Talk:Sanitation/Archive 1

The
The article School sanitation seems a little odd and its related link about IRC reads like a business plan without saying much. Should either exist? If so in what form? (anon on village pump, Feb 2003)

I agree. Should probably be edited by someone who has access, though it does not seem like high priority considering the amount of time it has been unchanged. (Oct 2006)

This page is not for translations. Move them to wiktionary 203.135.9.119 (talk) 09:49, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

Basic sanitation
Shouldn't there be a bit more stuff on basic sanitation? Thousands of organizations around the world are spending billions of dollars to bring basic sanitation to millions of people. Certainly that warrants a a little more stuff in an encyclopedia. Aditya (talk • contribs) 15:39, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

Yes, I think someone familiar with this and with good information should create a page about it -B.

Creating separate articles on different aspects of sanitation?
Sanitation has many different meanings
 * Solid waste management
 * The management of feces and wastewater
 * Food sanitation

How about creating a disambiguation page and creating three different articles, one of each of these topics?--Mschiffler (talk) 19:06, 7 November 2008 (UTC)


 * Usual practice is to write them as part of the base article first, then subdivide them if/as needed later. -- MarcoTolo (talk) 03:57, 8 November 2008 (UTC)

Info about radiation sanitation....
--124.78.215.31 (talk) 07:56, 20 March 2010 (UTC)
 * http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=allintitle%3A+radiation+sanitization&btnG=Search&as_sdt=2000&as_ylo=&as_vis=0
 * http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=allintitle%3A+radiation+sanitation&btnG=Search&as_sdt=2000&as_ylo=&as_vis=0

Comment-out section
There was a section title "Sanitation in the developed world" that was commented out. I've changed the section title to "regulation" and brought it back into the article. The comment said the section needed further development before being put back in the article. However, if it's commented out, it will never be developed ever, since no one will no it's their except by accident. D O N D E groovily  Talk to me  16:25, 1 May 2012 (UTC)

Enough information about helminth infections?
From what I can see so far, we have not got enough information about helminth infections in the section on health of this page. WHO estimates that 2 billion are infected by intestinal worms: www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs366/en/

Arno Rosemarin's thesis is that hygiene and treatment of faeces remain so poor across the developing world that this monster has just kept growing for the past 50 years even with some concerted deworming programmes. This is by far the single most widespread public health problem dwarfing all others. EvM-Susana (talk) 16:47, 18 October 2014 (UTC)

Let's remove the section on "See also"
I would like to remove the section on "See also" as this is an arbitrary collection of links and does not conform with the normal Wikipedia article style. Such links should be placed in the text and not as a link collection. The really important links can go into the External Links section (not sure what the recommended maximum number is here, but probably not very many). EvM-Susana (talk) 16:47, 18 October 2014 (UTC)
 * I have removed it now because nobody objected so far. EvM-Susana (talk) 11:13, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

Two bullet points under the reference section?
Does anyone know why there are those two bullet points under the reference section? I guess they should be either cited properly (and thus be in the reference section) or deleted, or go into Further Reading if we want to have "further reading". EvM-Susana (talk) 11:13, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

Paragraphs without proper references - section on health impacts
I see here two paragraphs where the references are not done properly. What to do about those?

This one: Sanitation refers to the safe disposal of human excreta (Mara, Lane and Scott and Trouba,1). This entails the hygienic disposal and treatment of human waste to avoid affecting the health of people. Sanitation is an essential part of the MDGs. The most affected countries are in the developing world (Zawahri, Sowers, and Weinthal 1153). Population increase in the developing world has posed challenges in the improvement of sanitation (Konteh 69). According to Zawari, Sowers, and Weinthal (1154), lack of provisions of basic sanitation is estimated to have contributed to the deaths of approximately 3.5 million people annually from waterborne diseases (or more precisely called faecally transmitted infections).

And this one: Poor sanitation accounts for almost 50 percent of underweight child since it has a direct link to diarrhea. Children suffering for diarrhea are more vulnerable to become underweight. According to Mara, Lane, and Scott and Trouba (3), about 26 percent acute respiratory infections occur in children who are malnourished, which has a direct link to diarrhea. Sanitation is a serious issue that is affecting most parts of the world especially the developing countries. On a global scale, the most affected are children who in most cases lose their lives due to diseases caused by poor sanitation. Major initiatives need to be set up if the MDG goal on sanitation is to be achieved by 2015.

Also we need to double check for repetition.

The section on public health should be further improved. I still wonder if we shouldn't have a separate Wikipedia article on it about "Health impacts from lack of sanitation" - Or we put it all here into this article? Note there is also stuff on health impacts in the pit latrine Wikipedia article. Eventually it should all be reconciled I think, so that it appears on one page, and the other pages (e.g. the pit latrine page) link to that. EvM-Susana (talk) 11:56, 21 October 2014 (UTC)


 * I have made some improvements here but further work is needed. Need to select the most recent publications for citation here (e.g. from WHO and UNICEF). We should also check what health information we have put on the page on "open defecation" and how we can combine those. And we should decide which of the two pages should eventually be built up to contain all the details about health impacts from lack of sanitation - should it be on the sanitation page or on the open defecation page? Some information about health impacts is also on the pit latrine page. EvM-Susana (talk) 15:33, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

Explicitly address water supply
The topics of sanitation and of safe water supply overlap, but there needs to be a distinction made clear in the article.LeadSongDog come howl!  05:59, 30 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Good point. Actually, I think more so in the other direction. Therefore, I have added some links from the water supply article to the sanitation article. Can you make a suggestion what content or links need to be added in the sanitation article in direction to the water supply topic? EvM-Susana (talk) 10:31, 30 December 2014 (UTC)

Needs more work on the lead
The lead is not a good summary of the article. Rather it focussed on the definition of sanitation. This should rather be moved to the main body and the lead should be made into a summary of the article. Will work on it when I get time or feel free to beat me to it if you agree.EvM-Susana (talk) 14:48, 14 January 2015 (UTC)

Section on Improving Global Access needs more work
The section on Improving Global Access needs more work, it should rather refer to the other existing articles on this topic (perhaps move some of the information to the JMP page). Could also utilise information on the open defecation page where we talk about reducing open defecation. EvM-Susana (talk) 14:48, 14 January 2015 (UTC)

Please do not move the history section to the start again
Someone without a login made quite a lot of changes without discussing them here first. Please get yourself a login so that we can communicate with you. And please don't move the history section to the start again. We have created a manual of style for all sanitation articles, which is following a similar logic to the manual of style for medical articles (WikiProject Medicine). Please see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style_(Sanitation). Most readers when they come to a Wikipedia article want to know about current information, therefore there is no need to start with the history section. And it helps if all articles follow a consistent style with standard section headings. That's why we created this Manual of Style. EvM-Susana (talk) 09:27, 19 May 2015 (UTC)

What to do about the history section?
I am quite confused now about the history section. It is currently short. The person without a login expanded it recently but he/she just copied it from other pages (so it was removed again by Doc_James, rightly so). I have now provided a link at the beginning of the section to three other pages where the history of sanitation is being dealt with. Somehow we have bits and pieces all over the place. But perhaps that cannot be avoided as the history of sanitation is linked to the history of toilets, the history of waste management, the history of water supply and sanitation, ... One thing is for sure, we should not copy large pieces of text about the history from one Wikipedia article to the other (at least not without any explanations). EvM-Susana (talk) 08:38, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Yes if the history section was just copied from another Wikipedia page it would not be such a big deal. The problem is it was also copied from a copyright source. Doc James  (talk · contribs · email) 08:40, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
 * I can't really see the problem with a properly written history section shared between relevant pages. JMWt (talk) 10:17, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
 * If we had a properly written history section then it should appear in full on one page; and appear in part (and with links) on the other pages. Why do I say that? Because otherwise it leads to a doubling of efforts and wasted time: I might then edit the history section on Page A and would have to proceed to make the same edits also on Page B etc. In any case, so far there are bits and pieces on all the pages that I mentioned, none of them is really very focussed so far. EvM-Susana (talk) 11:42, 20 May 2015 (UTC)

Adding info on new terms: basic sanitation, safely managed sanitation
In our next round of improvements, we'll do some work on adding information about basic sanitation and safely managed sanitation which are the new Sustainable Development Goals terms. I have also created new articles for those which I am currently redirecting to improved sanitation. This still needs some work. EMsmile (talk) 13:53, 9 August 2017 (UTC)

Modifications to the lead (18 Nov 2017)
Hi User:Jpasan, I noticed you are new and made some pretty big changes to the lead section. That's fine but it would have been good to give more details in the edit summary as to why you removed content and the image. It would just be good to know your reasoning. Probably they are good changes but it makes it easier to follow if we know why it was done. Also two textblocks were still worth having, I think, just not in the lead perhaps. So I have re-inserted them into the body of the article. Do you agree? There might be a bit of repetition now, we have to check that. EMsmile (talk) 00:03, 18 November 2017 (UTC)

Too much focus on wastewater and excreta management
In my humble opinion, this piece needs to highlight early-on that sanitation includes SWM, management of urine, water supply where people use it for ablution and/or where toilets are connected to sewer systems. Sparsh85 (talk) 17:06, 18 April 2020 (UTC)
 * I have changed the heading titles and the structure a bit to make it clearer that sanitation is more than excreta management (even though the article has a focus on excreta management). As per the definition given in the article, sanitation includes excreta management, wastewater management, solid waste management and drainage. Management of urine is part of excreta management. Water supply is not part of sanitation though. More work is needed to streamline this article overall. Keep in mind that it is a "high level article" which should point people to all the relevant "sub articles" and only have detailed content on things that don't have their own sub articles yet. EMsmile (talk) 03:44, 20 April 2020 (UTC)