User:McHusky/sandbox

What I'm doing for ADW
Hi peer reviewers!

I'm working on the page Inertia (anxiety).

It's a top-importance stub page. I'm basically going through and making every WP:MOS change I can, including:


 * 1) Cleaning up existing references (mostly done already)
 * 2) Adding a table of contents
 * 3) Maybe adding an image/images?
 * 4) Finding more and better sources
 * 5) Adding any reasonable amount of content I can
 * 6) Revising the existing content so that it sounds more like a Wikipedia page

And I think that's pretty much the whole scope of what I'm trying to do from the outset. As written below, I want to change the page to a more appropriately titled one, as well.

Talk: Title - Autistic Inertia
"Inertia (anxiety)" is a somewhat unhelpful and misleading title [find MOS page about titles].

Everyone refers to this phenomenon as "Autistic Inertia" [more citations needed] — including all of the current sources.

I recommend the page be moved to "Autistic Inertia".

[this talk page was just posted, should I delete this section now? Does that count as moving it? I guess it doesn't really matter]

Title change controversy argument
Reasoning: "Place here your rationale for the proposed page name change, ideally referring to applicable naming convention policies and guidelines, and providing evidence in support where appropriate. If your reasoning includes search engine results, please prioritize searches limited to reliable sources (e.g. books, news, scholarly papers) over other web results."

The phenomenon being described on this page is called Autistic Inertia by both the scholarly literature and the blogs originally cited. At the very least, Autistic Inertia is definitely it's own thing that should be distinguished from the alleged "anxiety inertia".

That said, there is no evidence to be found for "anxiety inertia" being related enough to Autistic Inertia to justify being in the same page, nor is there really anything that constitutes evidence for its existing. If "anxiety inertia" is being claimed as a thing by wikipedia alone (or at least without sufficient references), then I know that violates a few guidelines. Honestly, I think "anxiety inertia" is at best an uncommon metaphor for some manifestations of anxiety. Contrast that with Autistic Inertia, which is described as a complex phenomenon and discussed in detail across the community to the point of gaining recognition in scholarly research.

I'll clarify that argument: "anxiety inertia" is a metaphor used uncommonly and in an offhand way to describe anxiety. Autistic Inertia is a term that describes an embodied phenomenon experienced by autistic people that happened to emerge and gain widespread use primarily within online autistic communities before being studied and formally recognized by scholars.

If anyone really feels strongly enough about the anxiety metaphor of inertia and thinks they can justify a wikipedia page for it, then I think the solution would be to usurp the page, since as it stands it's really just describing Autistic Inertia right now anyway.

I'll go through and add links to this before posting it to the talk page in the Requested moves template.

No original research

SPS

FORUM

Notability

More concise version:

Autistic Inertia is a specific and notable topic. The idea of "anxiety inertia" is basically just an uncommon metaphor. They appear similar, but they're not the same thing. Searching for terms related to "anxiety inertia" yields a handful of blogs that use a vague analogy to inertia. Searching for "Autistic Inertia" yields many references to this specific term, with a consistent, shared definition. Included among these results are scholarly papers that refer to this term, with at least two specifically discussing or investigating it in detail. There's a big difference in notability between the two understandings, and I don't think they're related enough to be put on the same page. To that end, I can't find any writing about "anxiety inertia" that's reliable enough to support any writing on wikipedia.

The page was originally very clearly about the phenomenon of Autistic Inertia. For this reason, you could argue that "anxiety inertia" should usurp this page while the page is moved to "Autistic Inertia". However, because "anxiety inertia" isn't really a thing, and it definitely doesn't meet notability standards, I think it would be preferable to just move the page and not worry about usurpation.

PDA
After doing that, add see also or section to Pathological Demand Avoidance?

Add section to that page about criticism? See

Talk: Source quality?
The sources seem to predominantly be blogs and stuff. I'm looking for more scientific literature; I'll link what I can find here:

Buckle et al. (2020) recently produced a preprint ("original publication date 2020-11-24") that claims to be the first study to explore "autistic inertia".

[That's some lucky timing.]

Welch et al. (2020) found and reported on many descriptions of embodied experiences of autism by autistic bloggers through a method called "blog trawling". They focused on "movement control and arousal regulation", and found that "Autistic Inertia" was frequently discussed by these bloggers and has a great deal of consensus on the autistic blogosphere regarding the experience and specifics of the phenomenon. This article also discusses a great deal of related phenomena as reported by autistic people.

This paper by Martijn Dekker is from 1999, and appears to be the first mention of "autistic inertia" I could find [not sure how to cite that page]. I found it in a paper by Pellicano et al. (2019) that cited it when briefly mentioning the term "autistic inertia".

There are articles that cite and synthesize some of these blogs. Should a blog be cited if a published article is also citing that blog and using it to make a statement? Does the primary source take precedence, or the peer-review, published, "official" source? ... or just both, because why not?

Blogs:
"Autistic Inertia: An Overview – Unstrange Mind"

"Autism and Executive Functions"

Articles:
""No way out except from external intervention": First-hand accounts of autistic inertia"

"Living in autistic bodies: bloggers discuss movement control and arousal regulation"

Other?:
"ON OUR OWN TERMS: Emerging autistic culture"http://www.autscape.org/2015/programme/handouts/Autistic-Culture-07-Oct-1999.pdf

Autistic Inertia notability
I think there's totally a case to be made for this having sufficient notability for at least a small article. It's a Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources (medicine) thing, though, so it'll involve a ton of meticulously crafted reasoning based on wikipedia guidelines. I've seen enough to have an idea of what that argument would look like, but I'm not fluent enough in wikipedia to be able to put that together easily.

If I understood the thing about self-published sources about themselves correctly, then I think that might be enough to justify an article about it, although that alone definitely doesn't clear WP:MEDRS. But, I think when you consider the scholarly sources that effectively act as secondary sources on the blogs (if we're assuming that blogs by autistic people about their experiences count as primary sources), then that might clear MEDRS.

If that's still not enough, then that'll just leave me upset about wikipedia enforcing an unnecessary degree of institutional gatekeeping. This is a very particular case that's definitely worthy of more attention. I mean, why would it be rated as top- and high-importance by WikiProjects Autism and Psychology?

I'm not sure if it's worth arguing about, but should this really have such a high bar that an entire community can reach consensus about a phenomenon they experience, but since there hasn't been enough scholarly attention on this subject, Wikipedia can't acknowledge it? What's supposed to happen before a page can be made about this? We need a dozen more studies like and so that someone can write a lit review on it? Or do we need more than just the one lit review?

I think this is just particularly frustrating because the discussion within the community about this topic involves a hefty amount of bemoaning the fact that professionals don't recognize this phenomenon despite a clear consensus within the community about the exact phenomenon and how important it is to understanding the autistic experience. Should Wikipedia ignore their voices, even despite the fact that they're finally being recognized by scholars?

Maybe this is a really shaky path to go down, but... are autistic people not better authorities on autism than the academic institutions that have a long history of misunderstanding and mishandling the condition? For medical purposes, is it really more safe to mischaracterize the condition based on the misinformation that's taken root in the research institutions, rather than to take autistic voices into account, at least in part, in describing the experience of their condition on a public platform? Is the fact that academia has turned a blind eye towards the internal experience of autism really a justification for acting like there is no broad consensus on the realities of it?

Potential section moves:
I think this at least deserves a section or subsection, since it is widespread in the community to such a degree that it's gained recognition by scholars.

Here are some places it could belong:

Societal and cultural aspects of autism - overview section? that page needs some work for other reasons. Might be worth a talk page.

Executive dysfunction - add a subsection under the ASD subsection.

What is autistic inertia?
This is a really complicated problem.

There are multiple questions here.

Do we have sources of high enough quality for a psychology topic?

Do we have enough sources to write a full article about it?

The problem is, what kind of thing is it?

If we're taking it as a declaration that this is a symptom of ASD or a syndrome related to it, then that needs to meet wp:medrs standards. There's barely any scholarly research that even investigates it

It's extra tricky because there are other uses of "inertia" in psychological topics (just look at Inertia (disambiguation)), both formally and informally. The more formal ones are very distinct and already exist, and the less formal ones are basically just one-off metaphors.

To make matters worse, you'll occasionally see people use "autistic inertia" in a sense different from the more specific executive dysfunction-related usage. The usage related to executive dysfunction is the only one with origins and discussion in scholarship, so that's the one we should be focused on.

We have some scholarly research that basically notes that it's talked about within the community and reports some of what the community says about it. That's not even really a true investigation of it. There's that one paper (that's not even published yet) that actually investigates the thing itself. We're gonna need a lot more of those so that someone can write a lit review about it, and then we'll have one source that we can use for it. It's gonna be a while before this can be a real article about a psychological phenomenon.

However, that all hinges on treating it as a psychological phenomenon. Is it a thing in itself

If we go down that last route, then it's probably more appropriate to find a place for it within another article, probably like in the ASD subsection of Executive dysfunction, or maybe even in Societal and cultural aspects of autism.

I do think in that last respect it's worth writing something about.

Also, I'm not sure what the typical protocol is, but I do think it's worth a redirect to whatever this subject becomes. The article really was about Autistic Inertia before, and if people linked to it for that purpose, then they should get redirected to its current form instead of a dead link.

Possible solutions:

Keep and move to Autistic Inertia
This requires clearly recognizing it as a non-medical topic. However, this means it has to be recognized both in the context of its (limited) scholarly discussion as related to executive dysfunction and in the context of its use within the autism community.

Admittedly, this is pretty shaky.

Bad solutions:

Delete and ignore the topic
Wikipedia's content about autism is frankly in shambles as things are. It looks like there's actually a huge problem with treating everything related to the autism spectrum as "biomedical". I know it's really a grey area, but if Wikipedia is gatekeeping all knowledge that doesn't come from lit review level sources, then it risks being restrictive to such an extreme that the information is outdated to the point of being actively misinformative. When that misinformation is about a vulnerable, infamously misunderstood minority... that's a serious problem.

Yes, I will die on this hill.

I know this isn't the place to argue about Wikipedia's policies, but treating something like this on the same level as biomedical content is restrictive to the extreme. If we can sidestep that barrier for this somehow, then we really should.

Can someone point me to where/how Wikipedia defines what content counts as "medical"?

What counts as medical?
WikiProject Disability/Style guide

Hypothetical situation:

There's a large community of wheelchair-bound people. They all have different reasons for being in wheelchairs, but in wheelchairs they all are.

One day, 20 years ago, someone complains about how their hands hurt when they go uphill a lot. The community has many discussions, internet posts, and presentations about "uphill wheelchair hand-itis". Some scholars on disability impairment even publish a couple papers that mention how the wheelchair community is vocal about this "hand-itis", even discussing what the community thinks the cause is. None of these papers look into the physical causes of it themselves, although there is one preprint that investigates it more directly.

Can Wikipedia make an article about "hand-itis"? What kind of article? Should it be a subsection in the "wheelchair community" article? Is it allowed to be written about at all?

... that's a ridiculous metaphor, but honestly it fits the exact situation in my opinion.

A great new snag
https://www-tandfonline-com.ezproxy.neu.edu/doi/full/10.1080/09638288.2020.1729872 (Welch, 2019).

They compare "autistic inertia" to autistic catatonia, not executive dysfunction. That's... unique.

I think that was the only real, published paper to discuss it. Since their discussion about it is definitely not in line with what I interpreted most of the discussion to be about, I think that was the last leg it could have stood on. Now things are a lot shakier.

Frankly, there's so much stuff about "Autistic Inertia" that it really should show up on Wikipedia somewhere.

Pivot
"Autistic Inertia" is a commonly used term within the autistic community. It's been associated with difficulty starting and stopping tasks.

The exact cause for this is not yet well understood [citation], but it's been potentially linked to "autism spectrum catatonia" (Welch, 2019) and executive dysfunction (others).

Analysis paralysis
Analysis paralysis needs some attention. Executive dysfunction at least deserves a mention.

Survey
Delete, but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. The original article was basically just poorly sourced plagiarism, to be sure. "Inertia (anxiety)" is unsaveable as far as I can tell, since there's really just nothing there, and explicitly linking it with anxiety disorders would have to violate WP:NOR, since there's nothing to be found that even meets basic reliability standards, let alone medical standards. If we tried to save it, it would have to be moved to Autistic Inertia and it would need some serious improvements to sourcing. Unfortunately, it appears that there isn't much for scholarly sources, and there isn't anything that meets WP:MEDRS, for sure. (I still think something should be done for the topic, and that might mean a redirect could be useful, but I'll put that in the discussion section)

Discussion
I still think something should be done for this topic, and it would be shame to ignore it despite its clear and strong presence as a subject of discussion in the autism community. Does anyone know what the standard or guideline is for counting things as "biomedical" or not? This topic is admittedly close to that line, whatever it is, but I think there's a strong case to be made for this topic having a mention somewhere in Wikipedia, given the degree to which it's discussed in the autism community—it's discussed so much that it actually has gotten attention to the point of being thoroughly described in published scholarly research (Welch, 2020), as well as directly investigated by unpublished research (Buckle) (I know that's not a valid source, but my point is just that it's enough of "a thing" to warrant at least a mention somewhere on Wikipedia). No one's claiming that this is a medical disorder itself, and insofar as it may be a potential "symptom" of autism spectrum disorder, there's insufficient material that meets WP:MEDRS. That said, I believe that insofar as it's a significant phenomenon and topic of discussion in the autism community, we have the sources for that.

Still, even then I'm unsure if there are really the sources necessary to support an entire page for that. It also could appear to be more medical than it really is, if simply put on its own page. Being in context on a page and clearly labeled as "a not scientifically/medically verified phenomenon and common topic of discussion within the autism community" could be enough to keep it out of the purview of medical sourcing standards. If anyone has ideas for where that could go, I'm all ears (eyes?). Executive dysfunction and Societal and cultural aspects of autism stand out to me as potential places, although the former may be a bit too "medical" in context, so I'm unsure if it would even matter how strongly I disclaim the medical validity of the term. Either way, could it be worth keeping the Inertia (anxiety) page as a redirect to whatever might manifest for Autistic Inertia?

(A couple notes: I'm the Wiki Ed student that was assigned this article. I'm not personally invested in keeping it around or anything, but I do think this is a great opportunity to get rid of this problematic article and instead represent this topic in a more appropriate fashion elsewhere on Wikipedia. Also, apologies for any formatting problems—I'm new to editing here, let alone on AfD pages).

New wave
So, I might casually start trying to rally people for a crusade to slightly relax Wikipedia's restrictions

Wikipedia policies and essays in support of this:

Ignore all rules (and don't forget the essays on wp:iar)

NOTBUREAUCRACY

Wikipedia essays to look for about this:

Are people scared of merging the 4 autism articles just because the work seems daunting?

Is it too complicated, so no one wants to bother?

Maybe the fear is that merging will create a page that's too big? That's a fallacy though, since you can just link to "main articles". There's certainly redundant information across these.

Autism pages redundancy
The "further reading" table at the bottom of the pages contains a "diagnoses" box. It's laid out as "Autism Spectrum(HFA - Classical Autism - Asperger's Disorder - PDD-NOS - CDD - Rett Syndrome)". This implies that at best, the "Autism Spectrum" page should contain all general information, and the other pages should contain only the information specific to that term and diagnosis. This is at least a good direction to take the first step on cutting down on the redundancy and improving the clarity of these articles.

AfD discussion response
It's a tricky topic for sure, but my thoughts are that it may be pushing the bounds of the quality of sources we have for this topic to include it in a place like Autism spectrum, since putting it there would imply that it's something like a known symptom of Autism Spectrum Disorder. That's clearly medical in nature, and there isn't enough research on it for any sort of scholarly consensus. What we do have sources for, though, is to recognize that this is a very popular term for autistic people to describe feelings related to their solidly, medically documented impairments in executive dysfunction, arousal regulation, and other lesser-known but scientifically established difficulties.

For NSSI vs SIB in autism articles; autism in self-harm articles
https://molecularautism.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13229-019-0267-3#Abs1

Look for lit-review level stuff?

Consider both self-injury sections in autism articles and autism sections in self-injury articles