User talk:Stoney1976

Editor interested in increasing verifiable, evidence-based content in Wikipedia. Very open to discussions in which verifiable sources are presented as the source of the arguments.

June 2020
You have been blocked from editing for a period of 24 hours for edit warring. Once the block has expired, you are welcome to make useful contributions. During a dispute, you should first try to discuss controversial changes and seek consensus. If that proves unsuccessful, you are encouraged to seek dispute resolution, and in some cases it may be appropriate to request page protection. If you think there are good reasons for being unblocked, please read the guide to appealing blocks, then add the following text below the block notice on your talk page:. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 19:25, 30 June 2020 (UTC)

I'm personally a big fan of List defined references as it makes the wikitext far cleaner and easier to read, and I've used them since their inception. Nevertheless, not everybody agrees with using them because a new editor may become confused that they can't find where references are defined (not expecting that to happen in the references section). It has been accepted that a change to LDRs is a change to the WP:CITEVAR format, as unintuitive as that may be, and you're going to have to reluctantly live with that, as I do.

If you want to change an article to LDRs, you have to raise it first of all at the article's talk page and seek consensus for the change. Of course, immature articles that have a mish-mash of references are fair game for bold edit, but something as heavily edited as Coronavirus disease 2019 just isn't suitable while it's changing so rapidly, because new editors to an article will almost certainly use in-line definitions and the article will rapidly turn into a mixture of types causing even more confusion. My advice would be to look at more stable articles if you want to make an effort to raise the prominence of LDRs, but you mustn't expect everyone to see them as a good thing. Cheers --RexxS (talk) 19:46, 30 June 2020 (UTC)


 * Thank you RexxS - I did not know what it was called. I tried looking it up but without success.Stoney1976 (talk) 20:16, 30 June 2020 (UTC)

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MEDRS
Please make yourself familiar with the standards for high-quality sourcing required by WP:MEDRS, particularly for biomedical claims that must be supported by scholarly secondary sources. I've just reverted the large changes you made to Coronavirus disease 2019 which make claims about the effects of viral load without any of those sources being provided. We cannot use newspapers as sources of biomedical content, nor should we use animal studies, nor primary sources such as studies or case reports. The opinions of a single expert might be useful, but are unlikely to be sufficient to base an entire section on. --RexxS (talk) 17:44, 4 July 2020 (UTC)
 * I don't know anything about what "fragmenting a discussion" is either. I do have other sources but seems I was aiming too high (journal articles) and too low (newspapers) at the same time. At least the publication turnaround seems to be speeding up due to the urgency of the situation. Still, at this point I'm only likely to find "review articles" related to similar viruses.Stoney1976 (talk) 18:22, 4 July 2020 (UTC)
 * And I did check the reference list to get a sense of acceptable sources before I started.Stoney1976 (talk) 18:24, 4 July 2020 (UTC)


 * None of your work is lost, as it's all there in the page history. But it's not going to be much use without the highest-quality sources to support it. I don't get my medical advice from a newspaper, and our readers shouldn't, either. If you're unaware of Trip database, it's worth a look to find secondary scholarly sources for any medical topic. Perhaps a read of SARS-CoV-2 viral load and the severity of COVID-19 from the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, which discusses the available evidence, might be a starting point. It's rather out-of-date now (26 March 2020), but should give you some idea of some of the analyses that were in progress. None of those came from a newspaper.
 * You will find that there still is very little in the way of secondary scholarly sources that discuss the effect of initial viral load on COVID-19.
 * Trip only comes up with a couple of sources, one of which is from 2004 and discusses SARS.
 * PubMed has just one result for "Initial Viral Load" COVID-19  and that's published in a Frontiers journal that I wouldn't touch with a bargepole.
 * Fragmenting a discussion is where one comment is made on one page and the reply is elsewhere. Wikipedia is a collaborative editing environment and debates are not limited to just two people. It makes it very hard for anybody reading it to follow a fragmented discussion. --RexxS (talk) 18:42, 4 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Thank you. This is all very helpful. I was hoping there was something like the Trip database. Stoney1976 (talk) 19:13, 4 July 2020 (UTC)

Kamala Harris
She and reliable sources both refer to her as "Black" or "African American". Africans were transported to Jamaica, and her African ancestry comes through this. Please do not use the talk page as a WP:FORUM with your negative comments towards Democrats. – Muboshgu (talk) 22:05, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
 * "Woman of Color" or "Black" would work, but there is some debate about the groups outside the US to whom the latter applies. By your definition of African-American, everyone is African-American. It wasn't a negative comment about Democrats. I'll track down the source.Stoney1976 (talk) 22:31, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

Important standard notice
--Neutralitytalk 23:42, 11 August 2020 (UTC)