Talk:Diarrhea in developing regions

Page review
After reading the article and discussion on the talk page about the content and tone of this article, I'd like to offer a few comments. First of all, the article covers many key factors that suggest a link between poverty and diarrheal disease. However, the article focused mainly on diarrheal disease in children and did not address diarrheal disease in adults. Even if the prevalence is much higher in children, this article should cover a wider range of ages. I agree that the source from 1985 should be removed and the content should be updated to reflect current medical information. I also agree that at some points the page reads more like an essay than an encyclopedia entry. Removing summary statements and analysis would make the tone more complaint with WP:MOS. Statements such as "It is known that…" need to be removed to make the article more accessible to a general audience. The article is successful in synthesizing a variety of viewpoints. I'm not sure what information from this article overlaps with other articles, but because the factors influencing diarrhea and treatments of diarrhea are different in developing regions, I would argue that this content deserves its own page. Keep up the good work! Khatchell (talk) 21:12, 6 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes but factors effecting rate of diarrhea in the developing world have been discussed in other articles. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 10:05, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

Review of article
I agree with Khatchell that this article deserves its own page because it focuses more on the social consequences of diarrhea, rather than the clinical side. I also agree that this article sounds more like an essay than an encyclopedia, and that some sentences need to be removed. Also, I feel that because the article seems to focus a lot on children, changing the title to include children, or including more information on adults would make this article stronger. The article also has a lot of strongly worded beginnings, so attributing to references may help provide a more neutral POV. This may be a minor detail, but the section on Children and diarrhea section was a little difficult to read because of the amount of numbers there was, so making that section easier to see in a table, or decreasing the amount of numbers and percentages may be helpful to the reader. Overall, I feel that this article is strong enough to be its own page, and that Jpoles1 did a great job writing this article! Momo137 (talk) 06:10, 7 November 2013 (UTC)
 * This is like saying that the article on gastroenteritis is really about gastroenteritis is the developed world. This of course is false. Renaming all are articles disease X in developing regions and disease X in developed regions would be a disaster. Doc James  (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 09:59, 7 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Though I do agree that this would be not be an effective means of writing for Wikipedia, I do not believe that this argument applies in this case. When you have a disease which has such a profound impact on developing regions, and when there is a body of content that approaches the issue from a social/economic and capabilities standpoint which is not appropriate for incorporation into a medically oriented article like gastroenteritis, it is important to discuss it elsewhere.
 * Jpoles1 (talk) 17:36, 21 November 2013 (UTC)


 * After reading the gastroenteritis, diarrhea, and diarrhea in developing regions articles, I believe this article is substantively different in content to justify an independent page. The discussion of diarrhea in developing regions in the other articles is very brief. Considering the catastrophically high of diarrhea mortality, especially among children, the existence of this article is more than justified. If you look at the articles on AIDS, you will see that there is one specifically on HIV/AIDS in Africa. The talk page for that article includes a vigorous debate, but it is not about the validity of having an article about the manifestation of HIV/AIDS in Africa specifically. So there is a precedence for having this sort of page. Would it be so bad if every cause of massive mortality in the developing world had its own Wikipedia page? Who would that harm? And more importantly, would that not possibly make some difference in the lives of people in the developing world. It is important that Wikipedia not have a Eurocentric bias, especially when it comes to diarrhea. Mankad (talk) 22:50, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

The article on gastroenteritis mades 9 mentions to the developing world and have a fair bit of discussion on the condition there. We could have an article on diarrhea by country. The issue is that instead of trying to give a good overview we would then have hundreds of out of date poorly referenced articles that will be impossible to keep correct. Anyway I have been slowly trimming the primary research from this one. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 00:05, 24 November 2013 (UTC)

Coming back to the question of merger with main article on diarrhoea
I have just added content to the main article on diarrhoea (with respect to developing countries) only to find out right at the bottom of the article the link to this other article which may be quite good (I haven't had time to read it in detail yet). I agree with Doc James that it should be merged with the other article, or at the very least the other article should very clearly have links (several) to the article about developing countries diahrroea, or make it clear that it is only on diarrhoea in non-developing countries. But really, with such a disease it does not make sense to split it. Have there been other precedences for splitting it? Should we now also split the page on helminthiasis as it affects people in developing countries totally differently to people in developed countries? And the same with menstrual hygiene management? Down syndrom? All these are things that affect people in different regions of the world differently and yet we don't create separate articles for it. So let's do the merger. Also another argument is this: if people from developed countries read on the Wikipedia page on diarrhoea and then see the content for developing countries, it will raise their awareness that this is a serious condition for so many people in the world - thus bringing the "two worlds" closer together. EvM-Susana (talk) 22:41, 10 January 2015 (UTC)
 * This should really be merged back into the main article on diarrhea. I agree the last think we need is every article about every disease to be split into two.
 * This content is really about infectious diarrhea rather than diarrhea generally. More work will need to be done. Doc James  (talk · contribs · email) 04:41, 11 January 2015 (UTC)