User talk:Jackiemcdonnell

Welcome!
Hello, Jackiemcdonnell, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Ian and I work with Wiki Education; 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) 18:33, 15 November 2022 (UTC)


 * , Jackiemcdonnell, I understand you want to place your piece in an article for coursework, but I'm not sure you are hearing the concerns of editors or have grasped the rules around making medical claims, which are among the strictest criteria for any aspect of Wikipedia.


 * Medical claims about the benefits of yoga are subject to the mandatory policy WP:MEDRS. That means that each claim must be supported not by ordinary research papers, which are WP:PRIMARY and as such not sufficiently dependable for this purpose, but by Systematic reviews, which are second-level research, investigating whether the totality of field trials or other primary studies that the review could find in the literature are of sufficient quality to justify a medical claim (therapeutic benefit). Very little research on yoga meets this criterion.


 * In addition, there are some 100 Wikipedia articles on the subject of yoga as exercise, and that article is at the root of the tree - in other words, it summarizes the key facts from many other articles. As such, it's the very worst place to begin. Your concern is basically with yoga as therapy, and you will see in that article that it carefully distinguishes the kinds of claim, from medieval magic upwards, that have been made for yoga. The modern claims there are made on the basis of systematic reviews; I am not sure that you have uncovered anything that can stand alongside that material, but if you do find suitable sources then they should be added very briefly without sales-y preamble about how beneficial yoga is.


 * I hope this is not too late to be of help to you in your coursework. All the best, Chiswick Chap (talk) 13:54, 8 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Thanks @Chiswick Chap.
 * Jackiemcdonnell, the first issue is that when someone reverts your additions to Wikipedia you need to stop and discuss things, to understand what's going wrong.
 * The second issue is one of style - you're supposed to be writing an encylcopaedia article.
 * Statements like this are basically filler. All the information there is in the reference.
 * You should only use quotes when the precise wording significantly improves the reader's understanding, and even then, it should generally be less than than 5-8 words. The use of copyright content on Wikipedia needs to be kept to a minimum.
 * What's the reason for picking this study? If it's the only study of its kind, why is it notable enough to include in Wikipedia? And if it isn't the only one, are you sure it's representative of the literature as a whole? Was the sample size big enough? Are there confident that there aren't other studies that conflict with this one or undermine its conclusions?
 * The latter reason is why, for medical topics, we need to rely on recent systematic reviews instead of individual studies. Because even if you did know all this about the literature, there would be no way for readers to know what you know. That's why we have the policies that Chiswick Chap linked to.
 * Also, as Chiswick Chap mentioned, this is the top level article in category:Yoga as exercise, and probably actually belongs in Category:Yoga as therapy. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:02, 8 December 2022 (UTC)
 * The latter reason is why, for medical topics, we need to rely on recent systematic reviews instead of individual studies. Because even if you did know all this about the literature, there would be no way for readers to know what you know. That's why we have the policies that Chiswick Chap linked to.
 * Also, as Chiswick Chap mentioned, this is the top level article in category:Yoga as exercise, and probably actually belongs in Category:Yoga as therapy. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:02, 8 December 2022 (UTC)