Akashicorca

Welcome to Wikipedia from the Medicine WikiProject!

Welcome to Wikipedia and WikiProject Medicine

Welcome to Wikipedia from WikiProject Medicine (also known as WPMED).

We're a group of editors who strive to improve the quality of medical articles here on Wikipedia. One of our members has noticed that you are interested in editing medical articles; it's great to have a new interested editor on board. In your wiki-voyages, a few things that may be relevant to editing Wikipedia articles are:

• Thanks for coming aboard! We always appreciate a new editor. Feel free to leave us a message at any time on our talk page. If you are interested in joining the project yourself, there is a participant list where you can sign up. Please leave a message on the WPMED talk page if you have any problems, suggestions, would like review of an article, need suggestions for articles to edit, or would like some collaboration when editing!
• Sourcing of medical and health-related content on Wikipedia is guided by our medical sourcing guidelines, commonly referred to as MEDRS. These guidelines typically require recent secondary sources to support information; their application is further explained here. Primary sources (case studies, case reports, research studies) are rarely used, especially if the primary sources are produced by the organisation or individual who is promoting a claim.
• The Wikipedia community includes a wide variety of editors with different interests, skills, and knowledge. We all manage to get along through a lot of discussion that happens under the scenes and through the bold, revert, discuss editing cycle. If you encounter any problems, you can discuss them on an article's talk page or post a message on the WPMED talk page.

Feel free to drop a note on my talk page if you have any problems. I wish you all the best on your wiki voyages! Zefr (talk) 02:14, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

Elderberry edit

On my talk page, you said: "I was editing an article on a tree. I don't have a particular interest in Wikipedia's medicine articles at the moment. Whereas I see that the Medicine WikiProject outlines make sense for a clean, easy to read article, I also feel that they invite cultural bias. Something that I hope English Wikipedia, with time, will grow out of.

As the section I was editing was about was about historical uses by humans for this tree, I see no need to invite the opinions or attention given to said tree by large modern medical organizations unless there is a well known and established recognition by such organizations. I hardly even see the need for the links I provided: modern scientific trials that show the potential efficacy of traditional uses. I did however think they were of interest. The removal of my links and then replacing them with a link to a medical organization disregards the basic reality that the article is about a tree and the medical organization you gave a link to has no established relationship to this particular variety of tree.

If you feel that people should really be informed on the opinion or lack of opinion on North American public medicine vs trees, perhaps there is a better forum out there, or you could start one. It is impossible to test all of the potential combinations of all the constituent chemicals of all the plants on all of the humans. It as least certainly won't happen in our lifetimes. This challenge has already been talked about by pharmaceutical companies and ethnobotanists alike. Mark Plotkin has some good stories about this.

I wholly encourage you to help separate articles on trees from articles on medicine unless unless there is an established, documented precedent to do so. For example Cinchona and Quinine."

Sources for the Medicine Wikiproject are high-quality systematic reviews published in journals with substantial impact factors, if available. When an edit is made about the medicinal properties of a tree, like yours here implying antiviral properties of elderberry extracts, the source(s) must reflect a high degree of sourcing and certainty for fact. Your edit did not, as the sources offered are preliminary clinical research. If you will edit further on medical properties in the future, I provided the medical content sourcing guide as a way to help select the best background for readers. Good luck! --Zefr (talk) 04:58, 17 November 2018 (UTC)