Talk:Medicinal uses of fungi

Proposed merge of Medicinal mushroom and Medicinal molds here
These two article suffer from a number of issues:
 * The term mold / mushroom is a general term with no consistently defined meaning. In parts of the English speaking world, Mushrooms refer only to a very small number of species of Agaricus with the remaining basidiomycete species with robust aerial fruiting bodies are known as Toadstools. As a consequence both "medicinal mushroom" and "Medicinal mold" articles contain significant overlaps. with the Mold articles even including references to Basdiomycete species. Neither term can be considered to encompass the lichens, fungi with underground fruiting bodies such as the truffles, earth stars, elf caps and related species. The ascomycetes in general are also difficult to fit in although currently covered under Molds.
 * The term medical implies a use in Medicine and in Wikipedia this means that there should be evidence that medical benefits have been obtained in mainstream medicine as evidenced by secondary sources quoting peer reviewed human medical trials. There is very little evidence of this nature in the current articles.
 * In general references and citations should be from secondary or tertiary sources. Almost all the current citations are from primary sources and the article look more like academic publications than Wikipedia articles.
 * This new article includes all the material from the existing two articles which appears to satisfy the criteria of being demonstrably medical and having robust sources or capable of being supported by robust sources. There are still far too many primary sources, but these can be worked on.  Velella  Velella Talk 11:32, 19 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Merging seems reasonable. Splitting content on fungi across mold and mushroom articles doesn't work very well. Plantdrew (talk) 16:14, 20 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Support as the two older articles have fuzzy edges and much overlap. Adrian J. Hunter(talk•contribs) 13:29, 24 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Support It would be more useful to have all of the information relating to medicinal fungi in one article rather than spread out across two or more. TelosCricket (talk) 22:40, 25 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Oppose.Jatlas (talk) 16:02, 26 August 2014 (UTC)
 * we don't actually vote here, we "!vote" which means you have to provide a reason. If all you do is say "oppose", as you did, your voice will have no weight in the decision when consensus is weighed. Jytdog (talk) 16:17, 26 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Support they do overlap and the articles are not curated so they provide a consistent view. I don't think the community can maintain two separate articles on such closely-related topics, so we should merge them. Jytdog (talk) 16:17, 26 August 2014 (UTC)


 * I do not view the DELETION/"merge" as an improvement (the title becomes LESS specific, large amounts of information is outright DELETED, the information and wikipeida logs from which everything is copied will be DELETED...). Why not merge/DELETE the article about apples and oranges, just to put them on a general "fruits" page? Users have been trying to DELETE this page outright since it was created years ago. This is yet another attempt... These articles have been attacked by every possible angle, citing wikipedia policy. However, I am aware of wikipedia policy, and my claims and concerns about the article are also valid... Please try to work with me, I've dedicated large amounts of time re-writing the articles, and spending time on their talk pages to address concerns. Kudos to the Medicinal fungi article, please do not DELETE the Medicinal mushrooms and Medicinal molds (via merging) articles along with their wikipedia logs.Jatlas (talk) 18:34, 26 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks for fleshing out your !vote. However your argument that a Merge would result in deletion of material is not valid. When articles are merged, everything is kept, and overlapping content is harmonized.  Much of what you write has to do with issues unrelated to merging. Jytdog (talk) 19:27, 26 August 2014 (UTC)
 * I appreciate and value the work that all editors have contributed to the two pre-exiting articles. Merging them in the way described will maintain a full history of contributions and talk page contents at the two re-direct sites. Thus nothing of the history will be lost.  Velella  Velella Talk  19:17, 26 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the feedback. I still oppose the merge. FYI (although irrelevant) i wrote 99.9% of both of those articles. "medicinal fungi" was originally a list article, not an article... Medicinal mushrooms & molds existed years before this article was changed from a list article to a regular article. Why does this new article have to absorb articles that are more specific and existed years before? In addition, this new article has been copied from the original 2 articles practically verbatim. Both original pages rightfully have their wikidata IDs and deserve to exist without someone coming along trying to shut them down. In addition, these pages have fan pages, and mirror pages on the internet that will be adversely affected. I beg you, please allow the original 2 articles to stand. If you want any help with this new page, or have any myco-questions, I'll be happy to help. Jatlas (talk) 00:25, 30 August 2014 (UTC)
 * these are all ownership arguments. wikipedia evolves, all the times.  everyone's work is very valuable but nobody owns anything.Jytdog (talk) 00:42, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

Thoughts
Velella asked me to take a look. I made a bunch of changes in this edit that I hope are explained in the edit summary, though please ask if not. Some random thoughts: Kudos to Velella for doing the merge! Adrian J. Hunter(talk•contribs) 13:29, 24 August 2014 (UTC)
 * The article should distinguish drugs that come from fungi (eg penicillin) from drugs that come from elsewhere but are industrially produced by recombinant fungi (eg phytase, I think). If the latter type are included it might make sense to change the title to Medical use of fungi or Use of fungi in medicine or whatever, as it seems odd to call a generic protein factory like A. niger a "medicinal" fungus.
 * Something missing is the use of fungi as probiotics. I know at least Saccharomyces cerevisiae has been used this way, though I haven't checked whether the efficacy is supported by evidence.
 * Most of the See also links should either have the relevant content included in the article or just be removed outright.
 * There's something wrong with the caption of the image showing red yeast rice.


 * I would be content with a name change as the current name gave me significant concerns. However, I opted for the current name as a first step in defining a more cogent article in order to reach agreement on content so that the pre-existing articles could be made into re-directs. It was my plan to then seek consensus on a more appropriate name but I would be happy with a different order of actions. I am also very content with the changes made so far. As I have noted elsewhere, I am neither a mycologist nor a bio-chemist - but I do recognize articles that have poor definition and boundaries! I think the issue around probiotics is a much more difficult one as the science is sometimes very dubious and often funded by makers of yoghurt or other commercial "probiotic" foods. It would be a pity if a carefully crafted, evidenced based article also included rather less rigorous science Regards  Velella  Velella Talk  08:47, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

Oppose merge.Jatlas (talk) 15:20, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

Taxol Photograph
The photograph of the three plant species that produce taxol is not relevant to this page. Pestalotiopsis pauciseta is known to produce taxol, but this is only mentioned in the caption, not the body of the text. I think it would be best to move the mention of Pestalotiopsis pauciseta into the body of the text and remove the picture of the plant species. There is a photograph of spores belonging to the Pestalotiopsis/Pestalotia group here. I know the owner, and I can see if he has more photos that can be uploaded to Wikipedia. However, the taxonomic id of those spores is tenuous. Also, there is a review article on Pestalotiopsis that mentions the production of taxol by s species of this genus (not Pestalotiopsis pauciseta) and another review article that goes in depth about the secondary metabolites the genus produces, but it is behind a paywall. (Xu et al. 2010 Pestalotiopsis a highly creative genus: chemistry and bioactivity of secondary metabolites http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s13225-010-0055-z) TelosCricket (talk) 18:21, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

original articles deleted
this entire article was taken from "medicinal mushrooms" and "medicinal molds" articles in addition, the original articles which stood for years have been deleted without a trace... Jatlas (talk) 23:05, 5 October 2014 (UTC)


 * No. The merge was undertaken with a clear consensus and allowing two months for any editors to voice their opinions. The content of those two articles has not been lost. Both content and history, including content and history of the talk page, are all retained in the history and readily accessible. Not a word has been lost.  Velella  Velella Talk 23:18, 5 October 2014 (UTC)
 * So much information deleted SMH... wow... Jatlas (talk) 23:22, 5 October 2014 (UTC)
 * The original 2 articles were bulldozed, and this shotty article with minimal info is the replacement. SMH...Jatlas (talk) 23:24, 5 October 2014 (UTC)
 * it is not unusual for editors to have different opinions on the details of a merger and we can talk about those.  if there are specific pieces of content that you could identify that are important to you and you don't find reflected in the current version, would you please identify them so they can be discussed?  your general complaint is not actionable but discussions about specific text would be. Jytdog (talk) 23:31, 5 October 2014 (UTC)

Post-merge admin
was right to express concern about the logs of merge sources: per WP:PATT, there needed to be a note in this article's edit history stating that full author contributions can be found in the source articles' histories. I've added said note, along with boxes at the source articles' talk pages which should prevent their histories ever being deleted.

I've moved relevant WikiProject banners from the talk pages of the source articles to here, retaining their original importance and class ratings. Adrian J. Hunter(talk•contribs) 04:10, 6 October 2014 (UTC)

Someone please link the data that was deleted from the article "medicinal molds". Thank you.Jatlas (talk) 16:20, 7 October 2014 (UTC)


 * to see the old article, just search for "medicinal molds" and you will get to the current article, but with a note just under the title that says "(Redirected from Medicinal molds)" If you click on the link there, or here, it will take you to the old article page, which now just has the Redirect tag on it.  If you click on the "View history" tab there, you can see all the old versions.  The last version before the merge is here. There, I just did it for you! Jytdog (talk) 16:38, 7 October 2014 (UTC)

Thanks Jytdog.Jatlas (talk) 17:06, 7 October 2014 (UTC)

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Wiki Education assignment: The Microbiology of College Life
— Assignment last updated by Jess5sig (talk) 01:40, 13 May 2023 (UTC)

Requested move 31 January 2024

 * The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: moved. (closed by non-admin page mover) –  00:22, 9 February 2024 (UTC)

Medicinal fungi → Medicinal uses of fungi – The largest section of the article describes medicinal uses. This section is larger than the rest of the article by far. - UtherSRG (talk) 18:11, 31 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Note: WikiProject Fungi has been notified of this discussion. UtherSRG (talk) 18:12, 31 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Note: WikiProject Alternative medicine has been notified of this discussion. UtherSRG (talk) 18:13, 31 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Note: WikiProject Dietary Supplements has been notified of this discussion. UtherSRG (talk) 18:13, 31 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Note: WikiProject Altered States of Consciousness has been notified of this discussion. UtherSRG (talk) 18:13, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.