Talk:Health effects of electronic cigarettes

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 25 January 2020 and 8 May 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Aremler.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 03:16, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 30 August 2021 and 21 September 2021. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Logbai707.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 03:16, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

Merge from Adverse effects of electronic cigarettes
The concerns of multiple editors at Talk:Safety_of_electronic_cigarettes/Archive_4 have not been addressed. There is a lot of overlap between the two articles, especially on nicotine and aerosol, which are outside of the "Adverse effects" section of the safety article. If the current length of both articles is to be maintained, they should be split along a more logical dividing line. But I agree with the editors who commented that both articles currently contain an excessive amount of detail, and if trimmed to an appropriate length would be short enough to merge. -- Beland (talk) 19:52, 5 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I disagree with the recent mass content deletion. Each article is too long to merge together. The article was expanded and it was reverted more than once and a new article was created to retain the content. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Safety_of_electronic_cigarettes/Archive_4#Article_length QuackGuru ( talk ) 20:25, 5 February 2020 (UTC)
 * What "mass content deletion" are you referring to? -- Beland (talk) 23:06, 8 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I meant to say I previously disagreed with the mass content deletion. The only way I could gain consensus for adding the content was to create a subarticle. Others convinced me the article was too long for the content here. QuackGuru ( talk ) 23:35, 8 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Well, there are four editors (including me) who seem to think that the way article content is currently divided is undesirable. The two remedies proposed so far are rearranging into a different set of subarticles to clarify scope and provide better non-overlapping summaries in the parent article, or to trim down content so it fits in one article. -- Beland (talk) 00:00, 9 February 2020 (UTC)
 * All the content that was recently trimmed or deleted from this article is enough content to start a separate article. QuackGuru ( talk ) 13:48, 30 May 2020 (UTC)

Excessive detail on 95% controversy
In the "Positives" section, I dropped some details about the controversy over the claim "vaping is at least 95% less harmful than smoking". (QuackGuru reverted this change.) I think it is enough to say that the group that released the claim were criticized for "having financial ties to the tobacco industry", as I wrote. It is not interesting to the vast majority of readers of this article which people in that group got money from where, or which journals published an infographic explaining the connections. This information should not be in the prose of the article; interested readers should be able to click through to investigative reports and see that it's reputable journals like The Lancet and BMJ through the footnotes. This excessive detail also gives undue weight to this controversy. There are several other statistics about the estimated relative safety reported in the article, which are not described as disputed, which should get about the same amount of coverage. Readers should be able to judge the reliability of each by how Wikipedia characterizes it (or if they care, chasing down original sources through footnotes) and not based on how much prose is devoted to disputing the number. -- Beland (talk) 00:14, 9 February 2020 (UTC)
 * QuackGuru has been blocked; I've restored the change. -- Beland (talk) 07:26, 16 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Sourced content was replaced with unsourced content. See "Tobacco manufactures vigorously promote the use of alternatives to traditional cigarettes with supposedly safer tobacco products, such as e-cigarettes, as a way to lower the harms of tobacco." This was sourced and it was removed. It was replaced with "Electronic cigarettes have been proposed as a healthier alternative for people who otherwise cannot or choose not to quit smoking, even if complete abstinence from inhaled nicotine products is healthiest." that is unsourced. QuackGuru ( talk ) 01:11, 30 May 2020 (UTC)

Content issues
With due respect to your concerns, during the discussion that lead to your three-month block, a major theme in the complaints was "ownership" over articles, expressed as reverting or discussing a large number of changes made by other editors, starting what the administrators felt was an overly large number of discussions, and alienating other editors with continual arguing. Would it be possible to pick maybe the most important of the below topics on which to continue discussion, and accept the rest as the work of other editors to improve the article? -- Beland (talk) 06:30, 31 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Sure, I will allow you to pick any that you think is of concern or you can close the discussion if you think there is no serious concern. No editor is required to response. Would it help if I don't edit this article for 6 months or a year? QuackGuru ( talk ) 14:31, 31 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Editors are obliged to reply if they do not want the proposed changes to happen. Otherwise, if you later implement the changes, you can rightfully say that no one objected when you proposed them on the talk page. The concerns raised in the enforcement discussion are not confined to a single article, and were not merely about editing, but how you conducted yourself in talk page discussions. Going away for 6-12 months and then coming back and engaging in the same behaviors would not solve the underlying problem, any more than going away for 3 months and returning did. What would be helpful is heeding the substance of the complaints, including accepting legitimate contributions from other editors without arguing. Corrections and discussions about potential factual errors, bias, and sourcing problems are welcome, but only if they are well grounded. What is not welcome and what exhausts and alienates editors are comments apparently geared toward producing a specific outcome rather than addressing heartfelt concerns, for example by ignoring conversational context if inconvenient to the argument, making arguments that contradict one's own previous arguments, or claiming that text violates lots of different policies even if it obviously doesn't or one has to squint sideways to shoehorn the situation into being a policy violation. For now, I'll reply to two of the threads below where there's text that I think needs changing. In the coming days there will be a lot more trimming and consolidating to respond to complaints that articles like this one are almost unreadably verbose, and I hope it will be a constructive and cooperative process. -- Beland (talk) 18:38, 31 May 2020 (UTC)
 * I replied to the "Lede" threads below; the other was deleted in this talk page edit. The claim that an article was retracted was correct, however the citation was to a different article. I ended up removing the whole sentence, since there are other, non-retracted articles which cover the same subject matter, and the fact of the retraction did not seem important to the article. -- Beland (talk) 01:14, 2 June 2020 (UTC)

Lede
Please see the previous lede compared to the current lede. There is promotional disputed language such as "In the United Kingdom, the Royal College of Physicians states that "The hazard to health arising from long-term vapour inhalation from the e-cigarettes available today is unlikely to exceed 5% of the harm from smoking tobacco."[10]" and "This estimate of 5% risk was recently affirmed in a 2018 review.[11]" The body contains content that disputes the 5% risk claim. See one of the sources used in the article.

See "The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine [12] of the United States argue that e-cigarettes are not without risk, but compared to combustible tobacco cigarettes, they contain fewer toxicants." It is not needed to state "The National they contain fewer toxicants.Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine [12] of the United States argue...". This weakens the claim or is too wordy. The part "...but compared to combustible tobacco cigarettes, they contain fewer toxicants." is repetitive. See later in the lede: "The majority of toxic chemicals found in cigarette smoke are absent in e-cigarette vapor.[39] E-cigarette vapor contains lower concentrations of potentially toxic chemicals than with cigarette smoke.[40]" The previous wording was "However, e-cigarette use with or without nicotine cannot be considered harmless.[15]"

See "The relationship of between vaping and conventional smoking is an area of active study and debate, including the relative health risk, whether electronic cigarettes should be promoted to people who cannot or who would otherwise choose to quit smoking, and whether or not the availability of electronic cigarettes is recruiting more people into nicotine addiction than if they were not available." This content in the lede is unsourced. The previous lede only contained sourced content. I don't think it was an improvement to replace sourced content with unsourced content in the lede.

See "The safety of electronic cigarettes is uncertain.[1][2][3]" This sentence was the first sentence in the lede. It is no longer in the lede. I propose starting with removing the unsourced content from the lede. QuackGuru ( talk ) 01:11, 30 May 2020 (UTC)
 * I have rewritten the lede for brevity in order to clear the "lede too long" cleanup tag, and dropped or reworded most of this text. My interpretation of MOS:LEADCITE and practice for many years (other than for biographies and direct quotes) is not to bother putting or requesting inline citations in the article intro as long as the claims made there are a fair summary of claims made in the body of the article that do have inline citations. As that guideline says, inline citations in the intro are more important for claims likely to be challenged. If you think any of the claims made there are on controversial or hotly debated issues, feel free to add footnote links to some or all of the inline body citations from the appropriate part of the intro. (I've retained the existing inline citations in the intro where they still apply.) If the new text is any way an inaccurate or unfair summary of the body, of course that should be fixed as well. But I'd prefer to move forward and improve the new version rather than simply flipping back to a more verbose version of the intro just because it came with inline citations, because that will not solve the "lede too long" problem. -- Beland (talk) 01:07, 2 June 2020 (UTC)

Images
A few images have been deleted from the article such as this image. I think they added value to the article. QuackGuru ( talk ) 01:11, 30 May 2020 (UTC)

Unknowns
A lot of the unknowns that were in the article seemed to have be expunged. The known unknowns are notable. See Talk:Safety_of_electronic_cigarettes/Archive_2 QuackGuru ( talk ) 01:11, 30 May 2020 (UTC)

Content deleted
A lot of relevant on-topic content was deleted from the article. For example, see "Reviews on the safety of electronic cigarettes, evaluating roughly the same studies, have reached significantly different conclusions.[6] Broad-ranging statements regarding their safety cannot be reached because of the vast differences of devices and e-liquids available.[49] A consensus has not been established for the effects as well as the benefits related to their use.[50] Due to various methodological issues, severe conflicts of interest, and inconsistent research, no definite conclusions can be determined regarding the safety of e-cigarettes.[51] However, e-cigarettes cannot be regarded as a harmless alternative to traditional cigarettes.[51]" These are not redundant claims. <b style="color: #e34234;">QuackGuru</b> ( talk ) 13:13, 30 May 2020 (UTC)

Environmental Impact section
Before it was removed from this article it was trimmed here and here. Consensus was against keeping the Environmental Impact section in the electronic cigarette article. See Talk:Electronic_cigarette/Archive_15. Consensus was also against removing it from this article. See Talk:Safety_of_electronic_cigarettes/Archive_2. <b style="color: #e34234;">QuackGuru</b> ( talk ) 13:13, 30 May 2020 (UTC)

Spacing after ref tags
FYI regarding this edit, I put line breaks after closing "ref" tags in order to make it easier to distinguish between the guts of footnotes and the main prose in the article. With many, multi-line citations, it's very difficult for me to find the beginnings and ends of main body text if the wikitext paragraphs are essentially on one massive self-wrapping line. -- Beland (talk) 02:03, 2 June 2020 (UTC)

QuackGuru
For the record, QuackGuru has been banned from medicine articles, so that renders moot a bunch of discussions above. -- Beland (talk) 02:40, 5 June 2020 (UTC)

Low quality of contributions makes this article worthless propaganda
The sources quoted are from the public health industry who receive huge amounts of funding from tobacco taxation and justify their funding by hyping public health fears. The sources are in turn used without context, a reference to carcinogens being present at levels 1000 lower than tobacco smoke becomes a simple statement that vaping fluid contains carcinogens in the article. So much of the article is vague, including the definition of vaping itself. The section on Suction reads like parody. The section on battery risk is excessively long, any number of consumer products from handsfree sets to pulse monitors have the same inherent issue. The genuine health risks posited are repeated ad nauseam even though they are inconclusive. The actually risk of second hand nicotine poisoning is obviously negligible, as it is for smoking, yet it extensively discussed in the article. The section on third hand risk, which is actually second hand, is farcical. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 122.106.255.106 (talk) 01:19, 23 February 2022 (UTC)

Article reads like it was written by someone who doesn't fully understand English
Seriously it needs a major copy edit — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.169.174.140 (talk) 20:21, 6 April 2022 (UTC)

This page really does need an overhaul
Even leaving the factual basis and improper elevation/devaluation of claims aside that make up most of this article, it reads like a cluster-bomb of random factoids without any order or structure without going into any detail about any particular claim. Makes it come off like I'm reading a weird collaborative op-ed where every author is only allowed one short sentence. 68.13.71.199 (talk) 23:13, 6 June 2022 (UTC)


 * I began. It seems as though someone has tried to include every possible reference.  There’s an awful lot of words that are non-information.  Empty wordiness, or statements of lack of knowledge, or of possibility. SmokeyJoe (talk) 11:15, 11 January 2023 (UTC)

Cut “summary of safety concerns”
I have cut the entire section “Summary of safety concerns” (and copied it below) on the basis that it reads like WP:Original research, and it not grounded in the single source. It reads like textbook advocacy. Even if improved with more content and better sources, I don’t think it would ever be good content. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 07:57, 16 January 2023 (UTC)

Summary of safety concerns

SmokeyJoe (talk) 07:57, 16 January 2023 (UTC)

Good God almighty.
I would just like to point out that this article is now more than twice the length of the article on Health effects of tobacco. Its content is all over the place, I don't know how a person could even read this. It's also riddled with opinions and editorializing and reads more like an internet forum argument than an encyclopedia article. I can only imagine the number of hours of valuable and limited free time that have been squandered on this neverending and honestly rather trivial edit war. Honestly I think it would make sense to just remove the article altogether and just redirect to the Health effects of tobacco article and have a section there for electronic cigarettes. After all we're really talking about the same drug here, just different mechanisms of delivery. We don't have separate articles for shooting heroin and snorting it. 50.86.77.162 (talk) 17:21, 6 May 2024 (UTC)