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Latest comment: 6 years ago by Gandydancer in topic Grant
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Grant

Latest comment: 6 years ago62 comments11 people in discussion

James, can you say what the $250,000 grant is for that Knowledge Diffusion Inc (operating as Osmosis) received in January 2017 in relation to WikiProject Medicine? The grant was from the Hewlett Foundation: "In collaboration with WikiProject Medicine and the UCSF-UCB Joint Masters Program, Osmosis will undertake a 12-month pilot project to help medical school faculty and students integrate OER [open educational resources] into their curriculum through a scalable approach combining technology and credit-bearing electives."

The videos were in 2016, so it can't be for them. The Osmosis account stopped editing in 2016 apart from one edit. SarahSV (talk) 23:38, 28 March 2018 (UTC)

User:SlimVirgin part of it is to support this class at UCSF. Amin Azzam has received some funding for this work which includes out reach to other medical schools regarding the editing of Wikipedia. Wiki Project Med Foundation is supporting the teaching of these classes and have been since 2013. Wiki Project Med Foundation however is not receiving any money, nor am I. There was a write up about this class in the NYTs back in 2013 when it started.[1]
We are also hoping that this will support a "teaching assistant" and the development of a "userscript" to guide medical students who are editing Wikipedia. Will need to look at this once / if the dust settles.
With respect to Osmosis, most of their work with respect to us is uploading videos on Commons as you can see here and they have been active as of February 22 2018. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 01:41, 29 March 2018 (UTC)
Thanks for the information. I can't see what Osmosis has to do with the student editing mentioned by the NYT. [2]
Knowledge Diffusion Inc, operating as Osmosis, received $150,000 in 2014 from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation "to help Osmosis make its platform accessible to all clinical students", [3] and I believe this led to the creation of the videos for those students; $250,000 in January 2017 from the Hewlett Foundation (touting their relationship with WikiProject Medicine); [4] $100,000 from TEDCO in December 2017 (again the relationship with Wikipedia is mentioned); [5] investment from Coverys, the insurance provider, in January 2018 (the relationship mentioned again); [6] and now they're applying for $100,000 from the Wikimedia Foundation (again mentioning WikiProject Medicine). [7]
That's $600,000 plus an unknown amount from Coverys, much or all of it connected to or mentioning WikiProject Medicine or Wiki Project Med Foundation. Which Wikipedians are involved in this? SarahSV (talk) 02:31, 29 March 2018 (UTC)
The "credit-bearing electives" refers to the elective for medical students at UCSF. The prof who leads efforts at UCSF has the folks from Osmosis give a talk during his Wikipedia editing class. He was interested in promoting Wikipedia editing to other schools so joined Osmosis on a grant application to help support these efforts.
Wiki Project Med Foundation through myself and others were collaborating with both Amin at UCSF and folks at Osmosis on the class. You can see the nine discussions about these efforts over the last few years on the WTMED pages.
It is additionally described in the reports from WPMEDF in both 2016 and 2017. They have also build us a video to help teach people how to edit Wikipedia's medical content.[8]
These organizations are also funding the creation of the videos we were using of course.
Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 02:48, 29 March 2018 (UTC)
Are you helping them in any way with their $100,000 grant application to the WMF? SarahSV (talk) 16:53, 29 March 2018 (UTC)
Other than telling them that there is a grant process, no. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 17:06, 29 March 2018 (UTC)
Can you say more about it, please? How did they come to ask for a grant from an organization that has been giving them free advertising space? Look at their LinkedIn: "Osmosis aims to provide your future clinicians the best education so that they can provide you the best care. Our popular videos are featured on Wikipedia, YouTube, Medscape/WebMD, the Washington Post, and many other outlets ..." This is the kind of thing you normally can't stand. Something about it being medicine, video, and people you've come to know has blinded you to the PR aspect of it. SarahSV (talk) 17:34, 29 March 2018 (UTC)
The primary issue I have with COI is when the organization creating the content has a COI with respect to the subject matter in question. I do not generally have issues with the NIH using NIH sources, or Cochrane using Cochrane sources, or the WHO using WHO sources.
Osmosis as I have said is primarily supported by grants. My initial understanding was that they were working to become an NGO. That they have not at this point is a little frustrating.
As the videos per the ongoing RfC are in all likely going to be removed this collaboration will be ending and the chance of them being considered for funding will decrease to around zero.
The NIH, WHO, UCSF, and Cochrane also mention their collaboration with Wikipedia by the way. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 17:45, 29 March 2018 (UTC)
I hope we can look into that as well, because by driving almost exclusively NIH sources into the leads of articles (including FAs, which had superior sourcing before you re-did them all to NIH), the quality of those articles has been driven down. Not only that, there is no reason to have Wikipedia article leads which essentially do nothing more than repeat what the NIH sources have-- that demotes the very strength that Wikipedia provides. Sorry this is off-topic, but I hope it is something we will discuss in the future. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:48, 29 March 2018 (UTC)
Agree that is a separate issue. Are you saying you plan to push for not allowing the use of the NIH/CDC as a source? I have always taken them to be positions of national expert bodies. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 17:58, 29 March 2018 (UTC)
Will start section below. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:11, 29 March 2018 (UTC)
James, can you say what you meant by "Other than telling them that there is a grant process, no"? Are you saying you advised them to apply for a grant from the WMF, and if yes, can you elaborate, please? SarahSV (talk) 17:53, 29 March 2018 (UTC)
Sure. They asked "does the WMF provide funding" and I said yes they do here is a link to the funding process page on meta. I have had zero roll in the draft of their application and in fact the link you provided above was the first time I had seen it. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 17:58, 29 March 2018 (UTC)
Okay, thank you for explaining. It just seems utterly bizarre that (a) we give them free advertising by placing their videos in hundreds of articles topped and tailed by their company logo and URL, then (b) we're asked to give them $100,000, when it should be them giving us money, and considerably more than $100,000. SarahSV (talk) 18:09, 29 March 2018 (UTC)
I do not believe they are making any profit. None of the links within the videos here are clickable. I consider the videos a useful resource. That they were willing to use an open license is fairly amazing. Expecially given that the Khan Academy and most other NGOs are not willing to use open licenses. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 19:04, 29 March 2018 (UTC)
Unless they've opened up their accounts to you, you can't know whether they're making a profit, but there's no reason to assume that they don't intend to, and given that the CEO has an MBA from Harvard Business School, I'm going to assume that he knows what he's doing. Wikipedia was a platform that might help them to grow; if they hadn't used an open licence, you wouldn't have been able to give them the space.
What caused Jake and Sylvia from the WMF to get involved, when you already knew the Osmosis people from their time at Khan? SarahSV (talk) 19:26, 29 March 2018 (UTC)
Jake was on the board of Wiki Project Med Foundation. Not sure about what resulted in Sylvia's involvement. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 19:29, 29 March 2018 (UTC)

Would you please explain how it came about? The short replies mean I keep having to ask more questions. Jake was there in his WMF capacity (diff). SarahSV (talk) 19:34, 29 March 2018 (UTC)

User:SlimVirgin I do not fully remember the step by step details of how this all came together. A few details:
  1. I have liked the work of the Khan Academy for years. I randomly reached out to them to suggest collaborating back at least as far as 2013.
  2. This is how I meet Rishi who was leading the efforts at Khan to create medical videos. Over a number of meetings I convinced him to convince the organization to do a trial of releasing three videos for use on Wikipedia which occurred in early 2015 and which you can see here.
  3. After those three there was no further interest from Khan in releasing more videos under an open license. Khan also decided to narrow their work to K to 12 and thus dropped medical information.
  4. Rishi was than picked up by a newly formed group, Osmosis to continue doing what he was previously working on at Khan. This new group was willing to use an open license which I thought was great. Thus we see the videos uploaded by this account Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 19:49, 29 March 2018 (UTC)
Looking back at old emails. Rishi reach out to both myself and WMF staff in 2015 which is what brought them into a meeting.
The only folks I have really collaborated with were on the content project side of things, this being Rishi and Kyle. Did not interact to any degree with others within the organization. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 19:59, 29 March 2018 (UTC)
Can you tell us about that meeting, e.g. where it took place and who attended? (This is re: "Rishi reach out to both myself and WMF staff in 2015 which is what brought them into a meeting.") SarahSV (talk) 15:51, 30 March 2018 (UTC)
Occurred by teleconference. That is this.[9] Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 18:58, 30 March 2018 (UTC)

James, you've always presented yourself as strong on transparency. During the search-engine issue, you were highly critical of people who were releasing bits and pieces of information but who avoided telling the whole story at once. Please do now what you wanted them to do then, and tell us everything that happened. SarahSV (talk) 20:05, 30 March 2018 (UTC)

You are by now grave dancing and just kicking and your actions here are coming across very like a hostile deposition-taking or interrogation. This is not like the Knowledge Engine, which was a major direction the WMF were thinking of taking our entire movement in.
WPMED has lots of informal collaborations as Doc James already mentioned in this exchange with you.
Doc James used some poor judgement by not managing the relationship more closely as he already said. The community didn't pay enough mind to the postings that Doc James made about this, as it was happening.
You are trying to hold James accountable for things the company did, like how they leveraged the relationship.
Do you really think Doc James is corrupt?
The relationship as it stood is over. If you care about the use of our name you should keep an eye on that and let everybody know if they keep using it. Jytdog (talk) 22:04, 30 March 2018 (UTC)
SV I have presented above what occurred. There is and was no behind the scenes machinations.
Here in 2013 I mentioned that folks at Khan were interested in collaborating (ie Rishi).[10]
Mentioned it again plus a number of other efforts with respect to video in Aug 2014.
Here in Nov 2014 you can see the "success" we had with an initial agreement of release of 5 videos that turned into 3 videos. Uploaded here. But this still took more time and when it occurred was announced here in 2015.
Here in July 2015 I say "am trying to convince organizations that releasing them under a license we can use is a good idea for global health." And there I discuss another release of videos this time from HealthPhone. Additionally we discuss a release of videos from the CDC/Harvard which within the Ebola article.
When the first video was released by Osmosis it was announced as "Hey All. The group doing medical videos at Khan has split off and joined an organization called Osmosis. The good news is that this new organization is producing all their videos under a CC BY SA license (rather than using the CC BY SA NC license at Khan). First videos are here and I have added them to the body of a number of articles" This was Dec 2015.
This is more or less how all my collaborations have worked. I email people asking if they are willing to release stuff under an open license. This is how I got the WHO Model List of Essential Medicines released under an open license. This is how I got all these ECHO cases released.[11] and these ECGs from ECGpedia[12]. I can list more cases beyond this but the pattern is fairly obvious.
Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 02:41, 31 March 2018 (UTC)
James, I'm not alleging "machinations". I'm saying that there are several ways to view what happened, and that you're only seeing it one way. The concern is that you (inadvertently) helped to organize an advertising campaign on Wikipedia (arguably native advertising), which led to a startup receiving eight million views of videos containing its brand name, as well as the ability to call itself a Wikipedia partner in its advertising material, and the official source of medical videos for Wikipedia. That relationship may have helped it obtain hundreds of thousands of dollars of funding, considering that Wikipedia is mentioned in the press releases announcing the grants.
You're credited as an author of the congestive heart failure video, by the way: [13].
If you had put that out to tender, other parties—including mission-aligned organizations—might have been willing to supply much higher quality videos, in exchange for that amount of advertising. Instead, the partnership went to a couple of people that you knew and liked. Can you see the problem with that? (This ignores the other issues: that the videos didn't comply with WP:V and WP:MEDRS, and that the wider community wasn't consulted.) SarahSV (talk) 19:35, 31 March 2018 (UTC)
Put out a tender? Wow. You appear to believe that working with Wikipedia for free is a massive honor that people are falling over themselves to accept. SV how many partnerships have you worked on? How many groups have you reached out to to make donations of content such as videos or images?
I have reached out to dozens of groups, most have flatly said no, including about 4 or 5 related to videos. NGOs generally are not interested in using a Wikipedia compatible license or even having us use their content at all.
Now I would love you to prove me wrong and there is nothing stopping you from putting our a tender for video creation.
With respect to them saying they worked with Wikipedia. Yes they were working with Wikipedia. Do you want all organizations that work with Wikipedia to stop saying they are doing so? Do you want the UCSF School of Medicine, the National Library of Medicine, International League Against Epilepsy, and Cochrane to stop making any claims that they work with us? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 20:37, 31 March 2018 (UTC)
James, I want to AGF of you, but it doesn't help that you keep comparing this for-profit company to the World Health Organization, Cochrane, etc. What they did wasn't "for free". You allowed them to embed ads for their brand name and subscription service into hundreds of Wikipedia articles, in or near the lead. That was worth a lot. Can you please take that point? SarahSV (talk) 20:50, 31 March 2018 (UTC)
They have used an open license. What they have risked by agreeing to do this is substantial. They also know that they cannot rescind this risk. These videos are the primary thing they produce. Already other organizations are picking them up showing them beside their own ads and providing nothing in return. Here they are for example on the Merck Manual page.[14] Remember Youtube pays the creator of the content. Using an open license allows your material to occur in places that does not pay.
Giving away one primary product with the hope that people will than give you grants to produce more and update the current ones is a long shot. They took this long shot. The subscription model is also fairly dicey.
Khan Academy, the World Health Organizations, and Hesperian Health Guides among many others are not willing to take this risk. How do I know? Well, I have repeatedly asked them. Khan does not want unapproved commercial organizations to use their materials without paying or to compete with them. WHO licenses some of their material to third parties for specific use and makes a few million from that. Herperian sells some of their material too.
So no I do not consider your point to be a valid one. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 21:19, 31 March 2018 (UTC)
You seem to be saying that you think that letting them have their 'branding' on videos we display is a 'fair trade' for our having access to these videos. Am I reading that correctly? Jbh Talk 04:15, 1 April 2018 (UTC)
Whats Inside of Blood
Introduction
I am saying that they were uploading here what they upload at Youtube. I did not see a couple of seconds of attribution as a huge deal and thus did not bother removing it. Appears I was mistaken.
The attribution at the beginning of these videos is not dissimilar to that done in the Khan videos. And less than the CDC / John Hopkin's videos.
Additionally we have Template:External media which creates stuff like this and this. It requires our readers to leave Wikipedia and give up private information to someone else. Additionally attribution is similar if not greater in these examples. Having the videos under an open license here does not require people to give up personal info plus these relationships expand the presence of open content.
Another problem with simple linking to these is that like many ELs they break.[15] Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 17:15, 1 April 2018 (UTC)
Re: your point above about Merck, Osmosis entered into a partnership with Merck; the videos weren't simply "picked up" by them, as you said. Did you know (before this recent discussion) that the videos on Wikipedia were getting millions of views? SarahSV (talk) 18:52, 1 April 2018 (UTC)
• Thank you for that perspective. From my perspective though the problem arises in the aggregate — in other words, to me, there is a huge difference between use of a single branded video on a single page after discussion and the use of 300+ branded videos placed by fiat. The first instance I would advocate removing the branding but if no one wanted to it would not be a big deal. Its a single video and the issue was discussed so meh. The second instance though is total saturation of out medical articles by a single provider. That alone should ring alarm bells in your head. That they were placed without discussion, without descriptive edit summary, and were replaced when removed raise big red flags which turn into flashing, screaming alarms. Then when one considers that two outside organizations, one for-profit, worked to create content that would effectively put Osmosis' name on most of our major medical articles. Just having material from a single source prominently displayed on so many articles is a really big deal which was made exponentially bigger by directing watchers to their web site.
I know you want to improve Wikipedia. I know you do not like companies using Wikipedia as a promotional platform, and I know you are not seeking to profit from Wikipedia. I simply can not square that with the effectively stealth inclusion of these videos which resulted from a collaboration which should have been shouted from the rooftops. I find that very frustrating because I think, had these been properly presented to the community (by that I mean the editors at each page), that these would have added a lot of value to many articles. You did a great thing by securing a huge amount of potentially great content and you can be rightly proud of that. On the other hand, you completely blew introducing it to the medical editing community at large. I do not know why you decided it was OK to add these by fiat and without explanation but I believe that is what killed it.
The sheer scale and penetration of an entire class of articles by a single provider will always be an issue. There is a point at which one must consider whether the videos supported out articles or Wikipedia became a vehicle for showcasing a product. Colin's snarky 'Amazon colaboration' post was over the top but it does illustrate a point. Any organization that places content across an entire class of articles will change the character of our coverage of that topic area. If they have a little logo on each video they also get a PR boost and Wikipedia becomes associated with them in the readers mind — how could they not? The donor's logo is on every article the view. Scale and saturation matter.
I really do not intend to dump on you here. I want you to see how these events look from the outside. There has been a lot of discussion about V and RS etc but there has been less about the failure to protectively seek out community engagement and nearly none about the effect of a single company providing significant content to an entire class of articles. Thank you for listening. Jbh Talk 20:28, 1 April 2018 (UTC)
You do not view the at least 9 discussions about these videos that occurred at WTMED over the last 5 years to be "discussion"?
It was also discussed at a bunch of WPMEDF meetings. Plus was in the 2016 WPMEDF report and 2017 WPMEDF report. That these reports had come out was posted in Feb 2017 at WTMED at least.
User:Anthonyhcole, User:Jfdwolff, User:FloNight, User:Peter.C, User:Harej, User:Biosthmors, User:Ocaasi and User:Keilana were on the board of WPMEDF during this time.
Additionally I presented about the Osmosis collaboration at Wikimania in 2017 during the main conference.[16] And Osmosis themselves presented about their work during the preconference to which about 40 people attended.[17]
With respect to people following "clickable links", this is actually very minimal per discussions with the pubmed. The videos contained NO clickable links.
These videos cost about 2 million to produce by the way. Attribution was only present when people clicked on the video, which is less than we give Khan in the arts project. Thus a very small percentage of people who looked at a page saw any evidence of Osmosis. To further clarify Osmosis was never mentioned in any captions that I can remember adding.
I had also convinced other providers to release videos under an open license such as you can see here.[18] Have removed that one aswell.
We have had less on Wikipedia discussion about our collaborations with the World Health Organization, National Institutes of Health, Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Cochrane, British Medical Journal, Radiopedia, Ultrasound of the Week,[19] and International League Against Epilepsy than about Osmosis. Ultrasound of the Week may also be a for profit (I have not looked as I do not really care). They have their logo on their ultrasound images (I have not removed it as I also do not really care). They produce amazing ultrasound videos and I was able to convince them to release them under an open license.
This is not the COI issue I find concerning. What concerns me is the armies of undisclosed paid promotional editors. The ones that are paid by an organization to write promotional material about said organization. Osmosis does not have a COI with respect to pneumonia, gout, or HIV/AIDs. If they did I would have no interest in collaborating. I have declined to collaborate with a number of pharmaceutical companies as they do not share our goal of trying to provide high quality health care information to all for free. Osmosis on the other hand shares that goal and I believe the WHO, NIH, and CDC do aswell.
Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 04:26, 2 April 2018 (UTC)

(outdent) James, what I find particularly troublesome in these discussions are the untruths you come out with, which when pointed out to be patently false, you continue to repeat. This then becomes a deliberate lie: you are now knowingly telling untruths to further your case. We've seen this about the lies that the videos were summaries of the article text so met the definition of WP:LEAD, we've seen this about the lies that the videos could be edited (as Wikipedians understand that word), and we see this above about the "at least 9 discussions about these videos that occurred at WTMED over the last 5 years". I commented on your nine diffs here so won't reproduce all that. One of them is a UNICEF video in Hindi, for crying out loud James. The closest that discussion (with a few people) gets to "these videos" is a side-note that you are "Still working on a bigger release from the Khan Academy." The closest you get to a discussion on "these videos" is this. The "discussion" involves Chrisbospher trying to correct mistakes by James and then getting his ass kicked at AN. soupvector, who is already aware of Osmosis, reviews some and is fairly negative. Ozzie10aaaa is positive but I seem to recall he's an involved-party too. And CFCF too. So pretty much the meta med project team talking among themselves. WhatamIdoing requests that the top editors on articles be contacted for review. Something that doesn't then seem to happen (don't see many reviews) and certainly doesn't happen going forward -- James added al the videos unannounced and sometimes without even an edit summary. This post is on a "How to Edit Wikipedia" video, not a medical article video, and as I note here, just about sums up the dreadful way that James edits Wikipedia and appears to encourage others to do likewise. I describe in that diff how people should actually be editing Wikipedia medical articles: we are not an accumulation of factoids to insert and edit war over.

Wrt the other stuff, James, why are you the judge as to whether Osmosis is an acceptable neutral-paid-editor for Wikipedia? Let's just not have private companies providing any content for WP that states "facts" or "opinions". Videos of hearts beating, medical procedures, ultrasounds, etc, do not come loaded with any POV or concern about WP:WEIGHT or WP:V.

You have, so far, done the bare minimum wrt these videos -- removing them -- but have not recognised your problematic behaviour wrt edit warring with your peers over them. You broke WP:V when you added them back to Epilepsy. In a working Wikipedia, you'd have lost your Admin badge over that. And you bullied to ensure breastfeeding continued to show dangerous health information to our readers. In a working WP:MED, that should have cost you any authority and respect you have. You have shown contempt for your peers, clearly indicating that consensus means "getting James to agree", but doesn't apply to you.

This: "These videos cost about 2 million to produce by the way. Attribution was only present when people clicked on the video, which is less than we give Khan in the arts project." is very worrying. It demonstrates that you were proxy COI editing to protect a 2 million investment by your partners. And the "we give" shows you think you are Wikipedia's representative with authority to negotiate on our behalf. Have you not considered that when your RFC was offered to the wide community for review, and they told you in no uncertain terms where to stick your videos, that you have in the past totally misjudged how you both present partnerships to Wikipedia but fundamentally how you've been going about making partnerships on behalf of the community. Rather than standing your ground and arguing, you should be saying "Yes, I screwed up". WP:MED should be doing a post-mortem on the whole thing and openly asking for advice on how to do better in future. -- Colin°Talk 09:09, 2 April 2018 (UTC)

Colin, you are talking at James as if he were a paid volunteer who has to do better, as if you employ him and have authority over him. Any reversions (which you believe were edit warring) would, from James' perspective, have been motivated by what was best for Wikipedia, specifically the viewers of Wikipedia's articles. You forget that he will learn from his mistakes and therefore does not need daily put downs and lecturing to remind him. James' motives were always pure and motivated by spreading, what he believes was, valuable healthcare information in video format to people. He wanted knowledge of medicine to grow in the public mind for the greater good. The community has rejected this in an RfC for several reasons. It is sad to see two good Wikipedians arguing like this, yourself and James (I am mindful you are the main author of MEDMOS and MEDRS, which deserves respect), surely you can recognise the good James has done in other ways on Wikipedia and get beyond this video thing? It looks fairly certain that you have 'won' the RfC, your argument carried the day about deleting the videos. Surely the fighting or negativity should come to an end too?--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 10:15, 2 April 2018 (UTC)
Literaturegeek, there's been a lot of comment about James' pure heart and motivation to help WP. I haven't ever suggested that he's deliberately trying to harm Wikipedia. But he is, nonetheless. Look, I've met James and taken him out to dinner. I've worked in the past with him on medical issues, such as when student editors were wrecking our articles, or to investigate the problems with copyright on x-rays. I don't doubt he hard work he puts in, for no financial gain. But there are real problems with his behaviour on his project, and frankly those problems are not helped by editors like you worshipping him. James has forgotten what Wikipedia is, a collaborative project of peers who, when editing in good faith, require respect and consensus-seeking. Instead he put the goals of "free educational media" above what Wikipedia is, and commissioned a private firm to create articles, presented as videos, and forced them onto hundreds of pages, where his fellow editors cannot (and are not allowed to) edit them or remove them. Look at what Graham wrote here. Graham is one of the finest medical writers on the project, who intimately knows how to write great prose for the lay reader, is (unlike James) a published expert in his field, yet has the humility to cite sources and take advice from lay editors. He's taken several articles to FAC, which represents a solid understanding of our policies and guidelines as well as how to structure and present information to readers. And yet James shows contempt for him by edit warring and then lying about a video meeting WP:LEAD (James is well aware of the content of the article -- he wrote it -- and the content of the video -- he inserted it into the article). James is so arrogant that he refuses to back down even when SlimVirgin tells him it fails WP:V. We still haven't seen any recognition from James that he accepts the fundamental problems with the videos -- only that he's prepared to accept a SNOWBALL level of opposition to his RFC option 1.
To be honest, like Sandy, I'm going to potter away at the article or two that I care for and then leave again. The big names I respect at WP:MED no longer seem to be supporting James or have left. He's already driven away a real subject expert in Epilepsy. There are too many people assuming that having MD after your name makes you a subject expert in all of medicine, which is as daft as thinking a biologist is an expert in quantum mechanics.
As Sandy has noticed elsewhere, these videos are just a symptom of a deep illness affecting WP:MED, and James is at the core of it. Just one example is this edit today where Narcissistic personality disorder loses the words "empathy", "exploit" and "manifests". The dumbing down of Wikipedia continues. The principle way that people learn new words is to see them used in context. A psychology article most certainly needs to be free to use those words and for readers to understand what they mean. This "making Wikipedia more shit" has been going on for years. James has good intentions for doing it, but has been frequently told off by better writers and wiser heads, yet he continues. And that's really the story here, and will continue to be the story when I go back to taking photos. -- Colin°Talk 10:46, 2 April 2018 (UTC)
I've met James too. I don't worship him, I have clashed with him about antibiotic articles and disagreed about other things. I have argued and debated things with James, and in my experience he is willing to change his mind when the facts or sources are against him and is capable and does work with lay editors. Many lay editors make mistakes in medical matters, because of their often limited knowledge, so I would expect him to disagree with a lot of lay editors. I favour using more professional wording too, so long as it is wiki linked for the lay reader to click on to learn what it means. But the guideline MEDMOS encourages 'dumbing down' language for the lay readers, so that would not be James' fault for following guidelines. The 'problem' is MEDMOS (which you wrote, although I know others have altered it somewhat since then). A large section of our readers will have a reduced vocabulary because our readers are young adults, even teenagers, and lower IQ individuals compared against the typical Wikipedia editor who tend to be higher IQ, so there is logic to 'dumbing down' language.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 11:22, 2 April 2018 (UTC)
This isn't the place to have the argument but our guidelines do not require "dumbing down" - the actual guidelines are more nuanced, but then "nuanced" isn't a word James one could use to describe James's editing. One big problem is James substitutes individual words, often without actually understanding the topic he is revising. Careful writing for a general audience requires first to understand the topic, immersing oneself in the literature, to be gifted in expressing those ideas in one's own words, and to develop the text in an engaging way that the reader can follow. It will introduce necessary "hard words" in a way that the reader can figure out their meaning from context: that's how an encylopaedia provides an encyclopaedic education. You went to read about a physchological disorder, and on the way learned how diseases "manifest" themselves as symptoms. By removing these words with unsuitable replacements "Occurs" isn't the same as "manifest", one loses an opportunity for education as well as making the text mean something else. The scattergun approach James has to this -- he just randomly picks on articles and changes words -- is disrepsectful to those who have worked on them. People who have carefully chosen words to express what they want to say, find them "copyedited" by someone who, to be frank, doesn't have a clue about copyediting, doesn't have a clue about the subject, and has himself a rather poor level of English writing. Why is an AE doctor with a poor grasp of witing prose rewriting the lead of Narcissistic personality disorder? Hubris; that's why. It is quite dispiriting for other others and just one example of the lack of respect. Ok, I'm bowing out here. These problems are well known, have been going on for many years, and aren't going to be solved today. I'm researching another article at the moment, which is more fun. Unwatching. -- Colin°Talk 12:00, 2 April 2018 (UTC)
James, thank you for your response - somewhere way back up there. I appreciate having your perspective on this. I think there is way too much heat here for me to contribute much right now so I will leave off for now. I hope that when the furor dies down you will initiate a postmortem and lessons learned discussion. Jbh Talk 13:58, 2 April 2018 (UTC)
I decided to look at the edits at Narcissistic personality disorder to see for myself. James did this: [20]. Part of that was the piping of "empathy", which looks to me like a matter of editorial opinion, and which was subsequently changed back by other editors: [21], [22]. I don't think that any of those three versions was "dumber" than any of the others: it's just a matter of looking for the most precise wording. But there was another part of James' edit that was not contested. He changed "exploit" to "take advantage of", which I think is a modest improvement, and "manifests in a variety of contexts" to "occurs across a variety of situations". That last part is a very significant improvement: the "manifests" version is very bad writing whereas the "occurs" revision converts it into clear and lucid English. To characterize that as "dumbing down" or lacking in nuance seems to me to be nonsense. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:35, 2 April 2018 (UTC)
User:Tryptofish, I agree that "take advantage of" is a subtle improvement, but disagree about other wording, having given it some more thought, and suggest you might not be entirely correct. Given the "context" of the subject matter, article body and the source cited, to simplify "manifests in a variety of contexts" you would change it to something like "appears in a variety of different ways." because those words are talking, I think, about the different subtypes of narcissistic PD (malignant, secure versus insecure narcissism, etc, etc) - James instead changed it to "occurs across a variety of situations." which indeed did change the meaning of the original wording. Manifest is not the same as 'occur', James' change; manifest is something that can be seen and recognised - either visually, auditory or tactile; e.g. "the wound manifested itself with sharp shooting pain and deep red swelling that was very distressing to the child and his mother". I am not even confident that my suggested alternative of changing "contexts manifests" to "appears" would be an improvement. So James does actually change the meaning of the sentence, I think, out of context with the source. User:Colin might have a very valid point (which is mostly lost by his confrontational style) that, not just James but all editors in general need to be very careful when rewording sentences, especially if the editor has not read or considered the whole article body and if necessary the source itself to understand the "context" of what is written and why. Maybe we need to consider making MEDMOS a lot more clear on this point?
I think most people would know what the word context and in fact manifest means, most lay people would understand this example: "she took me out of context," so was it worth changing the sentence with the risk of altering the meaning of the sentence? Personally, I probably would have just left "manifests in a variety of contexts" as is.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 22:20, 2 April 2018 (UTC)
I can certainly leave room to say that some third approach, such as "appears", might be better than either the original or the change. Or "appears in a variety of forms". I might even alter the structure of the sentence, to frame it in terms of what the people do, as opposed to what the disorder does: people with the disorder do these things in a variety of contexts. And I can accept that readers are generally able to understand what "manifests in a variety of contexts" means. But I absolutely reject the contention that "manifests in a variety of contexts" is anything like good writing. It sounds like a parody of committee-speak. If I were to say, here, that you and I are "devoting ourselves to an examination of the paramount designation of the particulars of the attributes of the subtypes of narcissistic PD" (OK, I'm obviously having fun with this), you could figure out that it means that we are "discussing the best way to say it". But that obviously does not make it good writing. And it certainly does not make Doc James insensitive to the desirability of getting the wording right, or justify that "confrontational style". These are things to work out through the normal editing process, not through a battleground. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:01, 2 April 2018 (UTC)
Fair points. I never scored an A in English at school, so I try to avoid nuanced changes to articles anyway. I guess the fact that - without having to think about it and consider the whole article body - I and perhaps you too were unsure exactly what the original writer meant by "manifests in a variety of contexts" that the whole sentence could have been better worded to begin with, so we are not left at first glance at the words 'best guessing.' Yeah, I have been quite upset with Colin's confrontational style, I dunno how James has kept his cool.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 23:34, 2 April 2018 (UTC)
OK, thanks! --Tryptofish (talk) 23:44, 2 April 2018 (UTC)
Just to note that I said above James "not recognised [his] problematic behaviour wrt edit warring with [his] peers over [the videos]. Subsequent to that, he has apologised to Gandydancer. It is a step, but a long way to go yet. Wrt James "keeping his cool", well he has his worshippers who speak on his behalf, just as James speaks on behalf of Osmosis. Jtdog, CFCF, et al, have written gigabytes in defence of the videos and misguided actions of WP:MED editors in fundamentally breaking Wikipedia. And as long as guys like Tryptofish spend their time devoted to defending James and nitpicking one example, rather than, perhaps, looking at his contribs and thinking rather than just knee-jerk responding. Consider: "If I'd taken an article to FA, and James came along and reordered by sections "per MEDMOS", or replaced words that I'd agonised over for the lead, in the space of mere seconds of time he devoted to a subject he knows nothing about, before skipping merrily onto the next subject he knows nothing about, would I feel any collaborative spirit?" I see below someone quotes Jimbo Wales nonsense about "sum of all human knowledge", which has never ever been Wikipedia's mission. Homeopathy and astrology are part of human knowledge. Dan Brown's conspiracy nonsense is part of human knowledge. No, what Wikipedia is about is, written in Wikipedia:About. The first two paragraphs of which, are in direct and very clear contradiction to what WP:MED have been up to. If people here aren't actually rather angry about that, then they should be, and should examine just what sort of project they thought this was. -- Colin°Talk 09:26, 3 April 2018 (UTC)
Colin, may-be, it's high enough time that you re-evaluate whether your (IMHO) continued battle-ground-mentality and participation, (despite un-watching this t/p), is making any proportional benefit? Whilst, the pulling-down of Osmosis videos, seems to have been the product of your efforts, honestly, it's time to drop the stick and move on.~ Winged BladesGodric 09:39, 3 April 2018 (UTC)
"Guys like Tryptofish"?? Uh-huh. For the record, "guys"[citation needed] like me try to be good editors, edit based on content, try not to take "sides", and try not to personalize disagreements. But I will certainly remember this. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:02, 3 April 2018 (UTC)

External v internal

James, I appreciate the Yeoman's work SarahSv has done on the external factors here (it appears that Osmosis had their way with Wikipedia, to their benefit rather than ours), but I am more concerned about the internal (to normal Wikipedia processes, policies, and procedures) factors. Could you please indicate:

  1. Did any editor other than yourself or @CFCF: ever add a video to an article? That is, are you the only editor who added these almost 300 videos to articles?
  2. Did anyone ever make a post, for example, to the Village Pump and it's various subpages, or any other place for notifying the broader community about this plan?
  3. @WhatamIdoing: asked several times for notification to significant contributors. Was there any case where an article talk page was noticed that a video was contemplated, in process, or that a script was provided to editors who were knowledgeable in the content area and might provide feedback?
  4. Was there, at any time, a discussion about or contemplation of how to make sure the videos were accurate and met sourcing requirements, particularly with respect to requirements for FAs, as they were installed on almost every FA? If so, could you please provide a link to that discussion.
  5. I have been through the (sparse) edits of all of the people involved in this UCSF project, and find them not to be knowledgeable in the most basic basics of Wikipedia editing. I do not find any indications of a solid grasp of the policies and guidelines that relate to medical editing. By whom and where were these people, who then asked for WMF money to train other people, trained? (In fact @AminMDMA: has edited his own article. And it appears they asked students, as their first edits, to support the latest grant, which shows a surprising arrogance and lack of respect.)
  6. Was there at any time any attempt to centralize, formalize, or allow community education or feedback on the videos, similar to, for example, Wikipedia:Wikipedia CD Selection or Wikipedia:Spoken articles? Those pages give examples of the kind of internal process that do not seem to have happened here.
  7. Was there any process in place for vetting/verification of accuracy in these videos? The inaccuracies in the articles I edit are an irritation, but the Breastfeeding example is dangerous. What process was in place for vetting these videos, preferably at the production stage? What process was in place for making sure they stayed updated (eg, the Lewy body video seems to have been in production just as the diagnostic criteria were changing)?
I would like to be able to highlight your good intent over what is appearing to be a significant amount of naivete about how a project of this nature should have/could have worked, and any feedback you can give that will show that this was not just a "closed garden" project, furthered by only you and CFCF, would go a long ways towards healing. Please convince me that the minimum of process, procedure, knowledge of how to approach a project like this was in place, and that it was not just CFCF and you making content decisions in a vacuum.
As you know, it is due to the deteriorating quality of our medical content (and all the issues raised by Colin on this page) that I no longer participate, and you have many times awarded me as a top medical content contributor.
I would also like to see this discussion move into healing. Since the various incorrect moves of the actual RFC, even if we subtract the 173KB moved, CFCF is dominating the RFC to an extreme extent,[23] but does not yet seem to understand basics of how the video project might have functioned, how the RFC might have been framed, that the videos were not summaries of leads (which, even if they were, would be another problem in and of itself), or how both of you can be viewed as having a COI in the matter. I do not see that healing is going to progress much if that doesn't change.
I would also like to hear from you what you were thinking when you edit warred to keep these videos in articles, after errors had been pointed out. Everyone makes mistakes, and I am not above forgiveness, but would like to understand why you did that, as that to me represents one of the most egregious things that occurred here. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:54, 2 April 2018 (UTC)
You do not feel the more than 9 posts at WPMED were sufficient. Okay yes I understand your position. None of the other collaborations I or WPMEDF have been involved in, including those that involved release of other videos were brought to a wider venue than WTMED.
We tried to get more involvement in drafting scripts here but you already know that. I agree that the on Wikipedia processes could have been better. With respect to processes used internally by Osmosis I recommend you reach out to them to get the details as I do not know them.
Breastfeeding is recommended for a year by the APA. I agree that other foods should be introduced at 6 months and agree that restoring that video before that was fixed was an error on my part. I would like to apologize to User:Gandydancer for doing so. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 18:47, 2 April 2018 (UTC)
Thank you, Doc. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 06:13, 3 April 2018 (UTC)
Wrt the apology to User:Gandydancer, thank you. -- — Preceding unsigned comment added by Colin (talk • contribs) 09:05, 3 April 2018 (UTC)
Thank you, James. You are very kind and I appreciate this detail on your part very much.
The same case has occurred with the video of celiac disease, as we all already know. I hope you have read this too [24].
Anyway, I think right now it's not enough to apologize (and I IMHO who has put you in this difficult situation is Osmosis and they are who have to apologize). The errors must be fixed. Better said, they can not be fixed, we can not fix the erroneous information that 42,018 people have received until this date about breasfeeding [25] and 205,051 about celiac disease [26]. That damage can no longer be solved. But they can avoid continuing to harm more people, removing the videos from YouTube and Commons.
It is not enough that they have removed the advertising (proof that they are perfectly aware of what we are talking about in Wikipedia), ( ? It seems that they have ads again...) they must be eliminated. They are misinforming hundreds of thousands of people, it is a very serious issue.
I'm trying to understand it, but I can not. I can not understand how knowing this, the videos continue posted on YouTube and Commons. This says very little in their favor.
Therefore, I make you a request here, since there is a total silence from Osmosis [27]. Please, can you ask them to remove these videos (at least Breastfeeding, Celiac Diseas and Irritable Bowel Syndrome)?. Thanks.
Best regards. --BallenaBlanca 🐳 ♂ (Talk) 15:35, 3 April 2018 (UTC)
Ballena Commons has very different guidelines for inclusion. Once released under a CC BY SA license I do not think one can simple ask for the content to be removed.
With respect to removing from Youtube, you can add comments to the videos. And you can reach out to them to ask them to remove the videos you find concerning. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 21:37, 4 April 2018 (UTC)
Yes, in Commons the original author or uploader can request it through a "deletion request": Commons:Criteria for speedy deletion, General reasons, 7.
Regarding YouTube, I'm trying to communicate with them here, through OsmoseIt but he just ignores / does not answer. I have asked a very specific question here: "What does Osmosis plan to do with the inaccurate videos?". After this, he replied in another thread on the same page "We at Osmosis have been following the conversation closely", I have repeatedly pinged him [28] [29] [30] and left a message on his talk page [31] but I (we, the Wikipedia editors) have not received even a courtesy reply. I have asked you, because you mentioned that you know them and that you are in contact with them. It seemed more correct to me to solve this here in Wikipedia, but I followed your advice. Thanks. --BallenaBlanca 🐳 ♂ (Talk) 00:35, 6 April 2018 (UTC)
Doc, it is kind of you to apologize, though I did not take it personally. You wouldn't know this, but you were the one that introduced me to medical article editing around ten years ago. I think it had to do with the common cold and you agreed that cough syrup doesn't work and everyday comfort approaches were the best - I loved you instantly! And I still appreciate your common sense approach to the practice of medicine and and that through the years you have resisted corporate influence in our articles, something very important to me as well (as you can see on my user page). So all the more reason that I am just baffled by your difficulties in seeing the Osmosis marketing strategy when Sarah has clearly pointed it out to you. Gandydancer (talk) 18:34, 4 April 2018 (UTC)
User:Gandydancer my thoughts on COI:
1) The COI issues I have the greatest concern with is when those producing the content have a COI with respect to the content in question. Osmosis does not have a conflict with respect to the topics they produce videos about.
2) The 2 second logo at the beginning I viewed as simply attribution and did not view it as concerning enough to remove. Plus it was similar to what Khan does.[32] I obviously misjudged the communities opinion on this and offered to remove these bumpers during the proceeding discussions if there was a desire to keep the videos on EN WP.
3) Osmosis back in 2013 had said they were becoming an NGO. That they continue to put this off does concern me. I should not have let it slide.
4) With respect to having the videos near the top of the articles, I viewed them as summaries of the conditions in question and therefore saw that as not unreasonable.
5) With respect to claims that the videos are little more than advertisements, I disagree. There are organizations out there that are paying to display these videos. With respect to Osmosis mentioning collaboration with Wikipedia in grant applications, for them to improve and make more videos it does require funding. Many organizations mention collaborating with us. With respect to claims about them being "official videos" they state that that statement was made in error and I agree it is completely inappropriate. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 21:33, 4 April 2018 (UTC)
I see that you remain firm in your position. I still do wonder, however, how it was that you were willing to overlook several errors, two of which could do real patient harm, that were clearly pointed out to you by Clayoquot. How did that happen? I take responsibility for the part I played in this since I should have followed up on my concerns rather than do what I've learned to do when it comes to a disagreement with you, which is to just give in. Gandydancer (talk) 13:48, 5 April 2018 (UTC)
Firm in what position? Yes I still support having video summaries. Yes I assumed and continue to assume good faith of Osmosis. I believe their goal like ours is to get health information out to the world.
I agree with removing the videos with significant errors (like the breastfeeding video) is the correct thing to do until they are fixed. I was expected them to be fixed more quickly. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 19:38, 5 April 2018 (UTC)
Doc, I just don't see how you can defend this video production company and assert that "their goal like ours is to get health information out to the world." To this date, months after you first informed them of the Breastfeeding errors, the video remains up on Youtube and their WP rep refuses to respond on their talk page. I can only believe that they used you to further their marketing goals. I've always seen you as a pretty decent person and I can imagine that they took advantage of your willingness to assume that others are as altruistic as you are. Following Ballena's lead, I also made a post at Osmoselt's page. Gandydancer (talk) 18:13, 6 April 2018 (UTC)
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