Stoney1976

Editor interested in increasing verifiable, evidence-based content in Wikipedia. Very open to discussions in which verifiable sources are presented as the source of the arguments.

June 2020

You have been blocked from editing for a period of 24 hours for edit warring. Once the block has expired, you are welcome to make useful contributions.

During a dispute, you should first try to discuss controversial changes and seek consensus. If that proves unsuccessful, you are encouraged to seek dispute resolution, and in some cases it may be appropriate to request page protection.

If you think there are good reasons for being unblocked, please read the guide to appealing blocks, then add the following text below the block notice on your talk page: {{unblock|reason=Your reason here ~~~~}}.  Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 19:25, 30 June 2020 (UTC)

This user's unblock request has been reviewed by an administrator, who accepted the request.

Stoney1976 (block log • active blocks • global blocks • contribs • deleted contribs • filter log • creation log • change block settings • unblock • checkuser (log))

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Request reason:

Please unblock me. I had no idea that what I was trying to do would be the least bit controversial. I have seen it done on many professional level pages. What I was trying to do is use List defined references. Anyway, I promise I will not try to apply this system again unless those on the talk page approve. I was trying to correct the errors from the reversals when you blocked me. I can edit the page without "list defined references" - I was just trying to make it easier and improve the page. Thank you for your time and consideration.Stoney1976 (talk) 20:16, 30 June 2020 (UTC)

Accept reason:

That's exactly what I wanted to hear, and it pleases me to have now unblocked you. I don't doubt your motivation was honorable, just the execution was problematic. Welcome back. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 20:41, 30 June 2020 (UTC)

I'm personally a big fan of List defined references as it makes the wikitext far cleaner and easier to read, and I've used them since their inception. Nevertheless, not everybody agrees with using them because a new editor may become confused that they can't find where references are defined (not expecting that to happen in the references section). It has been accepted that a change to LDRs is a change to the WP:CITEVAR format, as unintuitive as that may be, and you're going to have to reluctantly live with that, as I do.

If you want to change an article to LDRs, you have to raise it first of all at the article's talk page and seek consensus for the change. Of course, immature articles that have a mish-mash of references are fair game for bold edit, but something as heavily edited as Coronavirus disease 2019 just isn't suitable while it's changing so rapidly, because new editors to an article will almost certainly use in-line definitions and the article will rapidly turn into a mixture of types causing even more confusion. My advice would be to look at more stable articles if you want to make an effort to raise the prominence of LDRs, but you mustn't expect everyone to see them as a good thing. Cheers --RexxS (talk) 19:46, 30 June 2020 (UTC)

• Thank you RexxS - I did not know what it was called. I tried looking it up but without success.Stoney1976 (talk) 20:16, 30 June 2020 (UTC)

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MEDRS

Please make yourself familiar with the standards for high-quality sourcing required by WP:MEDRS, particularly for biomedical claims that must be supported by scholarly secondary sources. I've just reverted the large changes you made to Coronavirus disease 2019 which make claims about the effects of viral load without any of those sources being provided. We cannot use newspapers as sources of biomedical content, nor should we use animal studies, nor primary sources such as studies or case reports. The opinions of a single expert might be useful, but are unlikely to be sufficient to base an entire section on. --RexxS (talk) 17:44, 4 July 2020 (UTC)

• I don't know anything about what "fragmenting a discussion" is either. I do have other sources but seems I was aiming too high (journal articles) and too low (newspapers) at the same time. At least the publication turnaround seems to be speeding up due to the urgency of the situation. Still, at this point I'm only likely to find "review articles" related to similar viruses.Stoney1976 (talk) 18:22, 4 July 2020 (UTC)
• And I did check the reference list to get a sense of acceptable sources before I started.Stoney1976 (talk) 18:24, 4 July 2020 (UTC)

None of your work is lost, as it's all there in the page history. But it's not going to be much use without the highest-quality sources to support it. I don't get my medical advice from a newspaper, and our readers shouldn't, either. If you're unaware of Trip database, it's worth a look to find secondary scholarly sources for any medical topic. Perhaps a read of SARS-CoV-2 viral load and the severity of COVID-19 from the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, which discusses the available evidence, might be a starting point. It's rather out-of-date now (26 March 2020), but should give you some idea of some of the analyses that were in progress. None of those came from a newspaper.

You will find that there still is very little in the way of secondary scholarly sources that discuss the effect of initial viral load on COVID-19.

Trip only comes up with a couple of sources, one of which is from 2004 and discusses SARS.

PubMed has just one result for "Initial Viral Load" COVID-19 and that's published in a Frontiers journal that I wouldn't touch with a bargepole.

Fragmenting a discussion is where one comment is made on one page and the reply is elsewhere. Wikipedia is a collaborative editing environment and debates are not limited to just two people. It makes it very hard for anybody reading it to follow a fragmented discussion. --RexxS (talk) 18:42, 4 July 2020 (UTC)

Thank you. This is all very helpful. I was hoping there was something like the Trip database. Stoney1976 (talk) 19:13, 4 July 2020 (UTC)

Kamala Harris

She and reliable sources both refer to her as "Black" or "African American". Africans were transported to Jamaica, and her African ancestry comes through this. Please do not use the talk page as a WP:FORUM with your negative comments towards Democrats. – Muboshgu (talk) 22:05, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

"Woman of Color" or "Black" would work, but there is some debate about the groups outside the US to whom the latter applies. By your definition of African-American, everyone is African-American. It wasn't a negative comment about Democrats. I'll track down the source.Stoney1976 (talk) 22:31, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

Important standard notice

This is a standard message to notify contributors about an administrative ruling in effect. It does not imply that there are any issues with your contributions to date.

You have shown interest in post-1932 politics of the United States and closely related people. Due to past disruption in this topic area, a more stringent set of rules called discretionary sanctions is in effect. Any administrator may impose sanctions on editors who do not strictly follow Wikipedia's policies, or the page-specific restrictions, when making edits related to the topic.

For additional information, please see the guidance on discretionary sanctions and the Arbitration Committee's decision here. If you have any questions, or any doubts regarding what edits are appropriate, you are welcome to discuss them with me or any other editor.

This is a standard message to notify contributors about an administrative ruling in effect. It does not imply that there are any issues with your contributions to date.

You have shown interest in articles about living or recently deceased people, and edits relating to the subject (living or recently deceased) of such biographical articles. Due to past disruption in this topic area, a more stringent set of rules called discretionary sanctions is in effect. Any administrator may impose sanctions on editors who do not strictly follow Wikipedia's policies, or the page-specific restrictions, when making edits related to the topic.

For additional information, please see the guidance on discretionary sanctions and the Arbitration Committee's decision here. If you have any questions, or any doubts regarding what edits are appropriate, you are welcome to discuss them with me or any other editor.

--Neutrality^talk 23:42, 11 August 2020 (UTC)