User talk:Odobert

Welcome to Wikipedia from WikiProject Medicine!


Welcome to Wikipedia from WikiProject Medicine (also known as WPMED).

We're a group of editors who want to improve the quality of medical articles here on Wikipedia. I noticed that you are interested in editing medical articles, such as your edits to the article Femke; it's great to have a new editor on board. In your wiki-voyages, a few things that may be relevant to editing Wikipedia articles are:


 * Thanks for coming aboard! We always appreciate a new editor. Feel free to leave us a message at any time on our talk page. If you are interested in joining the project yourself, there is a participant list where you can sign up. Please leave a message on the group's talk page if you have any problems, suggestions, would like review of an article, need suggestions for articles to edit, or would like some help!
 * Sourcing of medical and health-related content on Wikipedia is guided by our medical sourcing guidelines, commonly referred to as MEDRS. These guidelines typically require recent secondary sources to support information. Primary sources (case studies, case reports, research studies) are rarely used, especially if the primary sources are produced by the organisation or individual who is promoting a claim.
 * The Wikipedia community includes a wide variety of editors with different interests, skills, and knowledge. We all manage to get along through a lot of discussion that happens behind the scenes and through the editing policy. If you encounter any problems, you can discuss them on an article's talk page or post a message on the WPMED talk page.

Feel free to drop a note on my talk page if you have any questions. I wish you all the best, and thank you for your help! —Femke 🐦 (talk) 19:02, 16 May 2024 (UTC)


 * Great to see you starting here! The rules for what Wikipedia considers acceptable sources are quite strict: it's mostly review articles that have come out in the last 5 years. Pubmed allows you to filter specifically on those criteria fortunately :). —Femke 🐦 (talk) 19:05, 16 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Apologies. I did not know about this rule. Thanks for explaining it to me.
 * A short personal note: I tend to disagree with the evidence pyramid in the MERDS: reviews are often biased by the authors' views and meta-analyses tend to include a lot of low-quality studies. I think it would be better to focus on the high quality trials that contain the actual data/evidence. However, I can imagine that insisting on reputable secondary sources is simply more practical to keep Wikipedia neutral and cautious in its claims.
 * Anyway, thanks for your work on the ME/CFS page, it looks pretty good. Hope to contribute in the future as well. Odobert (talk) 20:27, 16 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Please feel free to contribute and ask questions on the ME/CFS talk page also. For a number of reasons, this article is a difficult topic, but on the talk page the editors seem to be cooperating and congenial to try to improve the prose. That hasn't been consistent in the past and other articles also vary in the ability to edit without conflict and difficulty. Wikipedia does have a lot of conventions that are not necessarily easy to understand for a beginning editor, assuming you fall into that category. I do hope you continue to contribute too. Ward20 (talk) 21:57, 16 May 2024 (UTC)
 * When there is a new top-tier primary source, we add sometimes add this before it's discussed in a review. For instance, when DecodeME publishes their results, the number of genomes studied will quadruple compared to the last meta-analysis iirc. So we should add this.
 * In the ME/CFS I've mostly relied on clinical guideline documents, as they have less likelihood of bias imo compared to a narrative review. It's a difficult balancing act. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 16:15, 17 May 2024 (UTC)