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Hi Zodon, and Welcome to Misplaced Pages!

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Conflict of Interest Banner

I note that you flagged my suggested edits with a potential conflict-of-interest banner because I have consulted for Qiagen, a role not unlike many highly respected HPV experts. The peer reviewed data I provided in my original response supports the statements I've made, and I would presume that you too are well aware of this data and are an expert in this area. Is this correct? I can only assume that as a frequently relied on resource, Misplaced Pages tries to reflect the most up to date and accepted medical research and opinions as possible. Thank you. Drsavard (talk) 20:23, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

The problem with your edits was that they consistently presented one POV and removed more neutral material. Since the POV that was presented was that favoring the product of the company you consult for, that seemed like a potential COI. Some of the interpretations you presented were not representative of what was in the original reference (specifically relating to some of the screening guidelines). Misplaced Pages tries to give a neutral presentation of information. Have to present the downsides as well as the upsides of things and ballance the new and less well understood as well as the tried and true. Zodon (talk) 02:13, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

Follow up to Drsavard COI Banner

Hi Zodon. Since it seems we are having some trouble resolving our conflict of interest dispute, I have asked some other editors to step in and take a look at the content with us. Please reference WP:COIN for more information. Thank you for working with us to make sure the information on the disputed pages is relevant and informative. Drsavard (talk) 20:46, 22 July 2008 (UTC)

Wasn't aware we were having any difficulty dealing with it. Sorry I haven't had a lot of time to devote to wikipedia lately. Zodon (talk) 02:01, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

Not a problem. I know you were concerned about my posting medical information being a conflict of interest on several articles. I am hoping if you have time and are still interested, you can take a look at some of the articles I've suggested edits to and comment on the medical information provided. I really still am interested in making the edits I proposed to keep the article factual, but do not want to violate any community rules. Your feedback as a fellow contributor would be welcome. If you don't have time, I would like to move forward with the edits, as there were no further comments past the conflict of interest. (See cervical cancer, pap test and HPV Vaccine as an example). Thanks again! Drsavard (talk) 22:05, 30 July 2008 (UTC)

FYI

I think you can declare a separate "importance" for the reproductive medicine task force. Also -- while I have no objections to your choice of high importance for Condom -- it's not just page views that count. It's our estimate of page views among users who are looking for medicine-related articles. A person who is looking at an article for any other reason doesn't 'count' in this scheme. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:26, 26 July 2008 (UTC)

Is there any documentation someplace that makes more sense of the importance ranking for medical articles? I understand about things potentially having different importances to different projects, but it is a bit hard to make sense of some of the rankings. For instance, Condom was ranked mid importance, although it appears to receives a lot more views than some of the top importance medical items. Since Condom is one of the primary tools in preventing STIs, and reproductive ill-health is a significant fraction of the world's burden of ill-health, it seemed like Condom should be at least high importance.

Since the rankings in general don't make sense to me, I have generally avoided ranking things at all. (e.g. Cervical cancer is top importance and Human Papillomavirus, with about 2x as many views, is high importance, although cervical cancer is more serious, very few people get cervical cancer, but almost everybody gets HPV - go figure.)

In the case of Condom, the ranking seemed so far out of wack that I ventured to change it. But if others feel it was correct at Mid priority, I won't object if it gets changed back. However if there is more explanation of the rankings someplace (besides the ranking scale on project medicine) I would be interested to understand them further. Thanks. Zodon (talk) 17:36, 26 July 2008 (UTC)

I have no objections to your importance assessment for condom -- and since I have done something like 80% of the project's assessment work to date, my opinion is the one that matters.  ;-)

I also think that Condom might be a candidate for top-importance to the task force. (Of course, that's something that should be discussed at the task force's talk page.)

The Top vs. High rankings seem muddled to me. Your example is a perfect illustration of the concerns. Probably one or the other should be top, instead of both (just because we don't want to overload the top-importance rankings with STIs and cancer) -- but which one? Thoughtful editors could easily choose either.

Our current assessment guidelines (full disclosure: which I wrote) are IMO much more useful than the generic boilerplate that they replaced. But it's still a bit of a judgment call in some cases. In fact, even after assessing thousands of articles, there are still some that I leave alone, or come back weeks later and change.

One way of thinking about this is by comparison. Top-importance articles are the top 1%. High-importance articles are the top 10%. Low is the bottom half. So if you selected 100 medicine-related articles at random (Complete list available here), and lined them up according to importance to the hypothetical general reader, where would it fall? If it's clearly first in the list, then it's top. If it's clearly in the top 10%, then it's high.

Another way of thinking about this is through the lens of WP:1.0 ratings. Top-importance articles will always be included, even if they're just a dozen sentences long and have one pathetic reference. High-importance articles will almost be included, unless they're in poor condition. Mid-importance articles are included if the individual article is any good, but skipped if it is below-average quality. Low-importance articles are generally skipped. So think about a schoolteacher with Misplaced Pages on a stack of CDs: How obvious would the article's omission be to the teacher?

A common approach is to look at the other articles in the given importance category and see whether this article is a better "match" for this list or that list.

Finally, there's nothing quite like "learning by doing" for this. If you'd like to have a go at Category:Unknown-importance_medicine_articles and assess a few dozen (or hundreds), then I think you'll get a better handle on it. If figure that our first duty is to get an approximate rating associated with each article. If we later decide that this "High" is really "Mid", or the other way around, then that's not a bad thing. We just don't want to make huge mistakes, like rating something "Low" when it should be "High". WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:48, 26 July 2008 (UTC)

Thanks

		The Human Sexuality Barnstar
		Thank you for your well referenced improvements to the Safe sex article, Simon Speed (talk) 22:22, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Especially thanks for correcting a well intentioned but dangerously non-factual addition about soap and water. I worried about this when I saw it but (like most editors) don't have the medical knowledge and pretty much restrict myself to removing deliberate vandalism. --Simon Speed (talk) 22:22, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

I was right

Please read.

http://www.scielo.br/pdf/clin/v61n5/31813.pdf

I don't DO citations on Misplaced Pages. You can choose to do so if you wish.

My goal is to educate the public as to how long humans really live, and to explain why there are differences in longevity. Gender is a huge factor, with females having a better life expectancy than males in all but a few countries (which tend to be very male-biased, such as Pakistan). The point here is to show that the gender differences are mainly due to underlying biological factors, not just "bias in research" or "men ride motorcycles."Ryoung122 12:31, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

Gender and Super-C's

Greetings,

The largest study of supercentenarians yet done can be found here:

http://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations/AAI3109224/

Note that among the validated data, about 91.24% were female.

Compare to the IDL database (about 90% female) and the GRG database (about 89% female) and the assertion that the ratio is about 9:1 is strong.Ryoung122 09:06, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

As requested

Per your request the draft is here in it's entirety. Try to address the concerns (some will be sound in history) as soon as you can. Good luck with it.—Sandahl (talk) 00:52, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. Zodon (talk) 08:10, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Simplified version of Lonelypages

Hey, I was thinking Lonelypages could look confusing to people who just want to get orphan tags off the articles in their project, so I made a simplified version: Tagged orphans. All it needs is the cat or template argument, and it gives you all applicable tagged orphans. What do you think? --JaGa 07:22, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

Draft of thoughts:

"This is a list of tagged orphans (pages with no links from other articles)."

Might still be well to note that this is on English language wikipedia in simplified version?

Would it work to have a link that opens up more complex interface from the simpler one (hide the extra selections, but when click a link takes them to more powerful version)?

Maybe offer option to suppress the what is an orphan, etc. explanation, (at least on pages after the first one). (Could be done as parameter so those who use regularly can suppress the extra text). Get the heading down to 4 or 5 lines, leave the rest for listing.

Why force 10 point text in the style? (Would rather it defaulted to whatever the user preferred).

Other thoughts:

• Way to generate a wikilist (e.g. for project to keep track of what has/hasn't been reviewed).
• If hiding implemented - show hidden/non-hidden/either orphans. Zodon (talk) 09:03, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

Talk:Kill A Watt#Claim about reading errors

Just FYI, it's been observed several times by several people (google the subject matter), but that forum posting was the most authoritative that I could find, being an actual photograph of the test equipment in operation. I can add half a dozen less-good sources (at least reports from several different people shows that it's not a single faulty unit), but what exactly are we looking for? It's not important enough news that the New York Times is going to do a write-up on the subject, so expectations have to be limited. 71.41.210.146 (talk) 21:23, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

Copied question to talk page of article, will respond there. Zodon (talk) 01:25, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

redlinks in see also section

In response to this undo: I'm all for redlinks, but the MOS section on layout says not to have them in the See also section: "The "See also" section should not link to pages that do not exist (red links)." tedder (talk) 21:43, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

Okay, thanks, I missed that. I will try to see how to work the link into the text. Zodon (talk) 21:46, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

Human equivalent

Hi. I crossed paths with you on the Sustainability gardens article. A person that was reffing their book multiple times there and that also originated that article, also put the book on another article, which they also originated. This seems like an iffy matter to me Human equivalent. There is a discussion on the talk page. Your opinion? skip sievert (talk) 16:16, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

Drug categorization: consensus sought

Should the 2nd, 3rd and 4th levels of the Category:Drugs by target organ system mirror the Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical Classification System exactly, or be consolidated when possible?

Please read the more thorough description of this issue at WT:PHARM:CAT and post your comments there. You're comments would be much appreciated! Thanks. --ἀνυπόδητος (talk) 09:15, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

Reproductive Health

I've added comments to Talk:Reproductive_health#Name_change_to_Sexual_and_Reproductive_Health. Would appreciate your feedback - Alexd (talk) 05:34, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for the heads up. You raise an interesting point. I will respond further on the article talk page once I have time to think about it. Zodon (talk) 07:11, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

Can you?

In the page Safe sex you appear to have made a Revision as of 08:57, 12 September 2009 by adding text and citations to the article. One of those citations is causing a cite error. Could you please go back and fill out the full source information for the reference tag <ref name="Vittinghoff"/>? Thanks. 75.69.0.58 (talk) 19:29, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

I just moved the text in question, the citation error was already there in the version before I edited. But I dug back and found the citation anyway and fixed the error. Zodon (talk) 09:23, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

AfD nomination of Comparison of birth control methods

An editor has nominated one or more articles which you have created or worked on, for deletion. The nominated article is Comparison of birth control methods. We appreciate your contributions, but the nominator doesn't believe that the article satisfies Misplaced Pages's criteria for inclusion and has explained why in his/her nomination (see also Misplaced Pages:Notability and "What Misplaced Pages is not").

Your opinions on whether the article meets inclusion criteria and what should be done with the article are welcome; please participate in the discussion(s) by adding your comments to Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Comparison of birth control methods. Please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~).

You may also edit the article during the discussion to improve it but should not remove the articles for deletion template from the top of the article; such removal will not end the deletion debate.

Please note: This is an automatic notification by a bot. I have nothing to do with this article or the deletion nomination, and can't do anything about it. --Erwin85Bot (talk) 01:06, 23 October 2009 (UTC)

Womb veil

Several of your comments have improved the new article womb veil, and I appreciate your interest and experience in the broader subject area. However, I'm concerned that you don't understand the topic, which is NOT "history of barrier contraception for women." The topic is "womb veil"; that is, the form of barrier contraception introduced by Edward Bliss Foote to the U.S. under that name in 1864, after which time it became the most common term in American English for certain forms of female barrier contraception. After the first couple of decades of the 20th century, the term disappears as birth control becomes more medicalized. As far as I can determine, the term was not used outside the U.S. It is a distinctive part of American discourse and American attitudes toward contraception in a very specific time period.

Now, you may well wish for an article that is broader in scope; an article on "History of barrier contraception for women" would be a great addition to Misplaced Pages. You may dislike my choice of topic. I've written dozens of articles, almost all of them on very precisely defined topics; please visit my user page if you wish to see a list. I stand by the quality of my work. If you think the 'womb veil' article should be deleted, please propose that. (I suspect others will find it more interesting to read than you do.) To introduce the ancient Egyptians into an article so clearly focused on the 19th and early 20th century U.S., or to ask for a 'worldwide' perspective, is preposterous. It would be like insisting on adding Quaker views of marriage to an article about ancient Egyptian wedding rites. In fact, womb veil was written in conjunction with Popular Health Movement; both are specific to 19th-century America.

So please stop trying to make the article into something it isn't. This will never result in the very interesting and useful article you seem to want, because the proportions of material will be unbalanced, and the structure isn't there. Instead, could I suggest that you write the article you have in mind? I would be interested in contributing a section on barrier contraception in Greco-Roman antiquity. Cynwolfe (talk) 16:15, 20 April 2010 (UTC)

Proposed deletion of Reproductive life plan

The article Reproductive life plan has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

This is basically another article for a topic which is covered at Family planning

While all contributions to Misplaced Pages are appreciated, content or articles may be deleted for any of several reasons.

You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{dated prod}} notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the article's talk page.

Please consider improving the article to address the issues raised. Removing {{dated prod}} will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. The speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and articles for deletion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion. Kudpung (talk) 06:27, 6 September 2010 (UTC)

I responded on article talk page, thank you. Zodon (talk) 07:02, 6 September 2010 (UTC)

OPOWER entry

I noticed that you left a mark on the OPOWER entry, stating a concern that it is written too much like an advertisement. I'm new to Misplaced Pages and would appreciate more feedback on that point, specifically how the entry can be modified to address that concern. I have started a discussion on the article's talk page. Please respond there. Thank you. DAG KDG (talk) 10:38, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

Hohm

I've removed the criticism section again, policy is clear about this, if you want to keep it, the onus is on you to find sources, I don't have to justify it's removal as per WP:V. If you can find reliable sources, then stick it back in. --Cameron Scott (talk) 08:04, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

For an embrionic article like that, leaving some material there, or indication of what is needed may facilitate article improvement more than just deleting everything. (If there is nothing there, folks won't know what to go look for, and if you delete all the references - even if they were misused originally - people won't have as good leads of where to go to find information.) Zodon (talk) 08:10, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

With most content, I wouldn't actually be bothered but criticism sections in tech article often revolve around five people with nothing better to do on a talk-forum and that's why I want reliable sources. As for the references, yes I got that wrong. --Cameron Scott (talk) 08:37, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

Fair enough - I definitely agree that anything dubious (especially a criticism or a booster comment) needs a source. I looked at the items and they didn't seem unlikely as criticisms, which is why I thought leaving them as a seed to gather citations might help. But point taken about criticism sections being deprecated, etc. Thanks. Zodon (talk) 09:00, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

Combined oral contraceptive pill

Hi Zodon, =)

I added a "cite needed" in your statement on "The controversy is currently unresolved." What I wrote was based on mere chronology, and so I thought it was better and more neutral. Can you kindly give me a reason why you think your version is more neutral? I can see that it makes Misplaced Pages take a stand (without any citation), while my version does not make Misplaced Pages take a stand. It only informs the public what is the latest in a peer reviewed journal of the American Medical Association, which has a very high credibility and notability character.

I will also add a "cite needed" in the phrase "small increase" in some cancers. Kindly give the basis for this statement, since the IARC did not make that qualification.

I also do not understand the removal of all the lede points, including the abortifacient issues. Kindly explain. Thanks. Kleinbell (talk) 08:44, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

Since you reverted my edits, it would be nice for us to be reminded of this and this.

From what I know of my edits, I have been merely quoting, so I do not understand your comments about "sensationalizing" and "original synthesis". Kindly explain further. Thanks. =) Kleinbell (talk) 09:04, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

Will respond in talk page of article. Zodon (talk) 03:59, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

birth control

see talk page of Birth control. You may also want to read http://en.wikipedia.org/Wikipedia:Verifiability To be honest I struggle to understand why you think it is appropriate to leave or add unreferenced material in articles about contraception and birth control. (A) its a controversial subject, and as such should always be referenced, and (B) its an important subject about which people need reliable and accurate information.--SasiSasi (talk) 14:28, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

The lead summarizes the article. It the references and support are often in the article itself. To take a well developed article and remove large amounts of material for no other reason than that it lacks references, and to remove large amounts of referenced material without indicating any reason at all is not as conducive to improvement as finding references, or flagging items that you feel need referencing, and then allowing editors time to find the references.

You might wish to consider WP:PRESERVE and, Misplaced Pages:Editing policy#Be cautious with major changes: discuss. The purpose is to build an encyclopedia, not to enforce rules. Misplaced Pages:Ignore all rules Zodon (talk) 06:50, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

Adolescent sexuality in the United States

I noticed you have provided some good contributions to the article on Adolescent sexuality in the United States. Recent bold edits (discussed here) have offered an opportunity to improve it, particularly with regard to its incredibly obscene WP:LENGTH and lack of WP:NPOV. I'm hopeful you can return to contribute once again. Thanks. --Meitar (talk) 08:41, 4 January 2011 (UTC)