User talk:Ranze/Child genital mutilation

Move

 * The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section. 

The result of the move request was: No consensus to move. This proposal does not yet have enough support. At a minimum you should be able to persuade people that you have overcome the objections expressed at Articles for deletion/Baby genital mutilation. The objectors seem to think that you should pick a term that is widely used in the literature and is studied as its own topic. If you want to explore further options you could try asking on the page at Talk:Female genital mutilation. For whatever reason, you have encountered a lot of skepticism about the suitability of this material. EdJohnston (talk) 12:43, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

Baby genital mutilation → genital mutilation of children – At Articles for deletion/Baby genital mutilation some critics brought up that the phrase I chose for this article's subject is not common enough. This appears to be a somewhat valid criticism. While I found several sources of this phrase, it is mostly on forums rather than cited works. I have added several references to support 3 alternate titles, one of which I am highlighting here. I believe 'children' is most common and the ideal, although other phrases like 'infant' or 'minor' have also been used in academic works. I believe that if this is moved, it would be more proper. In fact since I'm the only one who has contributed content, I am tempted to just make this move if it will avoid the deletion. Is that okay to do, moving while nomination is in process? Ranze (talk) 02:49, 12 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Comment. I think child genital mutilation is somewhat more used in literature (few hits on GBooks). --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 03:32, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Agreed, coloquially speaking it appears more common than infant or minor, though I would like to keep them listed as secondary phrases. Changed BGM to CGM as suggested. Added 2 refs I found, not sure if ones you saw. Keeping others since they're equivalent alternatives that I already sources. Ranze (talk) 20:40, 14 May 2013 (UTC)


 * Comment. Female genital mutilation is the WP:COMMONNAME as the primary concern is the victimisation of infants and girls. K7L (talk) 15:29, 14 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Incorrect, the victimization of girls is not the primary concern in all the of the literature. In sources, they are often addressed separately, and often 'boys and girls' is used collectively. This is a more specific concern, when mutilation is done to those who can't consent to it, as opposed to females, who may opt to consent to some forms of modification as adults. Ranze (talk) 20:00, 14 May 2013 (UTC)

Note I've invited User:SlimVirgin to comment, she's been doing a lot of work to bring Female genital mutilation to GA quality recently so she's very familiar with the sourcing and should have well-informed comments. 20:55, 14 May 2013 (UTC)


 * Comment . It's not clear at the moment what the article would be about that isn't already covered elsewhere; the current version contains one source on gender dysphoria and another on Munchhausen's. If there's anything missing, Genital modification and mutilation is one place it could be added. Female genital mutilation doesn't specifically address the issue of children versus adults, but it's almost always carried out on children (four to fifteen is typical), so much of that article is about child genital mutilation. I think there certainly could be a separate article on people flying their children to countries where it's legal to have it done. Perhaps the best way forward would be to make the focus of the article clearer on a user subpage first. SlimVirgin (talk) 04:02, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

The "mutilation and modification page" isn't the ideal place to put this. I really don't even know why those things are bunched together, nor why MGM points there instead of getting its own page. While some of the procedures may overlap (what some consider modifying, others consider mutilating) the basic concept between the two (generally that mutilation is without consent and more damaging, and modification is with consent and less damaging) is pretty clear, which is why mod and mut should have their own pages. Right now the GMAM page appears to focus moreso on the procedures than the ideas associated with them in culture. Ranze (talk) 04:16, 21 May 2013 (UTC)

Sourcing problems
Assuming that the best sources to support the article topic have been brought, I reviewed the sourcing: The Gender Dysphoria book and the Munchausen book do talk a bit about therapy for self-mutilating boys and child molestors. But, the rest of the sources... Two of the sources are listed twice to pad out the refs list? A "Weird History" book? A book that mentions the article topic only once in the entire book, in passing? A single, four-sentence newspaper article about a single case of a couple that flew out of the country to support "Incidents have occurred where parents have flown from countries where it is illegal (like Australia) to countries where it is legal (like Bali) however much like child sex tourism, the authorities have cracked down on adults who go outside their nation's borders to engage in child abuse.[10]"? These sources do not comply with WP:RS for how they are used or are used improperly. 04:00, 15 May 2013 (UTC)
 * 1) Gender Dysphoria: Interdisciplinary Approaches in Clinical Management - talks about therapy for boys who mutilate their own genitals
 * 2) Weird History 101 is a Ripley's Believe It or Not style book that in no way could be considered a serious academic source, selected articles "My Dinner with Attila the Hun" and "I Started WWI"
 * 3) The Munchausen Complex: Socialization of Violence and Abuse talks about child molesters fixated on mutilating genitals
 * 4) Sexual Mutilations: A Human Tragedy (same source listed two separate times) and Male and Female Circumcision: Medical, Legal and Ethical Considerations in Pediatric Practice (same source listed two separate times) by Denniston and Marilyn Milos - these are proceedings of conferences by NOCIRC, an anti-circumcision organization, they are WP:SELFPUBLISHED and not reliable academic sources
 * 5) Parliamentary Assembly Documents, Working papers 2001 Ordinary Session are internal governmental working papers and are primary sources for that purpose, they are not scholarly secondary sources
 * 6) The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Australia and the End of the Liberal Consensus appears to be talking about female genitals mutilation, but only in passing in one sentence in the whole book
 * 7) ABC News story is talking about female genital mutilation, and is misrepresented by the article
 * I have removed the sourcing that does not comply with WP:RS and associated content, also the WP:OR/unsourced content, and the misused source.  04:10, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

Just to clarify, I didn't list the same reference twice to pad out the ref list, I listed them twice because I was consulting different pages within the book and quoting different excerpts to support different terms. I'm aware of how to name a ref so it can be used multiple times but what I haven't figured out how to do yet is to list a ref once but then to direct different reference anchors to different page/excerpts from the same source. Simply referring to the source overall is a bit confusing. I'm wondering if I should just do both pgs and quotes in the single reference and hopefully people can easily guess which anchoring matches up with each excerpt? Ranze (talk) 04:10, 21 May 2013 (UTC)


 * Sure, there's a couple of ways to do that with ref formatting, including expanding a ref to include a list of bullet items, and also you can use the sfn template, or you can also use the rp template to add a page number suffix to a footnote superscript. However I don't want to distract from the the really important point raised, which is the doubtful WP:RS fitness of the sources themselves.    15:31, 21 May 2013 (UTC)

Thanks I'll look into this ref-formatting idea, I was basically just establishing that the terms exist, which I think these publications do show. First, regarding the Parliamentary documents, I think we are allowed to use primary sources in articles, just we can't interpret them, we have to rely on secondaries to interpret. We also have to keep in mind that primary/secondary/tertiary is relative to usage and not an absolute label to put on media types based on generalizations. A parliament document is primary if we are talking about parliament, but if we are talking about GM that parliament happens to be talking about, then relatively, that document is a secondary source, as parliament members are interpreting that issue for us.

As for the self-published stuff, that's okay if they're experts. To use Milos as an example, she's a nurse with awards, which makes her seem a bit expert-y. Even experts have their critics. The key criteria appears to be whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable third-party publications. In regard to that, the Miami New Times has reported on her last year and they seem like a third party to me. Ranze (talk) 18:04, 21 May 2013 (UTC)


 * I'm puzzled as to how you could think the Miami New Times article you provided supports "whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable third-party publications". The Miami New Times article doesn't cite any of her work at all.  It barely even mentions her.  This would be a complete misapplication of WP:RS.


 * Milos is indeed notable in the world of anti-circumcision activism, and she's perhaps one of the most notable activists, at least in the USA (I don't know about worldwide). However, if you review all the sources available about the more general topic of circumcision (and not just anti-circumcision activism), she's very marginal, and vastly overwhelmed by the available scientific literature and large, reputable organizations worldwide weighing in on the topic, including the World Health Organization.  In terms of influence and reputation, Milos is not even in the same ballpark as the WHO.  This is where Wikipedia policies regarding WP:FRINGE and WP:DUEWEIGHT will come in.


 * I think ultimately the AFD didn't turn out your way because the article as proposed didn't contain anything. A proposed new article should be an encyclopedia article, it needs develop the notable encyclopedic themes on the article's topic and the content covering those themes needs to be well-sourced.  The article as you had originally created it was mostly a simple list of search results.  There was no content, it was just a placeholder for search results, so it wasn't an encyclopedia article.   18:43, 21 May 2013 (UTC)

It's just frustrating I guess, apparently I see value in sources, think them reliable, when others don't. When I asked about what makes a publisher reliable... I'm told this can't be defined to prevent gaming. But when stuff gets pushed out based on undefined valuing of refs it feels like a different kind of gaming. It's like, when you just know a topic is valid, but it's not PC to complain about, so not a lot of 'reputable' people are gonna be doing it, so it's harder to find them.

Heck, one major difficulty I had here was that searching "child genital mutilation" returned a lot of "female child genital mutilation" (which I excluded, trying to look for non-gendered instances of references). Conversely 'male genital mutilation' also returns 'female genital mutilation' so it's hard to find stuff specifically about that too. Ranze (talk) 00:52, 22 May 2013 (UTC)


 * There's no such thing as a perfectly reliable source that can be used no matter what the context. Every discussion about "is this a reliable source?" needs three pieces of information:  1) What's the source, 2) What's the article, 3) What piece of information in the article is the source being used to support.  The NOCIRC conference proceedings are perfectly reliable sources for the opinions expressed by the conference presenters, but they won't be reliable sources for general biomedical information.  You haven't made it clear yet if you'd like to be editing Wikipedia biomedical content, but if so, you need to read WP:MEDRS if you haven't already, WP:MEDRS is the Wikipedia guideline for sourcing biomedical information in any Wikipedia article. The next thing to read after that is WP:DUEWEIGHT.  Wikipedia gives weight to views in articles proportional to the emphasis found in reliable sources.  For example, there's a tiny fringe group that believes that the mercury-based preservative thiomersal causes autism.  This theory has been thoroughly discredited, and large, reputable, influential national or international organizations like the CDC, the World Health Organization and the American Academy of Pediatrics have all clearly stated that there is no concern.  But, there are still people who hold on to that belief, they're a small but very vocal minority, and they publish their own materials supporting their theory, for example see this.  In our Wikipedia article Autism, the thiomersal theory is not mentioned at all, per WP:DUEWEIGHT and WP:FRINGE.  But, it is mentioned in Thiomersal controversy - a specialized article covering just that topic. I think you're getting at the fact that you understand all this when you say "not a lot of 'reputable' people are gonna be doing it, so it's harder to find them" - yes exactly, if the reputable people aren't saying it, that means the good-quality reliable sourcing for it will be scarce, and so it probably won't get a mention in our articles.  This is exactly the result Wikipedia content policies are set up to produce.   02:00, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

FGM goes beyond the scope of being a solely biomedical article though. Whether or not something is called alteration/modification or mutilation is clearly not using medical vocabulary, it's open to a broader context of opinions from non-medical sources. The biomedical aspect would be in regard to complications, health effects, etc. Terms like 'cutting' exist in common vocabulary and we don't need medical authorities to tell us what is and isn't 'cutting' when it is obvious. That the WHO sometimes discusses cutting in conjunction with mutilation doesn't mean they're saying all mutilation is cutting or that all cutting is mutilation. Ranze (talk) 00:09, 26 May 2013 (UTC)