User talk:Emilyc44

Welcome!
Hello, Emilyc44, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Ian and I work with the Wiki Education Foundation; I help support students who are editing as part of a class assignment.

I hope you enjoy editing here. If you haven't already done so, please check out the student training library, which introduces you to editing and Wikipedia's core principles. You may also want to check out the Teahouse, a community of Wikipedia editors dedicated to helping new users. Below are some resources to help you get started editing. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:28, 16 January 2018 (UTC)

Article Evaluation
Article: Simulated patient

In all, I found this article to be well-written and informative, though lacking in sources. As a result of being under-sourced, many claims the piece makes on the topic of simulated patients are unable to be easily verified.

I feel that (for the most part) the entry has a natural, logical flow to it: at the beginning, a brief and easily digestible definition of “simulated patient” is given, along with a short summary of the role of simulated patients in the health care industry. This is followed by a history of the use of simulated patients, explanations of ways they are currently used, a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages inherent in their use, and an explanation of how individuals are recruited to act as simulated patients. Each of these topics is carefully explored in its own sub-section. My only qualm is with the final sub-section describing “Teaching Associates”; I believe the article is suggesting that teaching associates are simply specially-trained simulated patients who specialize in guiding students through intimate exams, however the exact relationship between the article’s main topic and this sub-section is still unclear to me. A discussion of the difficulty of finding individuals willing to be teaching assistants also didn’t seem to be an appropriate way to conclude the entry, and distracted from other more pertinent information.

This article did take a neutral tone, exploring both the advantages and drawbacks that come with use of simulated patients without over- or under-representing either category. Doubt could be cast on the substance and/or non-biased nature of certain claims, as they’re not attributed to any source, objective and unbiased or otherwise. However, given proper citation with reputable and neutral sources as references, everything in the article would be allowable as neutral, non-biased information.

One link in the references section leads to a page that no longer exists, however the majority of links do seem to work correctly. The sources given corroborate claims made in the article. In general, the references used are also neutral and reliable — some are from U.S. government websites, while others are scholarly analyses of the use of simulated patients seen in medical texts. Unfortunately, however, not all facts stated in the article are appropriately referenced.

A fact that was left out of this article but that I discovered through independent research is that use of simulated patients was ridiculed when first proposed; this information might fit well under the “History” sub-section, as it alerts readers to the fact that this now-widely-used practice was once exceedingly controversial.

The only recent activity on the article’s Talk page is a bot notifying editors that archive links had been added to certain external links. On the same page, it’s seen that the article is part of WikiProject Medicine, and that it bears a “B-Class” rating. The rating indicates that the article is approaching completion, but that it still lacks the requisite characteristics for meeting “good article standards” — likely because of the missing citations. I strongly agree with this characterization of the entry: the piece has a solid foundation, but doesn’t yet meet Wikipedia’s rigorous standards for proper citation.