Frpaneloux

Welcome!

Hello, Frpaneloux, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few good links for newcomers:

• The five pillars of Wikipedia
• How to edit a page
• Help pages
• Tutorial
• How to write a great article
• Manual of Style

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Again, welcome!  David Ruben ^Talk 11:50, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

 Navigation:

• Medicine Portal
• Style guidelines for medical articles
• WikiProject Medicine
  • Medicine Collaboration of the Week
• Pages needing attention
  • Pages needing attention from
    an expert in medicine
• WikiProjects related to medicine
• Stub sorting
• List of medical topics

I presume from your comments on Talk:Lyme disease that your are either a doctor, microbiologist or medical researcher. If so please join us at Wikipedia:WikiProject Clinical medicine and its talk page, The doctor's mess. There are collaboration pages and a weekly Medical Collaboration of the Week article :-) David Ruben ^Talk 11:50, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

Lyme Disease

Your comments about this articles POV/NPOV noted. Whilst I have been involved in this article, this has mostly been with general copyediting and transfering the previous mix of reference/citation styles to a consistant cite.php Wikipedia:Footnotes. The article is well (probably overly well) full of references. I'm not a specialist in infectious diseases, nor working in London (UK), am I working in a Lyme-epidemic area. The article does make clear what are standard conventional and wider-definition viewpoints, but I am (as previously indicated) unable to judge where conventional medical consensus is on all of this. Hence I am unable to judge the two aspects for appropriate POV inclusion which might give an overall NPOV:

• Firstly the phrasing of the text itself
• Secondly the balance in article space given to opposing side. So if conventionsl doctors are roughly equally split in their opinions, then a 50-50% even handiness would be about right. However if the "alternative divergent" view is a small minority, then an article within wikipedia, whilst maintaining NPOV in its description, does not have to give equal space.

It is particularly difficult to judge this given all the references given - to play devils-advocate these are stated optinions which can be cited to verify the comments made. However, of course, wikipedia is not here to debate out all and every piece of research, nor list every paper ever published on a topic. Hence, as an encyclopaedia, editors with knowledge of a field as a whole, need to help ensure a balance of significant (majority & significant minority) viewpoints and details are included (referring both to topics already included and whether any important side-issues missed, eg an article arguing over epilepsy diagnosis, cause & treatment would be remiss if restrictions on driving not also included).

So... if there are problems with an article, help to improve it by editing. I look forward to your contributions in editing the Lyme disease article and the edit summary comments explaining your steps in the process. David Ruben ^Talk 11:50, 15 May 2006 (UTC)