Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 20:40, 9 February 2006

This IP address, 86.10.231.219, is registered to highly intelligent brain cells dedicated to fighting vandals and is shared by multiple brain cells. Comments left on this page may be received by other brain cells of this IP and appear to be irrelevant. Caution should be used when blocking this IP or reverting its contributions without checking.

If you are an unregistered brain cell operating from this address, note that this need not necessarily be the IP address of your ganglion. In many cases, it turns out to be the IP address of your fingers that communicates between your brain cells and the Wikimedia servers. Such fingers are shared among a huge number of bodily usages compared to the number of brain cells using your particular ganglion. If you are frustrated by irrelevant comments appearing here, you can avoid them by creating an account for yourself.

Welcome!

Hello, and welcome to Misplaced Pages. Thank you for your contributions.

Currently, you are editing without a username. You can continue to do so as you are not required to log in to Misplaced Pages to read and write articles, however, logging in will result in a username being shown instead of your IP address (yours is 86.10.231.219). Logging in does not require any personal details. There are many other benefits for logging in to Misplaced Pages.

Please note these points:

• Please respect others' copyrights; do not copy and paste the contents from webpages directly.
• Please use a neutral point of view to edit the article; this is possibly the most important Misplaced Pages policy.
• If you are testing, please use the Sandbox to do that.
• Do not add unreasonable contents into any articles, such as: copyrighted texts, advertisement messages, and texts that are not related to that article. Both adding such unreasonable information and editing articles maliciously are considered vandalism. A user who repeatedly vandalises articles will be blocked from editing.

The Misplaced Pages Tutorial is a good place to start learning about Misplaced Pages. If you have any questions, ask me on my Talk page – I will answer your questions as far as I can! Thank you again for contributing to Misplaced Pages.

from Wikipedian: Kukini 07:00, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for experimenting with Misplaced Pages. Your test worked, and has been reverted or removed. Please use the sandbox for any other tests you want to do. Take a look at the welcome page if you would like to learn more about contributing to our encyclopedia. Thanks. --Jwissick 23:15, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

Reply in thanks put on Jwissick's talk page - see Diff for message:- ] 86.10.231.219 23:36, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

Time & Tide

Thanks for the note. Will be waiting. The Invisible Anon 16:48, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

Please watch Talk:Autism

Finally a little on a talk page, eh? Please see what others might say to the question of diet and Autism there. The diet and autism section is weak in the article. By the way, why not just establish a presence with a logon? You could edit from other locations and when your IP address changes some time in the future you wouldn't lose your ability to track contributions ans such. Also you could elect to get eMail. That feature is nice, and Misplaced Pages won't reveal your eMail address. Kd4ttc 23:24, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

Sorry

My apology. The note on the User page appears to have been made by someone other than yourself. Kd4ttc 23:28, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

Comment removed from User page

An anonymous fringe editor publishing rubbish. (unsigned comment by User:Midgley removed from User page) 21:04, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

Votes of Anons Do Count

Votes of anons do count. Need strong evidence of bad faith not to count them. See ".... administrators can disregard opinions and comments if ... strong evidence ... not made in good faith ... "bad faith" opinions include those made by sock puppets, being made anonymously, or being made using a new userid whose only edits are to the article in question and the voting on that article." Check edit history for evidence of good faith and do not presume bad faith. The Invisible Anon 12:28, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

I'm sorry if I am presuing to instruct an Englishman on English, but that page as referred to, and the text as quoted above are not easily construed in that fashion.

"..."bad faith" opinions include those ... being made anonymously..." is by far the most obvious way to read that composite sentence. I believe the same applies in the American version.

To test that, you could ask, or you could look for an example - a precedent or a common occurrence, of anonymous votes being counted.

I'm pleased to see this user now has a user page. Midgley 13:24, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

Woolf pack?

It would be much appreciated if you could remove your list of 'Woolf pack' members from your user page. I am not a puppet (sock- or meat-) of User:Jfdwolff, and I do not take direction from that editor or any of the editors on your list. I suspect that the other editors you have listed feel the same way.

It is also inappropriate to describe another good-faith editor as a 'medical graffiti expert', and you would be well-advised to remove that characterization. Making personal attacks on other editors is never an acceptable practice on Misplaced Pages.

To make communication with you easier and more reliable, I would strongly recommend registering a username. It's free, requires no personally-identifying information, and would allow you to have your own user space, rather than the anonymous space attacked to a random NTL IP address. Your preferred name, 'The Invisible Anon', is even still available. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 18:51, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

Thank you for your comments and I am taking careful note of what you say.

The 'medical graffitti expert' is a joke. It is quite a funny one. Let me explain. The user page was completely blank. Like a blank wall in the street. It had nothing on it. Then, suddenly, someone writes on it - just like a graffitti artist. And he wrote "An anonymous fringe editor publishing rubbish." See for yourself - here is the evidence ].

I know Adrian Midgely enjoys a joke and this one is quite apt in all the circumstances. This is not a personal attack and I find it hard to characterise it as such. However, I will be happy to consider your view further on the point. Perhaps you might also let me have your views on these questions: was it the action of a good faith editor for Adrian to do that? Isn't that an attack on another editor and on his user page no less? Haven't I dealt with it in a light-hearted manner and not taken offence? But, shouldn't I be the injured party?

Regarding the user pages listed on my user page, if there is a Wiki policy I can turn to to see if there is anything and what it might be that is objectionable, if at all, that would be helpful. So it is important to know to what is being objected to. Do you not agree that time and again the same names appear to crop up on the same pages? A number of the users listed on my user page, for example all appear on the RfD page ].

It is the same people every time. I can see that some of them co-ordinate with each other over these matters and there is evidence to show that. These are not all people acting in isolation but in co-operation and I keep seeing the same names over and over.

As for logging in, I have given that consideration. No other user is using this IP address to edit on Misplaced Pages. If one does, then I will consider the suggestion further. Until that time, if it were ever to occur and I doubt it very much, I am the one disadvantaged by not having registered on the system. I could ensure my messages are signed with pgp signature.

This is an example above. I have deleted the signature with this edit but the diff will always show the original message and signature.

I am certainly willing to consider modifying the text of the user page to take account of your concerns and any Misplaced Pages policy that is relevant. Do you object, for example, to just being listed as an editor who edits or comments on pages as I edit or comment on? The Invisible Anon 22:46, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

Anti-vaccinationists, discussions etc

Hmmm - there is a user & talk page as you said - I thought anons did not have - one learns something new every day :-). That said, unless you have a fixed internet link and stable URL number, the question arises is '86.10.231.219' always you ? If it is stable and only usable by you then why not register, if only to show to others that all contributions are from one person and allow people to engage in discussion, rather than perhaps it reflecting many people via an ISP sharing the same URL who might each hold opposing views and so make discussion difficult. I'm happy to accept that many desire or required to be "anonymous", so names without any reference to gender, religion, geographical location or political observation is admirable and indeed most WP usernames are effectively anonymous handles. Anyway, enough digressing and on with the discussion: Thank you for your courteous comments on my talk-page. Don't worry about your entry's length, although I think my talk page is getting overlong and in need of archiving. P.S. this entry seems even longer than yours:-)

I agree several other editors had failed to revert the deleted text, but you'll understand I was quite incensed at seeing the deletion (especially as it had taken me a couple of goes to post my vote, what with my computer crashing a couple of times - not you fault of course !)

The real problem for articles debating epidemiology/risks to complex issues is that the discussion must be held about complex research and data interpretation, which is probably at too deep a level for a general encyclopaedia such as wikipedia. I agree one can't just say "a minority disagree that X is safe for reasons that the majority reject", but getting too deep into a debate makes articles almost unreadable to the general casual reader. Heck, even I find the articles terse and a struggle to get through, but I have no magic solution to offer as to where to draw the line. There should be a role for external references to provide the greater detail, but articles can't be just bland one-line dictionary definitions with a huge numbers of references; they need to include some structure as to the outlines of the issues to give meaning and relevance to the deeper information to be found from a few selected references. Consensus on such articles will come I suspect less from agreeing the merit of specific arguments, but on NPOV summarising (vs. fully defending each POV) with then a few choice references outside and away from wikipedia. This then allows the reader to extend their understanding in either direction, and whilst the article wont be a "complete" discourse, it should be acceptable as an encyclopaedic entry.

You eloquently set out the (dare I say it) acceptable concerns that might be raised about any treatment, namely what is the potential harm if a treatment is not used, how effective is that treatment and what are the adverse effects of so using the treatment. You are quite right that good research (leaving aside what this precisely is, and where anecdotal reports fit into evidence gathering), should in time help quantify the statistics. This should be agreeable by all, although quite how appropriate to put every last detail into wikipedia that is meant to be a general encyclopaedia rather than a research paper is debatable - that is the point of having references (I happy for a risk to be written in WP as 'about half' rather than a technically precise but emotionally empty '48.15%'). However I disagree with you that such agreed statistics would end debate or disagreement (I wish that it could/would):

• Risk-benefit analysis is not only quantitative but also qualitative; being subjective in as much that each risk/benefit percentage must then be weighed by an importance-factor. Hence the effort in having to look both ways before crossing the road affects 100% of people, against being hit which is a smaller percentage. Yet the "statistics" do not result in us all crossing the road without taking care - clearly the cost of the 'effort' in checking is minimal although affecting everyone, yet the cost of being hit is huge. This makes discussion of a treatment's 'worth' harder than just a balance of percentages, there is scope here for genuine disagreement, for there is no intrinsic absolute truth in value judgements - I give below an example:
  • A young child (say 7 who is old enough to have some discussion with but too young to take absolute responsibility for their decisions) might refuse having a blood test due to needle phobia, irrespective of the possible benefit in their overall care (despite best efforts of doctors & parents to try to explain at their level of understanding) . A parent then 'forcing' their child to have a blood test, is certainly going to immediately feel some guilt for upsetting that child.
  • The statistical likelihood of the blood test helping to make a difference to the diagnosis, disease assessment, treatment options and eventual outcome can be debated - some of this may be hard statistical evidence, some is open to discussion or even great uncertainty (a blood test for an infection may allow correct treatment and life-saving cure, a test that confirms a cancer that after assessment proves incurable will, in retrospect, not have helped that child). Perhaps a more useful discriminator would have been some additional fact from the patient's history rather than resorting to a blood test.
  • So it is difficult to absolutely quantify the possible benefit of getting the test done against the blatantly obvious existence of emotional trauma involved in getting any blood taken.
  • Indeed in this respect medicine might be seen as partly an art in the application of science - I'm sure most doctors sometimes defer non-immediately-critical investigations/treatments they know from experience are likely to be for the best, for just such reasons (until perhaps circumstances change and greater weight applies to a particular course of action/inaction).

• Next is the issue of data presentation and weight. I've seen media articles about some life-threatening adverse effect of a treatment stating that doctors claim it is safe yet (shock horror) that they admit to a third of patients experiencing side effects. Of course this sort of statement is (deliberately) misleading, as side-effects will include not only the exceptionally rare life-threatening events mentioned, but also the many time more common side-effects that are mild, transitory and with no long-term consequences. Whilst not dismissing the potential for serious reactions and the need to spot early, this type of statement tries to imply that a third of patients will have the life-threatening consequences. In case you were wondering I've seen such articles relating to antibiotics (perhaps 33% experiencing mild stomach or bowel upset \ anaphylactic allergic reactions a tiny risk \ in appropriate circumstances treatment life-saving) and some anti-malarials (many cause taste disturbance or poor sleeping \ psychiatric disturbance is rare \ getting malaria can kill).

So, with good reason, the idea that the 'facts will out' and everyone will come to a consensus is both probably impossible and will be argued over with bias.

I think in part the problem with contentious articles is that the aim of wikipedia is somewhat vague; in that it can try to be all things:

1. At a very basic level is simple dictionary definition of terms e.g. "Flat-earth: the belief the world is flat and not a sphere" or "Vaccines: analogues of an illness that by injection into a person stimulate the immune system with the aim of conferring protection against the full infection". I hope both are NPOV even though flat-earth is rejected by most, vaccines accepted by most.
2. The next level up is a definition at the level of a young teenager's encyclopaedia. This might describe slightly more fully: perhaps difference of virus and bacteria, of using just a part of the micro-organism in a vaccine, of having some soreness at site of injection, and then a hint of the issues that whilst recommended by most, some question how useful they are.
3. However by the time one reaches a school leavers text book one should be discussing: levels of vaccine effectiveness, herd immunity and benefit this gives to those not yet vaccinated or failing to respond to a vaccine themselves vs. reduced likelihood of personal benefit.
4. WP is though usually above this and generally seems to have articles that expand in their latter sections to under-graduate levels.
5. The level of "ferocity" in some of WP's controversial articles seems more like that of the esoteric debates at post-graduate/research levels.

Now aside form the merits of any aspect within a debate about a topic, it is clear that the amount of information and thus presentation of mankind’s understanding (and thus shade of Points of View) builds up with the increasing target-level of the article. I think everyone could agree to NPOV at level 1 above, and within each side of the debate there is likely to be some POV disagreements at the stage of level 5. The question is the approach at the level of 3-4 of both maintaining overall article NPOV and the style of discussing each POV. I'm sure its just about possible, but 'about' is unlikely to be perfectly so.

As the complexity increases with each audience target level, so the amount and care with qualifying language needs to increase. Indeed at the deepest level of considering any facet of a topic is nearly always "this is the level of current understanding". Reaching this stage is likely to be inappropriate within wikipedia, or fall foul of original research rules.

All this I guess is a long way of considering how much info we want on vaccination, the arguments either for or against (either on specific issues, or conventional acceptance vs. alternative outright rejection) and the movements that hold these views. I don't know quite where I would place my own cut-off point, but would discussion about the "process of encyclopaedia compiling complex articles", rather than purely focusing on the details of the contents of an individual article, allow an acceptable article to be formed (vs. each side viewing an article as imperfect). I would suggest that abortion forms a good analogue - current article contains a dictionary definition of what it is & its history section (NPOV even if one disagrees with abortion), followed by the debate of the arguments against & the counter-arguments (the opposing POVs). The article neither suggest that abortion is a good thing (even pro-choicers would much prefer that a women never finds herself in a situation with an unwanted pregnancy), nor that all accept it is morally acceptable or unacceptable. Both pro-choice and pro-life viewpoints probably see the article as biased against their POV, but I think the article is a good encyclopaedic entry.

I do think that the anti-vacinationists article is in need of POV/NPOV consensus, but even more importantly consensus on what level to pitch debated medical topics, but I don't think that warrants Afd. I'll look forward to catching up with discussions after my wikibreak with a real-life week's holiday. David Ruben 05:02, 4 February 2006 (UTC)

Please see comments on my talk page

Please see comments at User_talk:Kd4ttc#Rfd_Anti-Vaccinationists Kd4ttc 17:36, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

RFC

RFC found here not originating with me. - JustinWick 22:45, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

a block paragraph is done with hard line breaks
and a single space before each line
otherwise they run and run and run and run and run off the side of the page and it's really annoying to read...  your comments on RfC have this error, please amend (preview is your friend).
- JustinWick 23:53, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

Ubernosy question

Just out of curiousity, why edit anonymously if you feel strongly about your edits? It has been my experience that editors often take anon edits less seriously... also login names do not appear to be easy to trace back to real world individuals (except in my case, where I just used my name, time will tell if that was a good decision). Cheers, - JustinWick 02:17, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

Allopath

The problem with using the term allopath to describe a practitioner of conventional medicine is that it carries some ugly baggage. Allopath is defined simply as 'on who practices allopathy', a term for which you have already provided a definition. It was invented by Hahnemann as a deliberate caricature of his preferred homeopathy, and it was (and is) used as a pejorative term.

To an extent, the term has been co-opted or subverted (if you will) by mainstream medicine, and some organizations now consider 'allopathic medicine' a synonym of 'conventional' or 'Western' medicine. Note that the preferred formulation–if you must use it–is 'practitioner of allopathic medicine', and not 'allopath'. An allopath is one who follows Hahnemann's caricature, a practitioner of allopathic medicine is actually practicing conventional medicine.

In the context of vaccination debates, describing vaccination as 'allopathy' has a particular potential to confuse—vaccination is based on exposing patients to compounds and organisms very similar to those which cause disease.

From the standpoint of writing an encyclopedia article, the meanings of 'conventional' or 'Western' are understood by a much larger audience than 'allopathic'. There's no need to use a more obscure term when it is no more precise and when it is seen as loaded. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 14:53, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

Thank you. You are kind to take the trouble to explain this. I have also been looking at the definition of the term following the comments of others. The Invisible Anon 15:00, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

Midgley

Please stop using the page User:86.10.231.219 as a platform to attack User:Midgley or to impugn the motives and good faith of other editors. If you would like to discuss the appropriateness of edits–addition or removal of material, name and location of articles–do so on the article talk pages. If you feel that more eyes are needed in an article dispute, the Request for Comment process is thataway.

Further testing the bounds and enforcement of our civility and personal attack policies is Not Done, all right? TenOfAllTrades(talk) 20:40, 9 February 2006 (UTC)