedure that has a fair bit of actual controversy surrounding it? (By actual controversy I mean that there are very solid – and conflicting – secondary sources.)

Also, if you know of someone who works on medical articles and doesn't have enough to do already I could probably use another set of eyes on this.

Thanks much,

GaramondLethe 01:36, 4 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks I have now watched the page as it seems to have fallen off my watch list. Some companies are pushing this procedure very forcefully. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 12:51, 4 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Here are some WP:Good articles on medical procedures: Bates method – Birth control – Brachytherapy – Coffin birth – Condom – Mental status examination – Tracheal intubation.

Perhaps one of them will seem useful to you. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:31, 5 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Doc James, thanks for taking a look. I've pointed the new editor to your comments and expect he'll be replying within a day or so. WhatamIdoing, the tracheal intubation article in particular looks like a good model to follow. I really appreciate you suggesting it. Best, GaramondLethe 05:21, 5 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Hi!

Could you please help to review and suggest any changes on my article which was just accepted as a new wikipedia article?

Functional magnetic resonance spectroscopy of the brain

Wikipedia reviewers are particularly concerned about the overlap between my article and In vivo magnetic resonance spectroscopy article. But I am sure that these need to be separate articles with links to each other.

Any comments appreciated.

Dcdace (talk) 16:48, 4 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Where are these reviewers expressing their concerns? Both talk pages are essentially empty. Resting state fMRI is a relatively new article. Event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging exists. Why "spectroscopy" instead if "imaging"? What's the difference between fMRI and fMRS, in other words? Biosthmors (talk) 20:51, 4 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I talked with reviewers on the help desk. Spectroscopy is different technique than imaging. Imaging gives information (an image) of water density, blood oxygenation, or some other single marker. Spectroscopy gives spectrum (not an image) of many chemical compounds in the studied region. fMRI and fMRS are two very different techniques. Dcdace (talk) 11:55, 5 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the clarification. How about putting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:FMRS_of_lactate.png at the top of the article and clarifying that in a picture caption and in the lead, perhaps? If you would like comments on the article I could provide them at the talk page. I was wondering though, is this article an WP:AFSE? Thanks again. Biosthmors (talk) 00:30, 6 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Also, why are you certain two articles are necessary when the lead of in vivo magnetic resonance spectroscopy says "MRS ... is a non-invasive analytical technique that ... stud[ies] metabolic changes in ... the brain." Please understand the reasons given at Wikipedia:Merge#Reasons_for_merger before you reply. How do you think we should proceed? Biosthmors (talk) 00:44, 6 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Biosthmors, thanks for your feedback. I made small changes in the introduction and put the image at the top. Hope it makes the subject clearer now. I agree the best way would be to put all comments at the article's talk page.

The article was started as my assignment within APS-Wikipedia Initiative. I am studying Neuroimaging and doing my MSc project on fMRS. This is relatively new but important technique in the study of brain function and is gaining more and more interest and delivering promising results. It is a technique in its own right. Topic selection was approved by the module organizer and encouraged by my supervisor who is an expert in this field.

fMRS is an extension of In vivo MRS. However, in my view, both topics need to have separate articles same way as MRI and fMRI and other MRI techniques have different articles. MRS is not looking at metabolite changes during the function unlike fMRS. MRS looks at snapshot information. The MRS article is not well written at the moment, in my view. Yes, it is written there "used to study metabolic changes", however what is meant by "changes" there is changes between different states of illness, changes between healthy and sick tissue, longitudinal changes. But NOT changes during brain function within few seconds to few minutes of temporal resolution while subject is inside the scanner. It is similar to MRI vs fMRI. MRI can be used to study changes in brain anatomy, but not during brain function. The focus of ‘snapshot’ studies and functional studies is different.

fMRS is a developing area and even if MRS and fMRS articles were merged now, after some time it would be necessary to split them. MRS itself is broad subject and if described properly would result in a relatively long article. Dcdace (talk) 12:47, 7 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:Peer review/Circumcision/archive1 by Zad68 and Wikipedia:Peer review/Bronchitis/archive1 by TylerDurden8823. Circumcision appears closer to GA-class than bronchitis, which appears most held back by an over-reliance on tertiary sources. (Tyler is already aware of this shortcoming.) Maybe developing a list of good secondary sources (and identifying missing content) at the PR for bronchitis would be best there. Thanks. Biosthmors (talk) 23:29, 4 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Hi folks! Starting Monday there will be a weeklong lecture series/editathon for medical students and faculty at University of California San Francisco. This was brilliantly set up by UCSF med student User:Michaelturken and will be attended by Doc James and myself as our first official Wiki Med(icine) event. UCSF has shown some interest in integrating Wikipedia into either a separate elective or even potentially a curriculum component. I wanted to give you all a heads up in case a) any of you are in the SF area and want to drop in or b) if there's an influx of new editors introducing themselves, joining the WikiProject, or asking questions about drafts and sources next week. This should be a really neat event and hopefully just the start of outreach to medical schools. Cheers, Ocaasi ^{t | c} 03:44, 5 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

What is the best target for hyperbaric chamber? At present we have two different targets, depending upon whether the second word is capitalised or not - see Hyperbaric Chamber and Hyperbaric chamber. Clearly, having them different can be confusing. It occurs to me that we should base the choice upon the the primary use of such chambers - for medicine, or for diving. Then we can fix up some of the redirects of Hyperbaric medicine and Diving chamber. --Redrose64 (talk) 21:05, 5 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

"Chamber" certainly should not be capitalized. It is not a proper noun. The use of hyperbaric chambers in diving is, in a sense, medical. The purpose is to prevent and/or treat harmful effects that can arise. Axl ¤ [Talk] 23:25, 5 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Capitalisation is not the issue. The redirect Hyperbaric Chamber has existed for over seven years, so is not a recent creation that we might want to speedy delete (but it is eligible for WP:RFD).

The question is about whether the two redirects should have the same target, or continue to have different targets; and if they should be the same, which is the most appropriate? --Redrose64 (talk) 23:58, 5 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I redirected Hyperbaric Chamber to diving chamber because diving chamber incorporates hyperbaric chamber into its lead, etc. as the same topic. Biosthmors (talk) 00:26, 6 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

There is a problem of sorts. As far as I am aware, hyperbaric chambers became common for treatment of decompression illness and for surface recompression of commercial saturation divers - the former is clearly medical treatment; the latter is definitely not, but both are diving-related (hence the "diving chamber" epithet). However, their use to administer hyperbaric oxygen therapy has, over time, found value in treatment of gas gangrene, carbon monoxide poisoning, and other ailments which are not diving-related. So the question is, should the article be titled hyperbaric chamber, with diving chamber as a redirect? --RexxS (talk) 03:22, 6 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Agree that "hyperbaric chamber" is the more appropriate title, because "diving chamber" is a specific application of the former. -- Scray (talk) 04:11, 6 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Agree with Scray and RexxS that diving chamber is a specific application of hyperbaric chamber, however the current article on diving chambers includes equipment that might not ordinarily be thought of as hyperbaric chambers, such as open diving bells. There is probably sufficient scope for two articles. Diving chamber, as it is currently arranged, and Hyperbaric chamber, for both diving and medical chambers which are closed and pressurised to higher than ambient pressure as a standard operating procedure. Pressurised aircraft and spacecraft are an interesting complication, probably best dealt with by a hatnote or small explanatory paragraph, as most people would not look for them under either of the titles suggested above. • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 05:47, 7 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

someone should study this as it applies to the consensus process on wikipedia — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tepi (talk • contribs) 16:40, 6 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This comment doesn't seem to contribute much to WPMED. Without additional context, I would respond that I see plenty of exploration of alternative views, discussion (sometimes too much...), and this if anything can slow content generation but overall it's healthy; so, it's not at all like Groupthink, IMHO - WP editors really don't seem to avoid confrontation. I'm sure there are instances that look like Groupthink, and if you wish to engage us to address such a situation, you'll need to provide some context. -- Scray (talk) 17:03, 6 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I occasionally disagree with my fellow editors. Even the ones I consider friends. I do not think groupthink is really applicable here. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 18:32, 6 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with Scray and James. -- Colin°^Talk 19:12, 6 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

very funny...lesion (talk) 19:14, 6 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This seems to be a reaction to some frustration with a disagreement happening somewhere else. You should try to address this directly, instead of creating this rather puzzling section on a public project discussion area mostly read by editors uninvolved in whatever dispute is causing you grief. Zad68 19:23, 6 January 2013 (UTC) _{I disagree with Scray, James & Colin. Axl ¤ [Talk] 20:25, 6 January 2013 (UTC)} [reply]

Yes :-) Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 20:34, 6 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

there is no recent grief, this was just general observation. lesion (talk) 20:52, 6 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Just noticed that Medical certificate is Wikipedia:Today's article for improvement. Its not tagged as part of the project yet either, maybe it shouldn't - we could end up with a whole heap of paperwork! looks like it is superceded in about a weeks time. Lee∴V (talk • contribs) 21:21, 6 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I've assessed it as a stub. The article is an unref'd, single section, ten-sentence, one-image stub. Any improvement or expansion will justify re-rating as Start-class.

For others not familiar with this, a medical certificate is informally called "a note from your doctor". It might say you were too sick to go to school (a sick note: why do we have a separate article?) or that you're healthy (medical clearance) or it might be used for legal purposes (certifying that the person really did have his arm broken in the motor vehicle collision).

People interested in airplanes (pilots must submit one for their licenses) might also be interested in helping, if anyone wants to find those WikiProjects. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:13, 7 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

FYI, I have just nominated circumcision for Good Article. If we can get this one to GA it will be WP:MED's first surgical procedure article to be either GA or FA. The article is an English Wikipedia top-1,000 most-viewed article. Zad68 22:14, 6 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Currently, there is a disagreement and edit warring at chiropractic over WP:COI and WP:POV. There is an RfC for input: Chiropractic RfC Cantaloupe2 (talk) 11:05, 7 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

In general, if you want to get responses to an RFC, you need to ask a specific question, not just say there have been some disputes and wonder whether anyone has suggestions.

As far as I can tell, the dispute is whether being a licensed medical professional constitutes a COI for articles about that medical profession. What's next? Nurses aren't allowed to edit Nursing? Surgeons aren't allowed to edit Surgery? This is so obviously a silly position that I have to assume that someone's trying to use COI as a means of topic-banning editors whose POV differs from his own. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:58, 7 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]