User:Tr3ndyBEAR/dispute

Stuff they said to check out Pages concerned
 * Dispute resolution
 * Requests for administrator attention
 * Disruptive user
 * Requests for comment
 * Administrator intervention against vandalism
 * Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents
 * Administrators' noticeboard
 * my talk page and the User:Zefr|user's page
 * Reliable sources
 * Citing sources
 * Identifying reliable sources (medicine)
 * Identifying reliable sources (science)
 * Nepetalactone
 * Zanthoxylum schinifolium
 * Wrightia tinctoria
 * Afrocarpus gracilior
 * Sutherlandia frutescens

Introduction
Hello, recently, I've had a really negative experience with another Wikipedian that I believe was engaging in disruptive editing and targeting. They went through my history and undid work I had done on four different pages. I believe their reversions were without merit. At first I thought there was simply a misunderstanding, but after attempting to engage in discussion with them, and them refusing to, I realized this user is not willing to discuss and their problematic behavior would require external input to deal with. I would like to go over the edits in question and why they were, in my view, extremely problematic. This post may get a little heavy into some deeper questions/issues with Wikipedia so I apologize in advanced for the length, but I think they are really important to address so I spent a lot of thought and time compiling this.

The main claim the user made against my contributions is the inclusion of information about other culture's relationship to those plants. They argued that this would lead to readers confusing it as "medical content". The user also had issues with my inclusion of phytochemical information (sometimes about chemicals not even related to human medicine). All of these edits were made on stub-class articles. Rather than standard editing practices of adding tags, the user's response was to completely undo my edits (even aspects not related to these matters like information about taxonomy, or other organizational edits). The user than went ahead and looked through my edit history to undo other contributions I made on unrelated pages (again, all stub class articles). But the most concerning behavior the user exhibited was a clear racist attitude towards other cultures, which I hope to discuss in detail in this post.

Ethnobotanical information on wikipedia
The user deleted any information on ethnobotanical uses of plants included regardless of how well-sourced they were because of their claim that this constituted "medical information". The idea that ethnobotanical information has no place on Wikipedia because it can be seen as a medical claim is ridiculous. There are tons of other species pages that include this information (I compiled a small list, but I'm afraid to post it here as the user may continue their disruptive editing to those pages as well).

The importance of ethnobotanical knowledge
This is not something I should have to be proving, but unfortunately I feel compelled to engage. In this case, it's important to defend not just the relationships that indigenous people have to plants related to their edibility or practical uses, but also their importance to medicine. Despite the fact that I never made any "medical claims", the user's racist remarks towards these culture's systems warrant this discussion.

World Health Organization's strategy
A real quick guide to the difference between traditional medicine and "alternative medicine":
 * pyramid scheme essential oil salespeople - alternative medicine
 * medical aspects of traditional knowledge that developed over generations within various societies - traditional medicine
 * Ayurveda system of medicine - traditional medicine
 * supplement companies using "Ayurvedic" as a buzzword to sell you something - alternative medicine
 * homeopathy - alternative medicine
 * traditional Chinese medicine - traditional medicine

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), when traditional medicine is adopted outside of its traditional culture, it is often considered a form of alternative medicine. However, WHO recognizes the value and importance of traditional medicine and has adopted a 9-year strategy to "support Member States in developing proactive policies and implementing action plans that will strengthen the role traditional medicine plays in keeping populations healthy." The strategy also aims to support Member states in "harnessing the potential contribution of TM to health, wellness and people-centred health care." Throughout, this report clearly shows an understanding and appreciation of the value of traditional medicine.

In February  2013,  the  WHO  Director-General,  Dr  Margaret  Chan,  stated  that  “traditional  medicines,  of  proven  quality,  safety,  and  efficacy,  contribute to the goal of ensuring that all people have access to care. For many millions of  people,  herbal  medicines,  traditional  treatments,  and  traditional  practitioners  are  the  main  source  of  health  care,  and  sometimes  the  only  source of care. This is care that is close to homes, accessible and affordable. It is  also  culturally  acceptable  and  trusted  by  large  numbers  of  people. The affordability of most traditional medicines makes them all the more attractive at a time of soaring health-care costs and nearly universal austerity. Traditional medicine also stands out as a way of coping with the relentless rise of chronic non-communicable diseases.”

That same WHO document stated, "Another recent study indicates that patients whose general practitioner has additional complementary and alternative medicine training have lower health care costs and mortality rates than those who do not. Reduced costs were the outcome of fewer hospital stays and fewer prescription drugs."

Whose knowledge?
Regardless, the point I'm trying to make clear, is that traditional medicine knowledge is knowledge that is worth preserving. Or at least that organizations like WHO recognize it as such. But beyond appealing to authority figures like WHO, there's a much deeper ethical issue that needs to be discussed when judging whether or not a knowledge is important enough to be preserved. Especially on a project like Wikipedia which seeks to be "a comprehensive written compendium that contains information on all branches of knowledge". When seeking this goal, we need to be critical of whose knowledge exactly we're hoping to compile.

Before going further, it's valuable for me to include some of the comments made by the user. On my talk page, the user said, "Ayurvedic nonsense has no place in a fact-based encyclopedia." When editing Wrightia tinctoria, they said they removed "ayurveda/unani nonsense" (in this case it was another user's contributions, but they deleted some of my contributions as well). If it's not yet clear to you why this type of attitude towards other cultures has no place on Wikipedia, let's dive a little deeper into how traditional knowledge is formed (this section is very important, please don't skip over).

Cahuilla experimentation
The Cahuilla (endonym ʔívil̃uqaletem) are a people indigenous to Southern California. Temalpakh (Cahuilla for "from the earth") is the name of a 10 year ethnographic work by anthropologist Lowell John Bean and Katherine Siva Saubel detailing ethnobotanical knowledge of the Cahuilla. In this work, they give us a look into the depth of Cahuilla plant knowledge and its genesis. Cahuilla "folk taxonomy" is extremely sophisticated and the names given to plants were exactly chosen, often in keeping with modern botanical classifications. For example, each species of oak and yucca recognized by modern botanists is also classified by Cahuilla.

Knowledge of plant uses for medicinal, edible, or other uses is extremely detailed and intimate, even in the fragmentary lore that survives. In Cahuilla culture, puvulam (shamans) and tingavish (doctors) were the main people concerned with botanical knowledge and experimentation. They made special studies of plant uses, experimented with various treatments, and learned the precise dosages of plant substances required to effect certain cures. Although some of this knowledge was public, much of it was kept guarded, being passed on only to friends and apprentices. At the same time, shamans and doctors met frequently to compare curing techniques.

Only someone extremely uneducated on these traditional practices would classify such knowledge as "nonsense". Regardless, the knowledge attained and passed down in this culture has a lot of significance to Cahuilla people. Who is this user to say that their entire culture is not worth preserving and doesn't belong on Wikipedia?

Central Restaurante
This depth of knowledge isn't restricted to Cahuilla by the way. In Lima, Peru there is a world class restaurant called Central Restaurante. It's consistently ranked amongst the top 10 of the world's best restaurants by many different lists (don't bothering trying to make a reservation as the reservation list could take over a year to get to you). The thing that really sets the restaurant apart is their ingredients. Many of these ingredients have never had documented uses in gastronomy. Some are little known herbs while others are strange ingredients like edible clay or huampa bark. Mater Inciativa, the organization used to find these ingredients, employs a full-time team of 2 anthropologists, a nutritionist, an environmental economist, a doctor, and 6 cooks. Together, they work with Andean and Amazonian communities to learn their knowledge about the edibility and uses of their ingredients as well as ways to prepare them (here's a beautifully done 4-minute video if you're interested in learning more).

Essentially, this restaurant has utilized ethnobotanical knowledge to become one of the highest regarded fine dining experiences in the world. Of course they're not the first to utilize deep Andean/Amazonian experimentation with plant species (potatoes, maize, quinoa, coca, as well as a massive number of lesser known crops were all made possibly by ethnobotanical experimentation).

Disturbance pharmacopoeias
Much has been written about the emerging paradigm in paleoecology of viewing the Amazon as a "manufactured landscape"  as well as the bioprospecting potentials of the Amazon. One thing that's clear is that understanding the ethnobotanical uses and relationships people had to their plants will be essential in understanding the ecology of the Amazon, the species distribution and biodiversity, and modelling it's resilience to climate change. However, one of the more remarkable papers I've seen related to the topic was a 2004 work, published in Annals of the Association of American Geographers, which traced colonial European efforts of drug discovery, intellectual property exploitation, and plant transference and acclimation to provide a review of the recent resurgence of scientific interest in tropical folk pharmacopoeias. The author finds that its not the "pristine" quality of the rainforest that it's actually anthropogenic nature (that is, an ecology shaped by the indigenous Amazonian peoples), which is accessible and rich in bioactive compounds, that has allowed for such a rich array of medicinal compounds.

Ethnobotany's relevance to drug discovery and medicine
In addition, the importance and role of traditional knowledge also extends to medicine in many ways. WHO recognizes the importance of it, both in circumstances where other forms of health care is unavailable as well as its role as complementary medicine in other nations. In addition, the user's ignorant and offensive comments on Ayurvedic and other medical systems are clearly not supported by the sciences.

In a piece published in Annual Reviews of Pharmacology and Toxicology (IF: 12.103, ranking 3rd in the category of Pharmacology, Toxicology, and Pharmaceutics according to Scimago's IF rankings), "Descriptions of the use of natural products in traditional medicine have served as starting points for new therapeutics. The details of the traditional use of these organisms can provide important information for future drug discovery and development efforts." Also adding, "[...] this ethnopharmacologic resource is threatened by the loss of traditional medicine knowledge and extinction of organisms."

So here we have yet another argument for the importance of the preservation of this knowledge. In this case, from one of the most highly respected journals in Pharmacology arguing for their importance for drug discovery. Another piece from the same journal talking about the importance of natural products (NPs) states, "NPs have been developed as drugs and have been used successfully as lead compounds for drug discovery. Between 1940 and 2014, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved 175 anticancer small molecules, of which 37% were synthetic and 63% were either NPs or directly derived from NPs."

I obviously can't possibly include all of the ways ethnobotany is influencing modern medical research, but I'll include a couple of articles with their abstracts to give you an idea of the range of impacts:

So why is ethnobotanical knowledge worth preserving?
In the end, it's really not our judgement to make. These cultures consider the knowledge worth preserving so who are we, people much less familiar and educated on those matters, to say it's not? But beyond that, I hope I've demonstrated at least some of the ways we can utilize such knowledge. Whether its mapping species distribution of the Amazon, discovering neglected and underutilized crops, finding new foods, investigating phytochemicals for drug discovery, or preserving a rich history and legacy of cultures who's knowledge has been explicitly targeted by colonizers.