Lord Dust

What a delightfully morbid message on your userpage. Taxes are also more permanent than death - there have been reports of people being resurrected. JFW | T@lk 12:58, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

PS I replied to your post on Talk:MMR vaccine. I'm not sure if you should recommend that John writes up a page about his website. These tend to get deleted.

Good of you to stop by :). And, yes they do, if the topic is "The Wonderful Webpage Whale.To". I'm pretty certain that's what he'd write, too, thus the gentle request to let me have a look at it first. I'd like to be the first to break it to him, and the first to offer help putting together something more beneficial to everyone. Some revision of priorities could allow for useful input, even if it is just a one line reference on Conspiracy Theory and an external link from there. I bet we could do better than that, though.

Keep in mind that I do believe that you are largely right concerning vaccination. My brother's kids did not get their full immunization packages, and I fought with him about that for months... until our family doctor told us that she was now recommending a chicken pox vaccine. Suddenly, I found myself thinking "That's a little unnecessary!". Until then, our doctor had been recommending intentional exposure at around age 4, if it could be arranged. Here in Canada, our public health system tends to hide the money end of it all quite neatly, so I don't know as much about that.

And finally, I hold much personal sympathy for doctors in this arena. They are the ones that have to sit there ginding their teeth while a child dies from a preventable disease while their parent refuses treatment for them. And while there are some horrible examples of the medical profession's indifference towards an immunization failure, I find it difficult to believe that doctors in general react with indifference to such occurrances.

Thanks for coming by!Lord Dust 19:23, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

The subject of varicella vaccination is a bit more controversial. Here in Europe we don't do it. Frankly, when my brood developed chickenpox in domino fashion (including many sleepless nights) I was secretly wishing we had.

The discussion with John is a rather deep-going one. Obviously he maintains there is an alternative truth about numerous medical realities, and Wikipedia should mention these theories if they have been lent a degree of credence by at least a small group of people. Until he can prove this, we have no way of knowing. WP:NPOV makes a proviso for this: Wikipedia does not need to be a forum for utter radical thought without a support base. There is probably someone in the world who believes that George W. Bush is the illegitimate son of Pope John Paul II. That does not mean we need to mention this, unless the blogs are overflowing and books have been giving this significant thought. JFW | T@lk 19:56, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

Ah yes, but but what if there's a large group of people who give credence to the fact that a small group of people give credence to these theories? A great example is Charles Manson. There aren't really a whole lot of people in the world who think he's an incarnation of Christ (one of a number of claims he's made), but plenty of people think that a few of his follwers believe this. Thus, it gets mention at Charles Manson, regardless of its veracity. Given that such an extreme comment was recorded, it would be worth mentioning even if only Manson himself, or a single follower was on the record as having believed it.

I think we're in such a situation here. It's not so relevant who believes all that tripe on whale.to (and make no mistake about, I don't see a lot of truth jumping out at me when I visited), but more relevant who believes that someone believes it. whale.to is an example, at the very least, of just how extreme one person can be in opposing standardized vaccination. In that light, it's worth linking to specifically because only one person believes the content.

I see from your userpage that this is something of a crusade with you. Might I suggest in this case that you devote your energy to appropriate labelling of said links, which I'd absolutely support. I see also that you earlier requested a specific policy to deal with external links in the vaccine pages. How about something like this:

Adverse Reactions

The following are examples of cases where adverse reactions to <the vaccine in question> have been reported. Substantiation or current status of the cases reported on these sites is left to the sites themselves.

The disclaimer ought to be present in some form on pretty much every list of External Links anyways. Links to broad denouncements of the immunization process in general should not be on each individual vaccine page, but ought to be on Vaccine controversy (as I see whale.to is). That page (Vaccine controversy), bugs the heck out of me. Both sides present poorly worded bullet-form lists, and some of the subtitles are downright combative.

Hey, what about this:

See Also

Something of a crusade on my userpage? You must be confusing me with someone else. Most of my work on Wikipedia is the maintenance of medical articles. The vaccine nonsense is something peripheral. I really don't know what gave you this impression.

Anycase, there's vaccine criticism, and there's whale. But you can see it all on Talk:MMR vaccine. JFW | T@lk 21:42, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

Mmm, no, not the vaccination thing, your Dr Linkslasher persona and accompanying maintenance of external links. Anyways, I had an idea concerning how to arrange all this, but I'm not sure it's worthwhile. Likely it falls into that category of ideas that make everybody unhappy, and is thus the only true balance acheiveable. *sigh*

"Saved" comments

True. I'd counter by saying that we're not linking to alien implant remover articles (I hope). Further, if any other site that covered such a broad range of topics ran a "positive" alien abduction piece, we wouldn't immediately tear down all links to that site from WikiPedia, nor ban links to that site concerning other topics.Lord Dust 19:01, 13 December 2005 (UTC)