User:NuclearWarfare/Articles to work on
Uncontroversial article suggestions?
[edit]So I figure I probably need to do some proper writing again. Do you or any of your talk page watchers have suggestions for a not-too-technical, uncontroversial medical article where review articles and such exist in spades? Yeah, I'm aware that I'm probably asking for a subject that doesn't exist, but can't hurt to try. Best, NW (Talk) 02:43, 4 July 2011 (UTC)
- Oh there are loads. Probably the majority of medical articles. How "technical" can it be? Epilepsy is on my [never getting round to it] to-do list. Needs a complete overhaul. I don't think you'd face any conflict editing there. Colin°Talk 08:55, 4 July 2011 (UTC)
- How non-technical a subject do you want? I've been thinking about an article on Disease awareness (an umbrella article that summarizes more specific subjects like Breast cancer awareness) for a few months. That's really more sociology of medicine than proper medicine, and as such is completely non-technical. The sources are mostly "books" rather than "reviews", but decent scholarly sources exist.
- You've been doing a lot with abortion, so if you're up on the subject, Pregnancy would benefit from your attention. Condom is not too far from FA. On the other hand, I suspect that what you're looking for is to get away from that area.
- I don't know what your general areas of interest are. I see edits to XMRV; if you're interested in hematological malignancies, then basically all the lymphomas and leukemias need to be re-written. DLBL, for example, is the most common lymphoma, and it's barely more than a start. In a few cases, there are stellar sources available for rare conditions ("rare" in this instance meaning "so under-watched that you could probably re-write the article in complete, uninterrupted, perfect peace"). Drop me a note if you're interested in that. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:13, 4 July 2011 (UTC)
- Wikipedia:Requested articles/Applied arts and sciences/Medicine sez we need an article about how the governments is prepared to stab all the childrens inna face. - 2/0 (cont.) 16:19, 4 July 2011 (UTC)
- How about Human Vision?. We have Human eye, Visual perception, Eye movement, Saccade, et al. but no overview. see Visual Stability - ArtifexMayhem (talk) 19:00, 4 July 2011 (UTC)
- Visual system also seems closes, but Vision is probably where the top human article should go. Then Vision (disambiguation) would list others. At present Vision is the dab page. Given the breadth of other uses there, a cautious approach to discussing the move of the dab page would seem warranted. The other option would be to make the human article Vision (human) and leave the dab page where it is. LeadSongDog come howl! 19:34, 4 July 2011 (UTC)
- One of the things I figured I'd do if I ever got burnt out in controversial areas would be just go down the list of Cochrane reviews and add them one by one to their respective Wikipedia articles (and deleting primary studies on the way). Yobol (talk) 04:41, 5 July 2011 (UTC)
- Almost any disease article is "noncontroversial". They are difficult, in that it takes some time to get up to speed. Mostly, the alt-med people just don't have enough medical knowledge (oh wait, that's irony) to edit them, so they throw in a "this herb cures all diseases", but they go away, because they just don't know enough and they lack any MEDRS articles. I remember getting involved with Alzheimer's disease with a Spanish editor. He provided all the references and such, and I did the writing. I believe I met LeadSongDog in that editing process. It was a really bad article when we started. Ended up a pretty good FA (don't you think LSD?). I play around with several disease articles, and it is relaxing. There are all kinds of parasites, viruses, cancers, and other disease states that could use help. Interventional cardiology is a mess, mostly written by corporate lackeys (I ran down IP addresses to coworkers, which amuses me, and why I don't edit them). Those are my ideas. OrangeMarlin Talk• Contributions 05:21, 5 July 2011 (UTC)
- Then and still I tend to focus on citegnoming, especially as I'm getting familiar with a topic. In the process of converting partial to complete citations you get the chance to read many of the papers that have been cited by previous editors. If you feel industrious you can also vet that they support the statements they are cited against. When they appear dated it's not too tough to check Pubmed for more recent reviews. Just pick a few keywords from the supported statement, pop them into the Pubmed query window along with "review" and see what pops up: very frequently one of the top results is useful, and perhaps even freely available online. Check the pubmed XML view "Publication type" value to make sure that it is a review and that it has not been retracted. By the time you get through the list you'll usually be in a decent position to constructively edit the content, and even if you don't do so you'll have helped subsequent editors. LeadSongDog come howl! 15:02, 5 July 2011 (UTC)
- Citegnoming? Well there's a new word. I agree, and it can be relaxing, though the missing diberri tool is not helpful. But you're right, you end up reading the citations, and think "wait wait, that doesn't support anything." The alt-med types quote mine from those citations, and when you read them, you find out they don't say "this green herb cures male pattern baldness," but instead says "this green herb doesn't cure male pattern baldness, but isn't harmful if taken in small doses." 16:22, 5 July 2011 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Orangemarlin (talk • contribs)
- Then and still I tend to focus on citegnoming, especially as I'm getting familiar with a topic. In the process of converting partial to complete citations you get the chance to read many of the papers that have been cited by previous editors. If you feel industrious you can also vet that they support the statements they are cited against. When they appear dated it's not too tough to check Pubmed for more recent reviews. Just pick a few keywords from the supported statement, pop them into the Pubmed query window along with "review" and see what pops up: very frequently one of the top results is useful, and perhaps even freely available online. Check the pubmed XML view "Publication type" value to make sure that it is a review and that it has not been retracted. By the time you get through the list you'll usually be in a decent position to constructively edit the content, and even if you don't do so you'll have helped subsequent editors. LeadSongDog come howl! 15:02, 5 July 2011 (UTC)
- Almost any disease article is "noncontroversial". They are difficult, in that it takes some time to get up to speed. Mostly, the alt-med people just don't have enough medical knowledge (oh wait, that's irony) to edit them, so they throw in a "this herb cures all diseases", but they go away, because they just don't know enough and they lack any MEDRS articles. I remember getting involved with Alzheimer's disease with a Spanish editor. He provided all the references and such, and I did the writing. I believe I met LeadSongDog in that editing process. It was a really bad article when we started. Ended up a pretty good FA (don't you think LSD?). I play around with several disease articles, and it is relaxing. There are all kinds of parasites, viruses, cancers, and other disease states that could use help. Interventional cardiology is a mess, mostly written by corporate lackeys (I ran down IP addresses to coworkers, which amuses me, and why I don't edit them). Those are my ideas. OrangeMarlin Talk• Contributions 05:21, 5 July 2011 (UTC)
- One of the things I figured I'd do if I ever got burnt out in controversial areas would be just go down the list of Cochrane reviews and add them one by one to their respective Wikipedia articles (and deleting primary studies on the way). Yobol (talk) 04:41, 5 July 2011 (UTC)
- Visual system also seems closes, but Vision is probably where the top human article should go. Then Vision (disambiguation) would list others. At present Vision is the dab page. Given the breadth of other uses there, a cautious approach to discussing the move of the dab page would seem warranted. The other option would be to make the human article Vision (human) and leave the dab page where it is. LeadSongDog come howl! 19:34, 4 July 2011 (UTC)
- How about Human Vision?. We have Human eye, Visual perception, Eye movement, Saccade, et al. but no overview. see Visual Stability - ArtifexMayhem (talk) 19:00, 4 July 2011 (UTC)
← As far as articles, as WhatamIdoing mentioned, the leukemias and lymphomas could use some love. Acute myeloid leukemia is the first featured article that I worked on extensively, but it's woefully out of date and needs to be updated to include molecular prognostic markers for patients with normal cytogenetics, as well as newer treatment approaches. Chronic lymphocytic leukemia is the most common leukemia in the Western world, but our article is still pretty half-baked. The most common forms of lymphoma (Hodgkin lymphoma, diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, and follicular lymphoma) could all use improvement. That's where I plan to start, if/when I go back to serious content editing. I suspect all of those articles will be non-controversial. MastCell Talk 17:56, 5 July 2011 (UTC)
- Thanks for the excellent suggestions all. Basic physiology is fairly beyond me though, let alone pathophysiology and disease. WhatamIdoing's suggestion of pregnancy and perhaps Orangemarlin's suggestion of interventional cardiology is probably closet to what I was thinking. I think what I was really aiming for is something like abortion—rather non-technical, fair amount of public health/epidemiology content that isn't too hard to comprehend—but without the whole pro-choice/pro-life part. Any thoughts on something that might fit those criteria? NW (Talk) 20:35, 5 July 2011 (UTC)
- My impression of Category:Early childhood education is that it could use a lot of love. You get CoI accounts and some politics, I am sure, but in learning the material you get to form an informed opinion in favor of DonorsChoose (<end shameless plug for a project I support but do not benefit from>). I do not recall seeing anything from the topic area at the drama-boards (though neither have I checked). Early childhood interventions can be wonderfully efficient, but by their nature the endpoints often require large studies and decades of follow up. - 2/0 (cont.) 21:00, 5 July 2011 (UTC)
- Obesity, of course. Health effects of tobacco, or possibly Medical marijuana. HIV prevention, teen pregnancy, and harm reduction are all possibilities. Disease, maybe; it needs to have Illness merged into it. Have you considered Public health itself? Oh, and I'd like Lifetime risk to quit being a redlink. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:03, 5 July 2011 (UTC)