User talk:Adam F Clarkson

Welcome!
Hello, Adam F Clarkson, and welcome to Wikipedia. We appreciate encyclopedic contributions, but some of your recent contributions, such as your edit to the page Protandim, seem to be advertising or for promotional purposes. Wikipedia does not allow advertising. For more information on this, please see: If you still have questions, there is a new contributors' help page, or you can write   below this message along with a question and someone will be along to answer it shortly. You may also find the following pages useful for a general introduction to Wikipedia: I hope you enjoy editing Wikipedia! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes ( ~ ); this will automatically produce your name and the date. Feel free to write a note on the bottom of my talk page if you want to get in touch with me. Again, welcome! Grayfell (talk) 08:33, 4 January 2015 (UTC)
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Protandim
Hello Greyfell,

Thank you for your message. I was surprised that all my edits were taken down and the original article stayed up unedited. But perhaps that is standard; I am still learning how to be an effective Wikipedia contributor and my goal here is simply to provide the best information on the topics I contribute to. I have been reading the articles you sent me.

I was always aware however, that Wikipedia pages are not to be used for advertising or promotion, positive or negative, and my intention is definitely not to write a biased article by any means. As an Epidemiologist who has written and published several unbiased health science articles and reports, my intention was to present the evidence and give solid and interesting information on the topic in question.

The current article is inadequate and misleading on many levels, and it promotes a negatively biased view by spending significantly more time referencing controversy and politics on the company who sells Protandim then it talks about the product which the page is meant to represent. In dong so, it leaves the research on the product until the very end of the article which doesn't make any sense to me. In fact, when you look at the present article in its entirety, you have to admit that the motives there are questionable to say the least and actually violates the Wikipedia's policy of neutrality as it stands which is ironic.

Because I don't want the public to be misinformed by wikipedia, I spent a good amount of my personal time researching the evidence on Protandim and sourcing my claims so that anyone could investigate them if they felt like the article was positively biased. That's why I'm surprised that all my good work was taken down entirely rather then edited which I thought was how wikipedia worked? Bottom line: I want to collaborate and believe that Wikipedia intents this service to be a place for collaboration.

In that spirit, perhaps you can be more specific in what seemed inappropriate and "promotional" to you, so I can make the edits necessary to get a much more informative and higher quality article on Protantim online and thus provide for the public public a neutral article rather then a negative one. Because my edits were removed by your request (?), the introduction to the "Protandim" page, has gone from being more relevant and informative and having 8 sources, back to be minimally informative and having only 4 sources, which to me is an obvious regression in quality.

That being said, I would love your help in improving the quality of this page if you were willing -- or maybe you can suggest how to edit my edits so that it's appropriate.

As far as I can see, I didn't violate any of Wikipedia's policies with my changes so more specificity on why you flagged my edits would be very appreciated. Writing that my "edit to the page Protandim, seem to be advertising or for promotional purposes" isn't really that helpful. What specifically? how do you suggest I change it?

For now I will just edit out some of the positive language and post it back up and hopefully that will satisfy Wikipedia's policies. Looking forward to your thoughts on this!

Cheers! Adam

Adam F Clarkson (talk) 21:32, 4 January 2015 (UTC)


 * Hello. I have moved your comments to the bottom of the talk page, per Talk page guidelines.
 * I appreciate your stated commitment to neutrality, but please keep in mind that Wikipedia has much higher standards for medical content then it does for general content. Please review Identifying reliable sources (medicine). One thing that is emphasized by that guideline, and is worth repeating here, is this: Primary sources should generally not be used for medical content. Additionally, Wikipedia is not a platform for medical advice, and any claims made about medical effects need to be extremely well supported. The lead is intended to summarize the body of an article, so "frontloading" a bunch of vague but positive sounding information is indeed promotional. Statements like "...showed a significant reduction in TBARS levels (a measure of oxidative stress )..." are giving an impression of medical significance which is not supported by mainstream medical consensus, nor especially meaningful in the context of an article about a company which sells products. Your version was also peppered with WP:PEACOCK terms such as "well studied" which further suggest a possible WP:COI.
 * I would recommend reviewing the article on Antioxidant, specifically Antioxidant, as this is a high-quality article directly related to Protandim. Most claims made there are well supported, and mention multiple perspectives and concerns. Please discuss any additional changes on the article's talk page. Thank you. Grayfell (talk) 22:57, 4 January 2015 (UTC)

Thanks Grayfell, Your feedback is very helpful and I understand much more clearly the details that flagged my edits. Makes sense.

A few thoughts on your comments:

First your comment"

"frontloading" a bunch of vague but positive sounding information is indeed promotional."

I get that the intro is not the place to frontload research results, however, what I wrote was not vague, rather it was the main findings from the initial study on the effects of the product on human health. I'll work with how to present this more tactfully though.

Also, I'm curious about your comment that:

"Statements like "...showed a significant reduction in TBARS levels (a measure of oxidative stress )..." are giving an impression of medical significance which is not supported by mainstream medical consensus,"

A reduction in TBARS is a medically significant finding. That's why the study was published in a medical journal, because it's significant. The first article I contributed to was actually on TBARS which clearly describes what TBARS are, why they are significant medically, and what their limitations are. What is you evidence that TBARS measurements are not supported by mainstream medical consensus? They've been used as an indicator to measure oxidation in organisms in medical research for decades.

Finally, your comment: "...nor especially meaningful in the context of an article about a company which sells products."

Isn't the article we're discussing about a product, a dietary supplement in this case? Protandim is not a company. The company that sells it is called LifeVantage. Which evidently is where the majority ior the information on the Protandim page should be located instead of where it is presently. As I mentioned in my previous message, currently the Protandim page, is "frontloaded" with unesseary detailed information on LifeVantage the company, and its history, then there is about the product and what it does. That to me is what is questionable. Shouldn't all that information be on a Wikipedia page on LifeVantage and information of the product Protandim should be the focus of the product page?

Thanks again for your help!

Adam

Hi again :) I just want to add that I am new to see and really appreciate your guidance. I will add my thoughts to the talk page as you suggested.

I'm assuming that our interests in this are the same, basically to uphold the standards of Wikipedia. In which case I'm guessing that you are an experienced editor here and this is why you sent me the message and linked me to all those useful links. Is that right or are there other terms?

I find it interesting that you mentioned how Primary sources were not to be used, and I agree. Wikipedia's belief that "is vital that the biomedical information in all types of articles be based on reliable, third-party, published secondary sources and accurately reflect current medical knowledge" makes sense to me. That's why in my edits I added 5 third-party sources to reflect the current medical knowledge. The article as you've preserved it has only 1 third party, that is only patent related and 2 primary sources. Thoughts?

Thanks! Adam Adam F Clarkson (talk) 23:57, 4 January 2015 (UTC)


 * LifeVantage Corporation was, at one point, its own article, but now it redirects to Protandim. The company's article lacked sources establishing notability. It had plenty of sources, but they were WP:PRIMARY, or extremely routine listings. Most of the substantial sources were about Protandim specifically, not LifeVantage. Regardless, the article is about a commercial product, and the description of that product needs to reflect reliable sources. The article should not, under any circumstances, support any grandiose claims that "Protandim is sold as a cellular longevity and disease prevention supplement" when the FDA specifically prohibits exactly that. If it is being sold as a disease prevention supplement, then that info should be passed on to the FDA, or maybe a few state Attorneys General. Implying, even indirectly, that the supplement prevents cancer is equally unacceptable. Take a look at the archives on Talk:Protandim, where there are a lot of previous discussions about these issues. It did not appear to me that any of those sources you added mentioned Protandim, there were generically about oxidative stress. This is why it appears to be a promotional edit. You are adding info that makes this supplement look more impressive by using tangentially related sources. Because of behavior like that, if you happen to be a Protandim representative or employee, I would suggest reading Plain and simple conflict of interest guide. Thank you. Grayfell (talk) 00:23, 5 January 2015 (UTC)

Hi Greyfell,

I can assure you that I am not in conflict of interest here. What I wish to do is improve this article so that it gives the public a fair unbiased report on the product which currently does not exist. By the sounds of it, the best way to start would be to create a page about LifeVantage Corporation and to read more about how to create a good article with wikipedia.

Thanks for your help,

Adam