User talk:Vivrolfe

Week 4 of Writing Wikipedia Articles: Final Projects Ahoy!
Hey - hope all is going well with you as we segue into Week 4 of WIKISOO! Just a reminder, in case you need it, that depending on your time zone, class time may have shifted - check out this link to make sure you know when to join us. Looking forward to chatting more with you this week about the Final Project - if you already know which article you're working on, you'll find instructions there for sharing this information easily with your classmates. Post any questions to the class Talk page, please! See you in class tomorrow I hope. Sara FB (talk) 01:49, 18 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Thanks Sara - sorry, my timing is all over the place at the moment but I'm hopefully just about keeping up! Vivrolfe (talk) 12:34, 18 March 2014 (UTC)


 * All the videos are online from each week, Vivrolfe - ping me anytime with specific questions (not timed for the UK this round, sorry!).... - Sara FB (talk) 23:38, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

WIKISOO check-in
How's it going, ? Just touching base as we start the fifth (!) week of the WIKISOO course. We're excited to see students working on such a diverse range of articles! If you haven't already, log in, scroll down to the bottom of the main course page to list your chosen final project article next to your own name; brag a little about your work (or just ask questions!) on the course talk page; and join the live lecture tomorrow as we move towards completion of the course! This is when things get exciting. :) Looking forward to seeing you in class! - Sara FB (talk) 23:35, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

Week 6 of WIKISOO
Hi ! Just checking in as we head into the final week of the Writing Wikipedia Articles class. You can look through last week's ether pad notes, check out your homework assignments from Week 5, and watch last week's lecture on YouTube - all right here. Check out my note from last week (above) if you're still diving into your Final Project... or head over to the course talk page to see if anyone else is having the same issues you are! Looking forward to seeing you in the last live webinar of the session tomorrow. Big WikiLove. -Sara FB (talk) 23:18, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

I love the picture Viv. --Geographer100 (talk) 11:21, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

Welcome!
Welcome to Wikipedia, Vivrolfe! Thank you for your contributions. I am MartinPoulter and I have been editing Wikipedia for some time, so if you have any questions feel free to leave me a message on my talk page. You can also check out Questions or type at the bottom of this page. Here are some pages that you might find helpful: Also, when you post on talk pages you should sign your name using four tildes ( ~ ); that will automatically produce your username and the date. I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! MartinPoulter (talk) 21:13, 14 June 2016 (UTC)
 * Introduction
 * The five pillars of Wikipedia
 * How to edit a page
 * Help pages
 * How to write a great article
 * Discover what's going on in the Wikimedia community

June 2018
Hello, I'm Zefr. I noticed that you made one or more changes to an article, Withania somnifera, but you didn't provide a reliable source. It's been removed and archived in the page history for now, but if you'd like to include a citation and re-add it, please do so! If you need guidance on referencing, please see the referencing for beginners tutorial, or if you think I made a mistake, you can leave me a message on my talk page. ''Please review WP:MEDRS. The sources you cited are preliminary research and speculation. '' Zefr (talk) 20:59, 5 June 2018 (UTC)


 * Not sure if this is how I talk back. Not sure why you have removed a number of journal articles. Sorry - I don't understand Wikipedia - sorry if I did something wrong. :)
 * When citing reliable sources for medical articles, we use WP:MEDRS as a source-quality guideline, requiring systematic reviews and/or meta-analysis of completed high-quality clinical trials. The sources you and the IP user added to the article do not meet MEDRS. Here is a video tutorial that may clarify. Please share with other students and instructors. Also note for . --Zefr (talk) 22:35, 5 June 2018 (UTC)

Welcome to WikiProject Medicine!
Hello, My name is Jenny and I am a board member of WikiProject Medicine and I also work as a consultant for Cochrane as part of the Cochrane-Wikipedia Partnership. I was told that you are a new editor and that you are interested in sharing evidence on Wikipedia to improve the medical articles. The medical articles on Wikipedia receive a high volume of page views and we greatly appreciate volunteers here to help improve them keep the content up to date. I have prepared a medical editing "cheat sheet" here, to help summarize WP:MEDRS and get new medical editors on their feet and contributing. User:JenOttawa/Introduction to Medical Editing: Cheat Sheet If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to let me know. Welcome to WikiProject Med! Jenny JenOttawa (talk) 17:27, 20 June 2018 (UTC)


 * Hi Jenny
 * Thank you for your kind note and help. I find the whole thing quite baffling and aggressive. I do want to contribute but it really shouldn't be this intimidating. I was inputing citations just as people do on the other medical / herb pages. Not sure what to do next now as it is never clear where you go wrong!
 * Viv
 * Thank you for the note. I am sorry that I missed it earlier. I am happy to help you navigate WP:MEDRS and understand what happened in this particular edit. When adding references to Wikipedia, the guideline WP:MEDRS requires that all citations are third-party published secondary sources (filtered information, not directly from the source). You were correct that a Cochrane Review is an appropriate source. Paraphrased Cochrane conclusions are often very helpful on Wikipedia pages to improve the evidence base of the article. The source you used was not the Cochrane Review itself, but a list of registered RCTs. Once these RCTs are published, and an independent party reviews the results or performs a systematic review that includes these studies, (and publishes the review), this information is acceptable on Wikipedia. Do you want to visit WP:MEDRS and then try again? The cheat sheet that I linked contains some helpful advice for navigating writing for Wikipedia. I would be happy to review your next few edits as well before they go "live". Note: I will be away from the internet July 1-9th :) Thanks again for reaching out. JenOttawa (talk) 03:22, 27 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Hi Viv. I'm also a board member of WikiProject Medicine (as well as WikiMedia UK) and Ewan suggested that I dropped you a note saying that I'd also be happy to help out if you're unsure about anything. It's often confusing for anybody who has some familiarity with editing Wikipedia to find that the sources that seem fine are rejected by other editors when they edit a medical article. It's partly because our medical articles are used by so many people as a source of medical information that we have to ensure we only provide the very best information, and partly because the field of medicine has so much research that some results will turn out to be wrong by sheer statistical chance. However, because there are so many sources on most medical topics, we can afford to be stricter with the sources we are willing to accept. A researcher like yourself will be used to analysing the sources you use, but we can't assume that all of our pseudonymous editors will be able to do that. For that reason, we have decided by consensus to only use sources that come from a good secondary source (reviews, meta-analyses, etc.) when writing about any biomedical claim to support that claim. That means when you wrote "ashwagandha root extract was safe and effective ..." and sourced it to a primary RCT, 28829155, it was inevitable that somebody would challenge it. I'm sorry you had that bad experience, and I hope it won't put you off contributing in future. If it's any help, I often use Trip medical database that can quickly show me whether secondary evidence exists for a particular topic. I checked for "ashwagandha root" and it found 25 primary research articles, but no secondary ones, sorry. Checking PubMed for reviews sometimes turns up useful sources as well. Please feel free to ask me if you need help; you can attract my attention by including  on any talk page (and don't forget to sign your post with four tides   or it won't work). All the best, --RexxS (talk) 15:04, 2 July 2018 (UTC)
 * Thank you for the note. I am sorry that I missed it earlier. I am happy to help you navigate WP:MEDRS and understand what happened in this particular edit. When adding references to Wikipedia, the guideline WP:MEDRS requires that all citations are third-party published secondary sources (filtered information, not directly from the source). You were correct that a Cochrane Review is an appropriate source. Paraphrased Cochrane conclusions are often very helpful on Wikipedia pages to improve the evidence base of the article. The source you used was not the Cochrane Review itself, but a list of registered RCTs. Once these RCTs are published, and an independent party reviews the results or performs a systematic review that includes these studies, (and publishes the review), this information is acceptable on Wikipedia. Do you want to visit WP:MEDRS and then try again? The cheat sheet that I linked contains some helpful advice for navigating writing for Wikipedia. I would be happy to review your next few edits as well before they go "live". Note: I will be away from the internet July 1-9th :) Thanks again for reaching out. JenOttawa (talk) 03:22, 27 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Hi Viv. I'm also a board member of WikiProject Medicine (as well as WikiMedia UK) and Ewan suggested that I dropped you a note saying that I'd also be happy to help out if you're unsure about anything. It's often confusing for anybody who has some familiarity with editing Wikipedia to find that the sources that seem fine are rejected by other editors when they edit a medical article. It's partly because our medical articles are used by so many people as a source of medical information that we have to ensure we only provide the very best information, and partly because the field of medicine has so much research that some results will turn out to be wrong by sheer statistical chance. However, because there are so many sources on most medical topics, we can afford to be stricter with the sources we are willing to accept. A researcher like yourself will be used to analysing the sources you use, but we can't assume that all of our pseudonymous editors will be able to do that. For that reason, we have decided by consensus to only use sources that come from a good secondary source (reviews, meta-analyses, etc.) when writing about any biomedical claim to support that claim. That means when you wrote "ashwagandha root extract was safe and effective ..." and sourced it to a primary RCT, 28829155, it was inevitable that somebody would challenge it. I'm sorry you had that bad experience, and I hope it won't put you off contributing in future. If it's any help, I often use Trip medical database that can quickly show me whether secondary evidence exists for a particular topic. I checked for "ashwagandha root" and it found 25 primary research articles, but no secondary ones, sorry. Checking PubMed for reviews sometimes turns up useful sources as well. Please feel free to ask me if you need help; you can attract my attention by including  on any talk page (and don't forget to sign your post with four tides   or it won't work). All the best, --RexxS (talk) 15:04, 2 July 2018 (UTC)
 * Hi Viv. I'm also a board member of WikiProject Medicine (as well as WikiMedia UK) and Ewan suggested that I dropped you a note saying that I'd also be happy to help out if you're unsure about anything. It's often confusing for anybody who has some familiarity with editing Wikipedia to find that the sources that seem fine are rejected by other editors when they edit a medical article. It's partly because our medical articles are used by so many people as a source of medical information that we have to ensure we only provide the very best information, and partly because the field of medicine has so much research that some results will turn out to be wrong by sheer statistical chance. However, because there are so many sources on most medical topics, we can afford to be stricter with the sources we are willing to accept. A researcher like yourself will be used to analysing the sources you use, but we can't assume that all of our pseudonymous editors will be able to do that. For that reason, we have decided by consensus to only use sources that come from a good secondary source (reviews, meta-analyses, etc.) when writing about any biomedical claim to support that claim. That means when you wrote "ashwagandha root extract was safe and effective ..." and sourced it to a primary RCT, 28829155, it was inevitable that somebody would challenge it. I'm sorry you had that bad experience, and I hope it won't put you off contributing in future. If it's any help, I often use Trip medical database that can quickly show me whether secondary evidence exists for a particular topic. I checked for "ashwagandha root" and it found 25 primary research articles, but no secondary ones, sorry. Checking PubMed for reviews sometimes turns up useful sources as well. Please feel free to ask me if you need help; you can attract my attention by including  on any talk page (and don't forget to sign your post with four tides   or it won't work). All the best, --RexxS (talk) 15:04, 2 July 2018 (UTC)

July 2018
Please do not add or change content, as you did at Rosemary, without citing a reliable source. Please review the guidelines at Citing sources and take this opportunity to add references to the article. ''Lab studies are preliminary research or WP:PRIMARY. The properties you discussed are unlikely to apply to in vivo physiology, which is why - for an encyclopedia - we do not report research in progress, but rather need reviews of high-quality clinical research; see WP:MEDASSESS. Thanks. '' Zefr (talk) 12:41, 13 July 2018 (UTC)

I am really not understanding why you do not permit quality peer-reviewed evidence. This is on par with other citations on that page and on dozens of wikipedia pages. I'm finding this really frustrating. For an open community I am not enjoying the spirit. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.242.238.242 (talk) 13:06, 13 July 2018 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a journal where reviewing preliminary lab research may be warranted in a discussion to give context; WP:NOTJOURNAL, #6-8. Peer-review is assumed for good-quality evidence, but in a discussion of phytochemicals - which have no established in vivo properties except for nutrients - any implication of anti-disease activity has to be supported by WP:MEDRS. Here's a tutorial to clarify further. --Zefr (talk) 13:16, 13 July 2018 (UTC)

Plus the reference before was an in vitro study. Plus why are blog articles allowed as evidence - some of which on that page are crummy?

Please do not add or change content, as you did at Rosemary, without citing a reliable source. Please review the guidelines at Citing sources and take this opportunity to add references to the article. please read WP:MEDRS Zefr (talk) 18:39, 13 July 2018 (UTC)