Cgorman4
Hey There
editThanks for the puppy! It reminds me of my slide on the last day of Intro to Clinical when I show the girl running in a meadow and then some puppies. Nice choice!Prof Haeffel (talk) 02:34, 24 January 2018 (UTC)
Hi!
editPuppies rock!!! nice choice Annaleisg (talk) 15:03, 24 January 2018 (UTC)
A kitten for you!
editHi!
Evelyn
Emcmanus1 (talk) 23:49, 24 January 2018 (UTC)
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DYK nomination of Intuitive eating
editHello! Your submission of Intuitive eating at the Did You Know nominations page has been reviewed, and some issues with it may need to be clarified. Please review the comment(s) underneath your nomination's entry and respond there as soon as possible. Thank you for contributing to Did You Know! Innisfree987 (talk) 00:45, 18 May 2018 (UTC)
Editing about health and medicine
editHi Cgorman4. About your note at AfD.
There is a whole infrastructure here in WP that is meant to help teachers work in Wikipedia with their classes, which is run by a nonprofit called the Wikipedia Education Program. For some reason your teacher has shunned working with them. But the materials they have created are available for anybody. The main training page is here, and if you look, you will see that they have generated a training module especially for editing about health. You might find that useful too.
What I have to say, is...
So what we aim to do in Wikipedia, is to summarize accepted knowledge. The genre here is "encyclopedia article". The genre is not "literature review", which is what you wrote.
Here we find accepted knowledge where experts in the field place it. For health and medicine, this is recent reviews in high quality sources, and statements by major medical and scientific bodies (for example, clinical guidelines published by the major colleges of medicine (not medical schools - we mean like American College of Cardiology); also the WHO, the NIH itself, the NHS in the UK etc.
We are not trying to catalog what every review ever published says, (and certainly not mention every primary source!) but rather summarize accepted knowledge. Just find two or three very high quality reviews that are aiming to summarize for the field "hey here is what we know and don't know", and summarize them, giving emphasis as they do.
It is hard to get used to, I know.
Generally, every kind of article has a related style guide, that talks about what kinds of things we usually include, and what we don't. We don't have a style guide for diet advice per se, but something structured roughly along the lines of Surgeries and procedures would be reasonable (there is stuff listed there that of course doesn't fit). The Mediterranean diet article is not bad. The body of the article summarizes the health effects, describes the diet itself, and gives the history. That is reasonable.
If you like, please read:
- WP:EXPERT (which tries to explain what we do here, and how it is different from normal academic writing)
- User:Jytdog/How which I wrote to try to orient people
- WP:MEDMOS (our style guide for writing about health)
- WP:MEDHOW which has lots of great tips
- WP:MEDRS which describes in lots of detail what kind of sources are OK.
Start with great sources, and summarize them! That is what we do here. Jytdog (talk) 05:11, 23 May 2018 (UTC)
- Hi, Jytdog, thank you so much for your note, and for all of these resources. I really appreciate your efforts to help the newcomer. You are quite right that this is hard to get used to!
- All of these resources are things I will certainly take into account in the future. I would like to raise a few points, which I hope will not be construed as argumentative but rather as food for thought and opportunities for reflection, since I know that you are highly influential on Wikipedia and hold sway over how policies are enforced.
- First of all, my professor provided us extensive information, education, and feedback throughout the entirety of the Wikipedia editing process, so to conclude that any of my edits' problems have resulted from my professor's decisions would be a mischaracterization I hope to dispel. I hope that this point will not inspire further response but will rather "set the record straight."
- I think that a lot of my surprise arose when the article was placed in the medicine project, as the topic prior to my edits remained under only "Food and Drink" for 12 years. But I understand why it has been reclassified. However, I do have some questions about whether the MEDRS and MEDMOS guidelines can be rigidly and reasonably applied when dealing with topics that relate mostly tangentially to the medical field. For example, the bulk of my edits before reversion covered the theory and measurement of intuitive eating. As someone very interested in psychology, I was most concerned with providing an explanation of how this whole idea came about in the first place, what the idea really is, how it is expected to operate in relation to other psychological constructs, and how we can possibly quantify something that seems so "wishy washy," as I like to say. Unlike the Mediterranean diet article, or many of the other diets included in Wikipedia, a lot of the scientific interest in intuitive eating comes from its theoretical underpinnings and implications rather than its guidelines, macronutrient components, etc. Articles with a theoretical emphasis on Wikipedia are not unprecedented; in fact, this encyclopedia is full of them. However, it seems to me that now any article focused on psychological theory with any implications for physical health will need to be stripped due to their violation of MEDMOS depending on a single tag that can be placed on the article relatively arbitrarily. Again, as someone interested in psychology, I can definitely say that would be a real shame and loss for the entire encyclopedia.
- I have one more comment, which I hope is not too metaphysical. It has become clear to me that there exists a fundamental distrust of scientific researchers, particularly in the field of psychology. I understand concerns about experts' biases influencing findings in any field. However, there seems to be an underlying assumption embedded in Wikipedia's policies that literature reviews eliminate the influence of this bias. If I am not mistaken (which I very well could be, as I am learning more and more every day but still have a long way to go), literature reviews are also written by scientists who inevitably have their own implicit biases, as we all do. To eliminate all biases is an impossible task. At the end of the day, that seems like the great advantage of collaboration at a place like this. As you say, one editor can pick out 2-3 literature reviews, and summarize them well. Actually, intuitive eating has enough literature reviews to do this, and other editors could supplement it over time. That is one reason why I do not understand why the page is up for deletion. If there is concern about the quality of literature reviews available, that again raises my concerns about how topics tangentially related to medicine may be faced with MEDRS requirements as a means of exclusion. For example, you list the NEJM as an example of a reliable medical source in your own instructions, which I certainly appreciate, but considering it is a truly medical journal, it is difficult to imagine anything like intuitive eating, currently concerned far more with psychological wellbeing than metabolic markers and physiological health, gaining coverage, not due necessarily to valuations of scientific validity but rather probably due to its current lack of attention from the medical field. However, it seems like attention from the field of psychology lends to the topic's notability instead and merits its place on Wikipedia.
- Thank you again for all of your feedback and for your devotion to making Wikipedia better. Cgorman4 (talk) 13:44, 23 May 2018 (UTC)
- I am sorry to say that based on what I have seen your teacher's grasp on the fundamentals of WP is kind of weak. So we have a blind leading the blind kind of scenario. I don't want to belabor this.
- About the article as it was when you came to it. As is obvious, WP is open to everyone, and random people come here and do stuff. Over time other people come across things, and change them. Sometimes for the worse, sometimes for the better - intentionally or unintentionally. Any bit of content is only as good (or as bad) as the last person who worked on it, left it.
- The result is... decidedly uneven. Not necessarily rational, nor aligned with mission, policies, and guidelines of WP. Sometimes, shockingly commonly, it is very good.
- About the classification of the page. So the MEDRS thing is a bit of a red herring in this discussion. WP:SCIRS says basically the same thing. That essay leaves more wiggle room about using primary sources, because there are people in the hard sciences (mostly physics) who feel strongly that the primary literature (research papers) in their field are very, very reliable, but the notion of secondary sources is there too.
- Using secondary sources is deep in the guts of WP. It goes to the mission, and our role here as editors not experts authoring mini-reviews ourselves, based on our authority. I have a thing on my userpage focused just on that, at User:Jytdog#NPOV_part_1:_secondary_sources.
- Your sense that "there exists a fundamental distrust of scientific researchers," is not accurate, at least for me, and I am sorry you have that impression. WP values the real world production of the scientific community very much -- WP exists to summarize all knowledge, including that of the scientific community.
- What I think you are perhaps confusing is what is given authority here in WP, and what is not, with some kind of "distrust". What has authority here in WP, are the mission of WP, the policies and guidelines and sources.
- What has no authority here, is an an editor saying, "I say that X should be in the article, because I am a scientist." We just don't care about such claims. We ignore them. Individuals don't have authority here based on who they say they are, in the real world. Ignoring such claims of authority, is different from "a fundamental distrust of scientific researchers." Its the difference between moral, immoral, and amoral (or theist, atheist, and agnostic). Like the last three in each of those series, we are a-individual-authority. We just don't care about an individual's claim to authority based on their own knowledge. There was a different project that branched off from WP in the early days, that tried to base authority on real world experts. It was called Nupedia. That is not what we do here.
- That said, experts in any field, including scientists, can be highly valued contributors. If somebody who is an expert gets oriented to the mission and the policies and guidelines, they can be amazingly productive and efficient contributors, and they come to be high respected in the community, as editors who have what we call WP:CLUE who are also real world experts.
- About the deletion nomination. My nomination is essentially a WP:TNT one. I think there probably ~could~ be an article. If you read my nomination, you will see that it contains this link, which is a search of Pubmed (which indexes far more than strictly medical content) for "Intuitive eating", limited to reviews. I haven't gone through all those to see if they are decent quality journals and to weed out any predatory publishers, but there may be enough there for somebody to generate decent content from. There may be other reviews in high quality journals not indexed by MEDLINE that may show up in PsycNET.
- If you are really committed to there being good content in WP about intuitive eating, I suggest waiting for the AfD to close. If it closes "no consensus and the page is kept, you can revise it. If it is closed "delete" you can do a new page, which I suggest you do draft space, and put through WP:AFC.
- I hope that all makes sense. Jytdog (talk) 15:39, 23 May 2018 (UTC)
- Thank you for your clarification and all of your time. Cgorman4 (talk) 16:23, 23 May 2018 (UTC)
- I hope that all makes sense. Jytdog (talk) 15:39, 23 May 2018 (UTC)
Science, fringe theories, and the development of Wikipedia content policies
editHey CGorman4! So, Jytdog has covered a lot of what I would point you to, and probably in a way that is more concrete/practical than mine! But in case it's helpful to hear from a slightly different angle, I thought I'd share a bit of Wikipedia history that I found really useful when I was first trying to understand the general orientation of the project.
In its early days, Wikipedia was besieged by fringe theories, particularly in the domain of physics. As I understand it, some actual physicists had shown up excited to contribute to the then-new public knowledge project--but they found their volunteer hours devoured just responding to stuff that had no scientific credibility, and it severely cut into time for what they were actually here to do, namely describe legitimate science for the public. It was a problem in terms of actually getting encyclopedia entries written, and it was a problem for retention of good editors who were also subject-matter experts (because if you're a scientist taking time away from your original research to contribute to public knowledge, unpaid, but instead you find all that time goes to arguing with cranks...you're not going to stick around.) So a system grew up to deal with this: all additions to the encyclopedia would have to be accompanied by a secondary sources already evaluated by recognized experts. Without such a reference, anyone can revert the addition, no questions asked, no debating the substantive merits of this or that concept, because doing that was bringing the whole project to a grinding halt.
That policy proved to be a pretty good way to run the whole encyclopedia--we don't have subject-matter experts available to evaluate all claims added ad infinitum, so instead everyone has to provide good sources for anything they add--and it became WP:Verifiability which applies across the board (though perhaps especially stringently for science? Debatable.) In any case, it's how we got to a place where if someone notices something has considerable sourcing issues (and absolutely, on an all-volunteer project, "if someone notices" can vary enormously and arbitrarily), you may start to see, "Nope. End conversation." (also known as WP:TNT), and sometimes even a sense that not entertaining the conversation, if it doesn't start from good sources, is itself good for the encyclopedia, because not being drawn into interminable debates on unreliable information is what made it possible to construct an encyclopedia with any good scientific information at all (even if that encyclopedia remains far from complete--the site's founder once said, "I really want to encourage a much stronger culture which says: it is better to have no information, than to have information [...] with no sources."
)
I'm laying it on a bit thick to make the point--as the quantity of text now on your talk page indicates, often people are willing to have extended discussions (it makes a big difference if the other discussant indicates interest in learning how Wikipedia is organized); tons of people are very invested in maximizing what's included in the encyclopedia; etc. But I hope the backstory gives you more of a sense of how, far from antipathy toward science or scientists, this system developed pretty directly to hold open space to write good science material on the project, and even specifically to protect the continued participation of editors who are scientists themselves. The challenge now is really how to communicate this to folks who weren't around to watch the system develop, and arrive to find something that functions so differently from most other forms of intellectual production (be it journalism, scholarly research, even other encyclopedias, as Jytdog mentions). (After all this, perhaps that challenge will wind up an area of interest for you! If so let me know and I can point you quite a number of corners of the project working on it from different angles.)
Ok having written a wall of text, I'll pause there!, but thank you very much again for your questions at AfD and your interest in the project! Unless you let me know you've had enough info for now (valid!), I will try to leave you a separate message with a few style pointers later on. Meanwhile, happy editing! Innisfree987 (talk) 00:16, 24 May 2018 (UTC)
- Hi Innisfree987, thank you so much for all of this information. You are correct; this is certainly helpful in understanding what Wikipedia aims to do.
- I also don't want to belabor anything, especially since you have been so helpful. I only want to clarify my own thought process so that if this problem arises again it may provide insight into possible confusion. I did not mean to suggest that Wikipedia is against science; one simple browse on the encyclopedia would reveal that to be false, so my apologies on not making my point clear. I also do not intend to argue against the need for secondary sources, as I fully agree with that as well. I suppose my confusion has stemmed from the fact that peer-reviewed journal articles seem to be classified exactly the same as pop news articles, books, and the like that undergo no sort of peer review process. It is my understanding that in the process of peer review, other scientific experts in the field provide feedback to the researcher(s) and make valuations used by the editor to ultimately assess the degree to which a study merits publication. This is why I have operated under the assumption that they are preferable to other sources; in the process of peer review, experts have already evaluated them, as you say. That is also why I assumed that there must be some sort of doubt in this process or in the validity of studies that are published, since citing many of them so as to not rely on a single researcher's work still constitutes "shaky science" and seems to raise major red flags.
- I think that I just have a very different understanding of what good sourcing is, which is totally okay. I have learned so much throughout this process! Thank you so, so much for all of your feedback and time. And for your commitment to making Wikipedia better! Cgorman4 (talk) 13:16, 24 May 2018 (UTC)
- Just to ping in here. One reason (among many) that we don't use primary sources from the literature, is the replication issue. I am sure that you are aware that this issue is especially acute in psych and sociology. As editors we have no way of knowing what individual research paper has been valued by the field and which have been ignored. I have seen people even cite research papers that had been retracted. Reviews are where experts in the field, pull out the research papers that are stepping stones on paths that the field understands are valid, and those reviews tend to just ignore the "dead" papers that nobody in the field thinks are important.
- Another reason why we don't use them, is that people advocating FRINGE ideas have tried to build content in WP by cherry-picking research papers (ignoring others) and building seemingly-compelling stories. This is especially pernicious because the content ~looks~ valid.
- And yes we treat research papers like popular media, which often picks up press releases about research papers, and hypes them.
- The popular media is especially horrible about this with respect to food and diet, and horrible things result. In the essay I started called WP:Why MEDRS? I have this bit:
Let's see, should I drink coffee or not? Maybe I will live longer and drive safer, and hey, if I am woman maybe I will be less depressed, but oh, no! it alters my estrogen levels and maybe it will screw up my baby. Every one of those links is from the New York Times, and is just from the past few years. I think it is terrible to jerk the public around like this. A newspaper has an excuse, but Wikipedia does not — we need to provide reliable information to the public.
- The badness of popular media coverage of food, diets, nutriion,etc has become a mini-field of study in itself:
- one paper from that mini-field is: Kininmonth, AR; Jamil, N; Almatrouk, N; Evans, CEL (27 December 2017). "Quality assessment of nutrition coverage in the media: a 6-week survey of five popular UK newspapers". BMJ open. 7 (12): e014633. doi:10.1136/bmjopen-2016-014633. PMC 5770895. PMID 29284712. (its a primary source, so treat it carefully!) :)
- The Bohannon bogus chocolate story had two fangs - one for predatory publishers, and the other for the tradition of crappy reporting on food science in the popular media. Both drew blood.
- There is a great website called HealthNewsReview.org - please check out their shredding of popular media coverage of new research papers about food, eating behavior, and diets -- the saved-search is here.
- The badness of popular media coverage of food, diets, nutriion,etc has become a mini-field of study in itself:
- So yeah - no way is WP OK with people citing popular media about food and diets. :) Jytdog (talk) 21:22, 24 May 2018 (UTC)
- Hi, Jytdog! Thanks for your message. I keep thinking I might be done with this discussion, but you keep raising super interesting points, and I am learning a lot, so I will keep going. :)
- I am really glad you brought up the "Replication Crisis," as this is something our whole class learned extensively about thanks to our professor prior to publishing our edits on Wikipedia, and really prior to a large part of our research process. I can assure you it is something I had on my mind throughout much of my own writing. Actually, that is one reason why I have been somewhat perplexed by the somewhat rigid reliance on literature reviews and meta analyses in determining the validity of a scientific topic on Wikipedia, since these sources are not immune to the very same issues that big believers in the Replication Crisis point to in individual studies (it is also worth noting that there is considerable disagreement in the field of psychology and I believe in science at large about the degree to which the "Replication Crisis" really is a crisis). In the AfD discussion,you brought up the Cornell Food and Brand Lab, so I will use that as an example. As I am sure you have seen, a number of the studies that have come from this lab have recently been retracted, including this one. However, prior to its retraction, this very study was cited in multiple literature reviews, including this one and this one, among several others. Had a Wikipedia editor summarized either of these sources, he or she would have highlighted a study that has since been discredited. I do not point to this example to further call into question the reliability of sources -- after all, I have studied psychology not only because I am interested in it but because I believe in the immense power of good research in the field to ultimately make the world better -- but rather to suggest that perhaps none of us can guarantee with utter certainty that any source, even what Wikipedia defines as secondary, is free from problems of validity and reliability, and perhaps evaluating articles' on a more case-by-case basis rather than applying this policy as a rigid blanket could be warranted sometimes. It might be totally far-fetched and I am very inexperienced, but this is all just what I have noticed from my short time on Wikipedia.
- This might also be another reflection of my naiveté, but it seems like the problem of cherrypicking could possibly be remedied, at least to some extent, if articles that were clearly cherrypicked were at least allowed to stay up so that someone else with a very different bias could supplement them. However, I completely understand the very serious concern about misinforming the public in the meantime, so I totally get that doing so may not always be feasible. I definitely think secondary sources can help with this and see the need for them here, but perhaps the perfect balance between primary and secondary sources is not wholly secondary but somewhere in between. This would allow Wikipedia to contain more information that can actually help people or at least inform them all while providing proper perspective and also not assuming that only secondary sources provide the information that is relevant, reliable, helpful (though I know the mission is not to give advice), and valid. We can agree to disagree on this for sure, but that is just my thought.
- You are completely and totally preaching to the choir regarding your notes about the distinct unreliability and invalidity of many pop media articles covering scientific research, which is why I have been surprised to see them cited in this encyclopedia not infrequently. However, I fully acknowledge that this is a volunteer project and that it is not possible to root all of these out as rapidly as I am sure they are added. I appreciate what you and other volunteers are doing in eliminating these articles as authorities in the encyclopedia, as I also care deeply about not informing the public via this medium (though that isn't to say that some articles aren't great; it is just that they really AREN'T reviewed by any scientific experts prior to publication, as you already well know). In fact, that was one of my biggest motivations in editing the intuitive eating article on Wikipedia in the first place, as there is a lot out there easily accessible on the internet that may not wholly accurately portray the nature of the research that has been done thus far (for example, there is a lot of talk of causation when the bulk of the research has been correlational), so I saw this as a great opportunity to at least focus on the research itself and provide the public information about that.
- Thank you for engaging me in such a great discussion as I know you didn't have to do that but generously did. I have learned a lot from you. Cgorman4 (talk) 22:34, 24 May 2018 (UTC)
- Thank you for being so gracious! In general you will find that the culture here, is that when people ask authentic questions and try to have real conversations, others engage the same way. (there is way too much asking of rhetorical questions and people who come to argue)
- I hear you on the hyping of the replication crisis itself.
- Yes it does take time for the reviews in the field to shed the retracted papers. The work of maintaining WP never ends. Even content that was great when it was added, needs to be eventually updated as the literature evolves, incorporating not only new work but shaking out bad old work. You are totally correct about that!
- The epistomology thing here is hard. Since we editors do not claim authority, we rely on the best sources we have, even sometimes knowing that there are funky things about them. Which we do our best to steer around. :) But do see WP:Why Wikipedia cannot claim the earth is not flat, which gets you into the weeds of this reliance on sources some.
- One of the things I liked about what your class was aimed at, was that (I think) almost all of you chose to try to improve content that was already in WP and was bad. So many classes focus on adding completely new material instead of revising existing stuff.
- Anyway, thanks again for talking! I look forward (and i do) to see you around. Jytdog (talk) 23:17, 24 May 2018 (UTC)
- Thanks for noticing that, Jytdog! We want good science out there, just like y’all do. And thanks again for an awesome discussion! Cgorman4 (talk) 00:58, 25 May 2018 (UTC)
- So yeah - no way is WP OK with people citing popular media about food and diets. :) Jytdog (talk) 21:22, 24 May 2018 (UTC)
Style pointers
editWell, I definitely should have composed my messages to you in the opposite order, as you and Jytdog have already covered sourcing in about as much depth as I imagine anyone would ever want! Meanwhile the AfD closed so I can't see the draft anymore, so here are the style notes that I had begun--but if you want me to look over anything new later, feel free to ask!
- Lead - This is the main thing that drew my attention when I reviewed for DYK. This section is meant to summarize the whole of the entry (which, as you know, is itself a summary), so you'll want to try to gloss each section of the body of your entry, and avoid going into a lot of detail on any one section, like giving a complete list of the principles laid out in one book on the subject. (Even if you were writing an entry just on one book, that much detail would likely go in a "Synopsis" section of the body of the entry, while the lead would touch briefly on all sections: context, content, reception, etc.) Placing that much detail/emphasis on one aspect of the entry right up front can be a red flag for the promotion of a specific angle on a topic, rather than a balanced account, which is why you encountered some PROMO concerns. Making sure you write the lead as an overview of the entire entry will help on this.
- Concision - While an online encyclopedia has a lot more room than a paper one, we share the goal of giving a brief and accessible summary to readers unfamiliar with a topic, rather than exhaustive detail. Those who want more can check out the sources cited or a "Further reading" section; for everyone else, we try to avoid tl;dr. (This is in line with what Jytdog notes about not detailing every individual study; and lit reviews are obviously very helpful in focusing the scope of what you discuss.)
- Avoid euphemism - It's normal (...well, for some of us!) not to want to be unduly negative, but for the encyclopedia, being direct with readers is the priority. So if the fact is something like, "The credibility of this theory is limited because these results have not been replicated as of X date", say that, rather than
"Other scientists’ replication of her findings would support the credibility of theory."
WP:CRYSTAL applies a bit here too; the encyclopedic project is only to say where knowledge stands now, not speculate about what could happen in the future.
Hope this is helpful. Do feel free to reach out with any questions, and of course WP:MOS has exhaustive instructions on style as well. Happy editing! Innisfree987 (talk) 02:53, 28 May 2018 (UTC)
- Thank you so much, Innisfree987! This is very helpful. Cgorman4 (talk) 16:13, 6 June 2018 (UTC)