Potionism
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Anecdotal data
editOn stroke and etanercept you inserted content about the use of this drug in stroke patients. This is interesting, but experimental data in 3 patients, without evidence of planned further trials, is really insufficient for general encyclopedia content. Please have a look at WP:WEIGHT and WP:MEDRS. The former policy suggests that we keep a balance when adding highly detailed information. The latter, a guideline, advises on the kind of sources that would normally be useful for medical articles.
If you want to discuss the inclusion of this content, I suggest you discuss it on the talk pages of each article. I also think that you should not simply undo my reversion (for which I provided a valid argument) without further discussion. JFW | T@lk 22:46, 15 February 2011 (UTC)
- I wanted to add some additional information to what Jfdwolff says. In general, Wikipedia does not rely upon primary sources. This is especially true for medicine articles, in which we always want to rely on secondary sources; the so-called "gold standard" are review articles, where multiple different studies are reviewed. The reason is that medical articles often report preliminary information, very small trials, or other data that is new and tentative. We need to report general practice in the field, and the consensus "best" knowledge. There are hundreds of different possible treatments for strokes, for example, some of which are widely accepted and used, some of which are generally frowned upon, and many of which are still in the early stages of testing or adoption. As such, I believe Jfdwolff is correct to remove the information you added from the article. If you have further questions, please discuss either here or on the article's talk page (Talk:Stroke). Qwyrxian (talk) 01:32, 16 February 2011 (UTC)
Hello. Thank you for getting in touch. I appreciate your experience in editing Wikipedia; however, after reading the rules of editing, I would like to make a few points that I hope will change your mind about the suitability of adding this content to both the etanercept and stoke pages.
My first point is that the reference I included is from CNS Drugs, an international, peer reviewed medical journal that specialises in neurology and psychiatry content. The paper was therefore reviewed by a number of stroke experts prior to publication and met the journal standards for fairness and readership interest. I direct you to the Wikipedia text that states:
The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth; that is, whether readers can check that material in Wikipedia has already been published by a reliable source, not whether editors think it is true.
The No original research policy (NOR) has three requirements relevant to the Verifiability policy:
1. All material in Wikipedia articles must be attributable to a reliable published source. This means that a source must exist for it, whether or not it is cited in the article. Wikipedia must never be a first publisher.
2. Sources must support the material clearly and directly: drawing inferences from multiple sources to advance a novel position—called original synthesis, or original SYN—is prohibited by the NOR policy.[2]
3. Articles should be based largely on reliable secondary sources. While primary sources are normally welcome, there are dangers in relying on them. For more information, see the Primary, secondary, and tertiary sources section of the NOR policy, and the Misuse of primary sources section of the BLP policy.
A primary source may only be used on Wikipedia to make straightforward, descriptive statements that any educated person, with access to the source but without specialist knowledge, will be able to verify are supported by the source.
Where available, academic and peer-reviewed publications are usually the most reliable sources, such as in history, medicine, and science.
The fact that this is preliminary data involving three patients is clearly stated for the reader, fulfilling the straightforward, descriptive requirement of the policy.
You state that the content on Wikipedia should reflect standard medical practice but I have not yet read that goal in the site’s information for editors. If it exists, I would be glad if you could direct me to the relevant text. I can however cite countless examples of experimental therapies being described on the site. I won’t list them all, but you may notice on the stroke page, that therapeutic hypothermia is described.
There are not in fact a number of treatments available for the care and rehabilitation of stroke survivors and the unmet medical need is massive. Thus, I believe this study is relevant to site visitors, provides value and has been faithfully described.
I hope that we can find an amicable solution. Perhaps if I insert a new “experimental treatments” section? I also have a number of other references that I could include. As yet I am not aware of reviews but no doubt these will be published in the coming months as the medical profession synthesizes the animal and human data available thus far. Potionism (talk) 23:36, 16 February 2011 (UTC)
- You are correct that in most cases we consider academic articles to be good sources. But the ideal sources are in fact secondary sources, not primary sources. Primary sources are allowed, but we may only state exactly what is in them, with absolutely zero interpretation. Furthermore, because of the real consequences of having bad medical information, medical articles actually have a stricter set of sourcing guidelines than other articles, which can be found at WP:MEDRS. I think that your last sentence really shows what we should do: if, in the coming months, we can expect synthesis of available data in secondary sources, then we should wait for those secondary sources. Wikipedia does not need to be, and generally shouldn't, be right on the "cutting edge" of science (we couldn't be, because then scientific articles would become bloated with every new study, though experiment, or analysis). I hope this helps. Qwyrxian (talk) 00:33, 17 February 2011 (UTC)
Hi. Thanks again for responding. Unfortunately you have mostly ignored my response to your concerns and instead stuck to your original opinion. I reinterate that the post fulfils all of Wikipedia's rules, in that it cites a verifiable published source and gives only information that is available in that source. This study has been widely publicised in the lay media and there are multiple academic research groups working on this particular therapeutic target around the world. On those grounds I think it would be useful to include a sentence or two in Wikipedia. As soon as a review becomes available, I will add that reference also. Sound ok to you? Potionism (talk) 02:46, 22 February 2011 (UTC)
- No, because you still haven't addressed the fact that, for medical articles, WP:MEDRS is generally considered to trump even WP:V, specifically because we don't want to include what the "lay media" says about medical issues as if it were equivalent to medical fact. But, even it didn't, WP:V and WP:RS, which are site-wide policies/guidelines, do state that primary sources can only be used sparingly and only to state exactly what they say (no interpretation at all allowed). Qwyrxian (talk) 03:26, 22 February 2011 (UTC)
But my edit fulfils the requirements set out in WP:MEDRS! The ref is for an article published in CNS Drugs, a respected, international, peer reviewed medical journal. It is a primary source rather than a secondary source and so the text I added (one sentence - how much more sparingly is there?) said exactly what is said in the freely-available abstract from that published article. No interpretation has been added. Do you concur?
- Quoting from WP:MEDRS: "Although popular-press news articles and press releases often tout the latest phase II clinical trials, such trials are rarely important enough to mention in an encyclopedia. In addition, the importance of small studies, laboratory studies, or studies that did not directly measure clinically important results is often overstated. When in doubt, omit mention of the primary study (in accordance with our policy on recentism) because determining the weight to give to such a study requires reliable secondary sources (not press releases or newspaper articles based on them)." This study, with three subjects, appears to fall exactly under the recommendations for omitting the primary study. It still seems correct to me to leave this out until such time as it appears in secondary sources. Qwyrxian (talk) 01:20, 28 February 2011 (UTC)
It's interesting that you choose to omit the first and last sentences of the paragraph: "If an important scientific finding is so new that no reliable reviews have been published on the subject, it may be helpful to cite the primary source that reported the original result." AND "If the conclusions of the research are worth mentioning, they should be described as being from a single study". The importance of this small study is that it's the first drug shown to reverse the neurological dysfunction that often accompanies stroke. That has major implications. The drug has already been approved for psoriatic arthritis, plague psoriasis, juvenile rheumatoid arthritis and ankylosing spondylitis, so it has a well characterised safety profile. This is not a new experimental drug that has been tested in a few hundred patients. It has been available in the US since 1998 and has been used by hundreds of thousands of patients, if not more. It is also undergoing clinical trials (sponsored by the NIH and US Army I believe) for Alzheimer's disease and is showing promise in treating spinal cord injury. Finally, I think I should point out that I am a medical editor and have absolutely no financial ties to this drug. I do however think this is very exciting research.
Please use review articles as refs. Thanks. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 06:05, 17 June 2011 (UTC)
June 2012
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Welcome to Wikipedia. Thank you for your contributions. I noticed that your username (Potionism) may not meet Wikipedia's username policy because it appears to be on behalf of an entire movement rather than one person. If you believe that your username does not violate our policy, please leave a note here explaining why. As an alternative, you may ask for a change of username, or you may simply create a new account to use for editing. Thank you. — Jeff G. ツ (talk) 00:54, 20 June 2012 (UTC)
Hi Jeff. Thanks for your message. My username is a variation of my surname and is the ID I use for all my online profiles. I hope that's ok. Thanks.
COI
editPlease make yourself familiar with wp:COI. It appears you have a connection to publications that you have been citing in Wikipedia. LeadSongDog come howl! 01:52, 20 June 2012 (UTC)