Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Medicine/Assessment

Getting a bot to tag articles
The Earwig has very kindly set User:EarwigBot to tagging biographies with the yes parameter for us, and picking up a few of the simpler quality assessments at the same time. I think that we could get this done every now and again, especially if we point back to this talk-page discussion, which contains the magic code for the bot. Once the code exists, it's easy to set up the bot. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:31, 16 January 2017 (UTC)

Change "Importance" to "Popularity" or something else
I'm a physician who has just started thinking about editing medicine wikipedia articles --

It's concerning to me that real, serious conditions that affect people in large ways, but are less frequent than others, are labeled "low importance" -- I don't think it's the right term, if it's a measure of how many general-purpose readers are going to be interested in a particular topic.

How about "low popularity"? Or some other term?

I'm thinking about figuring out how to change this, unless there's some reason to keep it that I don't know about. It's just not the right term. — Preceding unsigned comment added by SlamNo7 (talk • contribs) 04:44, 31 January 2017 (UTC)


 * This is the accepted term across Wikipedia. Will be pretty hard to change. From a broader perspective, importance and popularity are interchangeable concepts. JFW &#124; T@lk  21:01, 31 January 2017 (UTC)


 * OK, I guess I can say that I totally hear what you're saying and understand what you mean about the broader perspective ... at the same time, I'm thinking about a patient googling the condition that they are disabled by and finding out that it's not important [not knowing what it means across wikipedia] :/ That being said, point taken -- thank you for the message...
 * , the other possible name is priority, which is much more accurate. But changing it would require editing tens of thousands of pages, so we didn't.  WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:51, 22 March 2017 (UTC)

WikiProject Medicine and importance ratings
Hello everyone! I'm currently working on a project with Aaron Halfaker where we are studying how to do automated classification of article importance. In case you're wondering who I am and why I'm the one working on this, as part of my PhD I studied using machine learning to predict article quality and helped develop parts of ORES to enable it to make article quality predictions. We've previously collaborated with User:WhatamIdoing and created lists of articles that are good candidates for quality rating reassessment (here is an older one on meta), most recently this list from about a month ago.

We are interested in making article importance predictions and as our project page mentions we are looking into doing this both on a high level (e.g. the entire English Wikipedia) as well as for specific WikiProjects. I chose WikiProject Medicine as a test case because of our collaborations and because this is an active and well-run project.

I've recently trained a machine learner to make importance predictions for WikiProject Medicine's articles with a Top-, High-, Mid-, or Low-importance rating. We feed the machine learner three measures for each article: daily average number of views over the past four weeks, number of links pointing to the article, and the proportion of links pointing to the article that come from other articles within WikiProject Medicine. Using these measures we are able to correctly predict the importance rating of 63.6% of all articles in our dataset (18,654 of 29,320 articles).

We are interested in improving our classifier. Some of that improvement might come from adding sources of information to our model. We started out with a simple model partly to learn how it performs, but also because they are often easier to explain. What additional information we might use is not yet decided, if you have ideas (e.g. "these important medical topics have a specific property in Wikidata") I'd be happy to hear about them.

I'd also like to discuss what "importance" means in the context of WikiProject Medicine and how importance ratings are applied to the project's articles. If we take a look at the importance scale, our idea of using popularity and number of links pointing to an article appears to map fairly well onto that scale. Yet, when we use our model to predict importance we get some interesting examples of where the prediction differs from the actual rating.

Four Top-importance articles are predicted to be Mid-importance:


 * Major trauma
 * Near-sightedness
 * Refractive error
 * Tooth decay

82 High-importance articles are predicted to be Low-importance. In the interest of space I won't list them all, here are four examples:


 * 1852–60 cholera pandemic
 * 1881–96 cholera pandemic
 * Google Flu Trends
 * Hepatitis C and HIV coinfection

306 Mid-importance articles are predicted to be Top-importance. Again I won't list them all, here are four examples of these:


 * Abortion
 * Crohn's disease
 * Glucagon
 * Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act

1,002 Low-importance articles are predicted to be High-importance. Here are four examples:


 * Ayurveda
 * JAMA (journal)
 * MIND diet
 * UpToDate

Lastly, 60 Low-importance articles are predicted to be Top-importance. Four of those are:


 * Alexander Fleming
 * Euphoria
 * Medicare (United States)
 * Stem cell

Generally, an article that is predicted to be Mid-/Low-importance is not very popular and has few other articles pointing to it. Articles that are predicted as High-/Top importance are the opposite. Since I am not a medical professional I don't see me as qualified to judge whether an article's importance rating is correct (e.g. before I learned that our model predicts Chukwuedu Nwokolo to be Low-importance I had no idea who he was, but from reading the article he seems rather important). Therefore I won't make strong statements about whether I think our classifier is on the right track. I would, however, love to have a discussion about it! Curious to learn what other members of WikiProject Medicine think, please pitch in with your thoughts and comments! Regards, Nettrom (talk) 21:37, 20 March 2017 (UTC)


 * Nettrom, you are awesome. We have a few quirks in our rating system.  Of those, the most important from your POV are that people, books, laws, journals, organizations, etc. are all low-importance.  But excluding those quirks, this is a gold mine.  Some of them might be not quite where we'd place it (e.g., you predict Top, we choose High), but this is incredibly helpful.  Thank you.
 * Are you familiar with the old WP:1.0 project? I think that group is largely inactive, but there's been some talk about sideloading a subset of Wikipedia, and your approach might make a good way to do that.
 * User:Doc James, is anyone else active in article assessment work these days? WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:49, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
 * I am of course interested in article assessment.
 * With respect to "tooth decay" if affects 2.43 billion people making it a big deal. Refractive errors affect 1 to 2 billion and nearsightedness 1.5 billion.
 * Major trauma is the 5th and 7th leading causes of death globally.
 * Agree abortion should be top importance and adjusted it to such.
 * Agree that the 4 high importance should be low.
 * Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is local in scope (ie US importance) thus it is not top importance.
 * Alt med, journals, diets, people, and local medical politics are low importance with respect to WPMED. Euphoria is an emotion which with respect to clinical medicine is of low importance. Doc James  (talk · contribs · email) 01:54, 22 March 2017 (UTC)


 * Thank you so much for commenting, this is really helpful feedback! Apologies for not reading the importance scale description more closely, I might have picked up the various categories of Low-importance if I did. I'll see if I can incorporate that kind of information into our model. BTW, I've got a query that lists 134 candidates for reassessment, and I'll try to go through those.


 * The notes on how many people are affected by various diseases is very helpful, thanks! We started out by just using article views in our model, and I'm wondering if that results in certain medical issues being ranked low because people aren't reading about it on Wikipedia. That might also mean that our model has a bias towards Western/English-speaking information-seeking behaviour. If we could incorporate information about how many people are affected our model would probably improve greatly. Is that kind of information (readily) available somewhere?


 * I am somewhat familiar with the WP 1.0 project and have read through their archives trying to figure out how exactly they calculated importance, I know at some point they developed a formula and used a bot to label articles. If my memory is correct, popularity and number of links pointing to an article where also used there (in addition to other things), but their approach was also slightly different than we do. They calculated a score and then used those to categorise, whereas we take WikiProject categories and train a machine learner to figure out the calculation. Either way, we're both looking to determine roughly the same thing. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 19:49, 23 March 2017 (UTC)
 * The 1.0 group needed to come up with a model that was "probably matters", whereas I only need a model that gives me "probably matters to my particular group". Leonardo da Vinci should be a top- or high-importance article overall, but I don't happen to care about it.
 * There was some talk of putting disease prevalence data onto Wikidata, but I don't know the status of that project. Lane, do you remember that?  Did anything come of it?  WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:01, 23 March 2017 (UTC)
 * This is a dead trail - I have nothing to add. There was a certain pharma company in about 2013 who was asking various Wikipedians about automatically generating prevalence articles in English Wikipedia (like for example, "Diabetes in Scotland", with census-style information on prevalence and treatment and a dump of seemingly relevant citations). That never went anywhere, but they were quite serious about funding something if only it could be predicted that the community would accept it.
 * I do not recall anyone proposing a serious project to post any prevalence database to Wikidata. I might have happened and maybe I forgot.  Blue Rasberry   (talk)  22:10, 23 March 2017 (UTC)
 * The 1.0 group was a 2003 chat which made some arbitrary decisions that got adopted but never critically examined. The ratings system is well loved but it could change. I appreciate that you are starting from what is currently accepted, and I think that the importance scale generally works, but with you as a professional looking at this if you have ideas for big changes then please present them as alternative ways of doing this. Two issues above- the Affordable Care Act has an intimate connection with perhaps 500 billion dollars annually but kind of out of scope here, and da Vinci is a biography of someone who influenced cultural aspects of medicine. Wikipedia in general has problems with ranking intersections of topics. Another commonly cited example is that Hitler worked as an artist, so his name appeared in lists of high-traffic art-related articles. Ideally, we would be able to detect when something is part of a set but out of scope for what people expect to see. If you can even articulate the limitations you see in the current system then that would be a great outcome.  Blue Rasberry   (talk)  22:26, 23 March 2017 (UTC)
 * A number of us are working on an infobox update. You can see an example here gout. Frequency is in the infobox as is mortality. Once 500 or so infoboxes are updated to this the plan was to put it on Wikidata by bot. The update is on my list of "things to do"
 * Wikipedia of course contain data on frequency of diseases. Usually this is found in the last paragraph of the lead and the epidemiology section of the body. Doc James  (talk · contribs · email) 00:16, 24 March 2017 (UTC)


 * Thanks again for your comments! I thought I'd respond here too because the issue with intersections is something I've been thinking about and will look further into. I've already bumped into it in several different ways. When it comes to WP:MED and our prediction models we're mainly interested in the articles that default to Low-importance. One way to handle those is to add information to the model, but I'm also wondering if these articles are arguing for WP:MED's importance scale getting an additional category (or the articles not being in scope of WP:MED, but I'm not sure that's a useful path for the discussion to take). Something along the lines of "we'd like to keep an eye on this article, but it's not within our main interest area so it's not actually important." I know some projects added a "bottom" importance to their scale, but this seems different, because to me giving these articles an importance rating has a different meaning (this is also the problem with rating them Low-importance, it overloads the meaning of what "Low-importance" is). As you can see, I don't have a clear idea of how to proceed, but I'll keep thinking about it, and please don't hesitate to pitch in with your thoughts! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:39, 28 March 2017 (UTC)
 * I can say more about the problem but I am not sure how to proceed. One issue which has been challenging to address is how to sort the breaking of big topics, like medicine, into subtopics. The infrastructure currently used in Wikipedia is to name "task forces" as sub-WikiProjects in WikiProject talk page templates. For medicine, a list of task forces is at WikiProject_Medicine/Task_forces. As you say, there are some concepts which get tagged as "low importance" in the main category but are still very important from a subcategory's perspective, like for example da Vinci or the Affordable Care Act. Those might be high importance in the "Medicine - Society and Culture" task force. Other major concepts in medicine, like anything to do with pharmacy, might also be low ranking in medicine but high ranking in pharmacy, which also makes for a confusing separation. For any given WikiProject there could be lots of distinctions and on the back end of things there is no sorting mechanism. Also - just because things are the way they are, I am not convinced that this is the way people want things to be. If there were options for more granularity in sorting and ranking articles, then I think that more people could make more useful subcategorizations. However, I also think that a conflicting motivation is that lots of people wish to avoid creating intersections of categories, and instead I think there is demand for having an automated tool that combines two categories. Like for example, instead there being a "medicine - society and culture" project, I think there should be a "medicine" tag and a "society and culture" tag, with the option for a person to combine them. No want wants for their to be a subproject for "Medicine - United States", "Medicine - anatomy", "Medicine - history", and yet with the current system setting up these kinds of single-use intersections is the only way possible for generating lists of articles categorized within a specific scope. A consequence of this is, for example, that WikiProject Medicine has never had any significant participation by anyone developing articles on the culture of medicine, which I think is more a consequence of the design of the current system than what the community here intends. Lots of people could be interested in low-priority articles if only they could be tagged as important for a certain purpose.  Blue Rasberry   (talk)  18:59, 28 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Thought I'd also follow up here and mention that I went through this work list of articles that I mentioned above. The list contains articles that might be about individuals and not rated Low-importance. All those that are about individuals had their rating updated to Low-importance. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:39, 28 March 2017 (UTC)
 * User:Nettrom If only the items in that list were clickable and I would fix them. Can you make them clickable? Doc James  (talk · contribs · email) 19:44, 28 March 2017 (UTC)

Hi again everyone! First off, thanks for the helpful feedback I got earlier! In the time since I was last active in this discussion, I have been working on identifying the various categories of articles within the scope of WikiProject Medicine that ought to be Low-importance (e.g. individuals and scientific journals). Knowing those categories we can filter those articles out, which then allows us to build a model on the articles we're more interested in.

I wrote a program that uses Wikidata to discover which categories contains at least three articles, of which a majority of them are Low-importance. You can find the the entire list in my log on meta, if you're curious. Using that list of categories, I then identified all articles in my WikiProject Medicine dataset that are in these categories but not rated as Low-importance. There were only 126 such articles, and I created a table of them here: User:SuggestBot/Suggestions for WikiProject Medicine

I'm unsure whether I've identified good categories of articles that should be Low-importance, and would be happy to correct any mistaken ones. Once I know the list is good, I'll be able to generate some (hopefully) more interesting lists of candidate articles for importance reassessment. Thanks again for the feedback and interest in this project! Pinging WhatamIdoing,  Blue Rasberry , and  Doc James  as well. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 17:09, 11 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Looking at most of those and they should be recategorized as low importance IMO. Doc James  (talk · contribs · email) 17:15, 11 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Low and yes for most of them. In practice, society is a way to find things that ought to be Low (but that's terribly WPMED-specific when you're building a general tool).  WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:29, 12 April 2017 (UTC)


 * Yeah, that's why I was going the way through Wikidata as that should allows us to do this in general for any other WikiProject where it's relevant, and we should also be able to identify larger categories (e.g. "scientific journal" and "book" are both subclasses of "publication"). I am not certain it will solve the issue of overlap between WikiProjects and/or task forces, but it might help us enough to get useful results.


 * Please do let me know if there are issues with the list I have. I noticed for instance that the CDC is on there because it's a government agency, but its High-importance rating seems reasonable to me given its relevance to medicine. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:46, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

Hi again everyone! Over the past week, I've worked on further improving our model and now have a dataset of predictions to share with you. I gathered about one hundred articles where the model predicts an importance rating that is different from what it currently has. Would love to know more about how well we're doing, both in terms of whether our predictions are accurate, and if they are useful. If the prediction for a specific article seems off, please do let me know and I'll look up the statistics. And please let me know if you have questions about any of this, I'd be happy to help! You can find the list of articles as the first table on this page: User:SuggestBot/Suggestions for WikiProject Medicine

Also: pinging Aaron since he requested it. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 20:52, 20 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Albinism is uncommon. Melanin is not terribly important when it comes to medicine. Not sure why strychnine is suggested for top? Hormone would be top importance for WP:MCB but not really use. TCM would be top for altmed but not use.
 * Changed breastfeeding to top. Yellow fever is rare in most of the world. As is typhoid fever and cholera. Hurler syndrome affects 1 in 100,000 people thus not of high importance. Vasodilation is not a disease. Doc James  (talk · contribs · email) 02:43, 21 April 2017 (UTC)


 * Wpmed-view-link-percentile.png
 * Thanks for the feedback, Doc James, I greatly appreciate it! Based on your comments, I think it's clear that we're seeing a difference between how WikiProject Medicine prioritizes topics, and the extent to which readers are accessing these pages and how many other pages link to them. It is most likely also partly a result of the low number and homogeneity of Top-importance articles in WP:MED when it comes to the two main predictors we use (percentile of views and inlinks), ref the scatterplots on the right. All of the articles with Top-importance predictions you mention have a relatively high number of views, the lowest is Vasodilation with 961 views/day (over the past four weeks) which puts it in the 94th percentile. When it comes to inlinks, the lowest is Melanin with 804, putting it in the 97th percentile. Strychnine has 1,326 views/day (96th percentile) and 960 inlinks (97th percentile). Hurler syndrome is lower in both measures, 410 views/day (87th percentile) and 66 inlinks (61st percentile), which our model then predicts as High-importance.


 * Another interpretation is that this is challenging because of the wide variety of these measurements for Low- and Mid-importance articles. As the graph shows, these span the complete range. If Low- and Mid-importance articles were less likely to have a high number of views and/or inlinks, the boundaries for the importance ratings would be clearer, and the model would behave accordingly. While the main goal of this research is to build accurate models, I think we're also seeing some of the limitations of the underlying data.


 * Pinging  Blue Rasberry   and WhatamIdoing as well, since we've all been discussing this. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 17:15, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

Remember how we describe articles of top importance is "Subject is extremely important, even crucial, to medicine. Strong interest from non-professionals around the world. Usually a large subject with many associated sub-articles. Less than 1% of medicine-related articles achieve this rating." The bit in bold is key. Diseases that affect a few people or are only common in a few areas is not sufficient. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 17:23, 24 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Nettrom, have you talked to User:Walkerma about this project? He knows a lot about the 1.0 assessment system, and is probably your best contact for finding good general ratings (i.e., things not specific to my friends at WP:MED).  WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:01, 26 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Ah no, I have not gotten in touch with them, but that is a great idea, thanks for bringing their name up! Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 21:02, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

Medications
I think that we need to define clearly whether drug related articles (belonging to WikiProject Pharmacology) should be tagged under WP:MED as well, and if so, in which specific cases. Clinical parameters like Medical uses, Contraindications, Adverse effects, Drug interactions or Mechanism of action are parameters that are supposed to be a part of practically any drug related article. But does that warrant an inclusion under WP:MED as well? I do not think so while would like to differ. I would like to know what others have to say in this regard. In any case, it should be clearly defined and added to the guidelines.  D ip ta ns hu Talk 18:10, 27 March 2017 (UTC)
 * I do not have a strong position one way or the other. Our guideline says include them so I do. We should only include medications that have been once used in clinical practice if we include them. Should not include chemicals that have never been used clinically. Doc James  (talk · contribs · email) 18:16, 27 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Since we include other treatments such as surgery within WPMED we may as well keep including medications. Doc James  (talk · contribs · email) 18:20, 27 March 2017 (UTC)
 * I think that since we do not have WikiProject Surgery, we include surgical topics under WikiProject Medicine. Had WikiProject Surgery existed, possibly we would not have also tagged them under WikiProject Medicine.
 * I think that the guidelines can be defined. We can include a field  under WikiProject Pharmacology. Rather than including the   as norm (since drugs are essentially meant to be for medical use), it would perhaps be more meaningful to add   for ones that need to be transcluded from the list of medicines. This would bring a greater portion of WikiProject Pharmacology under the purview of WikiProject Medicine.
 * We can additionally introduce fields like company and alike under WikiProject Pharmacology.  D ip ta ns hu Talk 18:48, 27 March 2017 (UTC)
 * I don't feel like you understand this system. No articles are under any group's purview.  WikiProjects don't own articles.
 * The only thing that a WikiProject gets to do is to make a list of which articles they want to work on. The method of making the list (for historical reasons) is to add a template to the article's talk page.  The group at WPMED has always wanted to work on articles about medical treatments (surgery, medications, and otherwise).  Therefore, all such articles have always been put on the WPMED list.  The group doesn't want to work on hospitals, so we don't put those on our list.  The fact that there are two other groups interested in improving articles about hospitals is irrelevant:  we don't want to be bothered with them, so we aren't.
 * There is absolutely nothing about WPMED making its list that interferes with any other group making its own list. WPMED's interest (or lack thereof) in an article does not change which content or style guidelines apply to the article's contents; it does not change what the article says (or should say); it does not change who gets to edit it or what they can put in the article.  WPPHARM should make its own list without noticing or caring what any other groups put on their lists.  WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:53, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

For organizational purposes, I think it would be better to only list them under pharmacology, I don't see any benefit from tagging them under both projects. --WS (talk) 03:29, 28 March 2017 (UTC)
 * What exactly are you trying to organize?
 * A WikiProject's list of pages that they want to work on is not a substitute for properly categorizing articles. If the folks at WPMED want to work on these articles – or if they want to work on Photoshop or iPhone or anything else – then they should tag them.  It doesn't actually matter whether any other group wants to work on them.  WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:43, 13 April 2017 (UTC)
 * WhatamIdoing: I get your point and understand it. The way I see it is that WikiProjects organize articles the participants are likely to be willing to work on. In my view it does form a broad categorization. But at the same time, possibly there is no reason to group articles in two places.
 * I was trying to look up and develop some articles related to physicians today. I found that there are a significant number of them tagged under WPMED and a significant number of others that merely have a WP:Biography tag with or without s&a workgroup allocated to them. I found that rather attaching Category:xth century physician to them serves a better purpose of helping the interested users to find the articles.
 * In a nutshell, I see WikiProjects as a the broadest levels of categorization in a subject. There is no reason to make the categorizations overlapping. Not that the borders need to be crisp but discrete categorization helps.
 * At least that is what I feel.  D ip ta ns hu  &#128172; 15:28, 15 April 2017 (UTC)
 * WikiProject tagging cannot help readers, because almost no readers look at talk pages. About 45% of the English Wikipedia's readers are using the mobile website (including some readers who are on desktop computers).  The most popular article for WPMED, for example, is averaging 4300 page views per day, and just two (2) page views for the talk page.
 * The only way to get non-overlapping categorization is to tell groups of editors that they may not share interests. This is not fair or reasonable to editors.
 * Discrete, non-overlapping categorization will produce stupid results in the case of cross-disciplinary subjects, e.g., military medicine (is that MILHIST or WPMED? Your proposed system only permits one) or history of medicine (is that WPMED or WPHIST?).
 * WikiProject tagging (as you discovered) is almost always incomplete. There are also a huge number of articles that aren't tagged for any WikiProject.
 * In short, it doesn't work that way, and it won't work that way. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:58, 15 April 2017 (UTC)
 * The tagging is intended to help in the collaborative work. Since Wikipedia is not the result of work of one individual, there are always going to be things that are yet to be done. Users who see a gap add tags so that other users can take it up from there. The scope of interest of editors is not limited by WikiProjects. I myself edit pages for a varied number of topics. I understand your point and have no intention to argue. I just want to say that unnecessary overlap is pointless. The scope of military history and medicine are significantly different but that is not the case with pharmacology and medicine. Users of WPMED essentially know what they would find in WP:Pharmacology. There is no component of surprise in it. They even know which categories to look into if they are to find and edit a particular topic. So, I doubt if overlap in pharmacology articles really makes sense.  D ip ta ns hu  &#128172; 18:20, 15 April 2017 (UTC)
 * As I think about this I think keeping medications within WPMED is a good idea. Stuff that is not a medication in use yet should not be part of WPMED. Doc James  (talk · contribs · email) 23:23, 15 April 2017 (UTC)
 * James: Would you kindly let me know what sort of topics (articles other than that of people or companies) do you suppose WP:Pharmacology contains that are not medicinal in nature? Well you could argue that topics related to pharmacodynamics and phamacokinetics are unnecessary for us. But I believe most of pharmacological agents are used as medicines and hence are under purview of WP:MED. Would it not be an unnecessary double labelling?  D ip ta ns hu  &#128172; 13:35, 16 April 2017 (UTC)
 * WPPHARM contains a lot of early research chemicals that are not yet medications. Doc James  (talk · contribs · email) 16:18, 16 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Well in that case don't you think that punching these into a category and transcluding it should suffice to include the whole of WP:Pharmacology under the purview of WP:Medicine?  D ip ta ns hu  &#128172; 16:26, 16 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Not sure what you mean? Doc James  (talk · contribs · email) 18:08, 16 April 2017 (UTC)
 * If we add a category like Category:early research chemicals to the articles (similarly for companies, pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics etc. stuff which too can be grouped under similar categories) and treat that as a zone that we (from WP:MED) are not interested in, that should suffice to include whole of WP:Pharmacology under the purview of WP:Medicine. What do you say?  D ip ta ns hu  &#128172; 18:14, 16 April 2017 (UTC)
 * We achieve the same thing by what we do now. Doc James  (talk · contribs · email) 19:04, 16 April 2017 (UTC)
 * You are mandating an unnecessary overlap of both the WikiProjects for major part of WP:Pharmacology barring the few categories of transclusion.  D ip ta ns hu  &#128172; 19:08, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

The current state was not my doing. I am simply okay with the status quo. I am not barring a change but you do need to get consensus. I am not entirely clear on how your suggestion would work but it looks like it would take massive amount of work to carry out.

There is nothing wrong with overlap. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 00:26, 17 April 2017 (UTC)
 * My suggestion intended to avoid unnecessary work. Most of the categories should be already in place, and if not, they need to be placed anyway. Most of the drugs are tagged with WP:Pharmacology and not WP:MED. The existing overlap is only in a minority of the pages. My suggestion keeps it in consideration and avoids the unnecessary overwork of adding WP:MED to medicine (drug) related pages.  D ip ta ns hu  &#128172; 02:55, 17 April 2017 (UTC)
 * I strongly agree that drugs should be tagged with the med wikiproject. Many pages are in multiple wikiprojects so not an issue at all. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 01:09, 17 April 2017 (UTC)
 * It might be worth noting that the Category:WikiProject Pharmacology articles has 10,721 articles and Category:All WikiProject Medicine articles has 34,475 articles. and 2002 articles are tagged in both categories.  D ip ta ns hu  &#128172; 14:20, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
 * I feel that there is a strong reason to define guidelines about co-tagging of articles under WP:MED and WP:Pharmacology. Some people like to think that drugs that are in pre-clinical stage are not being tagged under WP:MED. Let me mention that ERA-45, ERA-63, ERB-26, ERB-79 etc. are some articles that are tagged under WP:MED in spite of the molecules being in pre-clinical trial stage. In other words, the domains remain stupidly vague and overlapping for no reason. I have already pointed out that the number of articles tagged with both are relatively few in comparison to the ones tagged only with WP:Pharmacology.  D ip ta ns hu  &#128172; 11:56, 29 May 2017 (UTC)
 * Have removed those four. Yes the guidelines are not consistently applied. Doc James  (talk · contribs · email) 15:19, 30 May 2017 (UTC)
 * Removal of a few identified pages is not the issue. Even I could have done it. The number of (articles on) experimental drugs or (articles on) those in pre-clinical stage is relatively few. Barring those few (and a few others like pharma companies, pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics stuff) there is prospect of overlap of basically the entire WP:Pharmacology with WP:Medicine. On the other hand, the number of articles actually tagged under both is relatively less. So, why do we not define a guideline that articles tagged under WP:Pharmacology need not be separately tagged with WP:Medicine? If that happens, WPMED users who want to edit pharmacology articles can easily avoid the nominal stuff that they themselves are not interested in.  D ip ta ns hu  &#128172; 19:07, 30 May 2017 (UTC)
 * I do not support such a change. I am not sure what the benefit? Doc James  (talk · contribs · email) 19:15, 30 May 2017 (UTC)
 * Just to add: Category:Abandoned drugs is for drugs that never made it to market, and Category:Withdrawn drugs is for drugs taken off the market, after they reached the market. I have found a huge number of articles that should have been tagged with one of the two categories but have not been. I am in the process of tagging them. I also found that many of those articles were tagged with WP:MED. I am working to remove those. I hope that transcluding these two categories the entire segment under WP:Pharmacology would be of interest to people interested in WP:Medicine.  D ip ta ns hu  &#128172; 06:38, 19 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Sounds good. Doc James  (talk · contribs · email) 22:29, 21 June 2017 (UTC)

2020 requests
We haven't historically archived old requests, but maybe I'll start copying them to this page, and then they can be archived like any other discussion. Here's the first batch. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:24, 29 December 2022 (UTC)


 * Ketosis significant update including editing of citations as article was flagged as having too many primary sources Pattkait (talk) 17:41, 10 October 2019 (UTC)
 * @Pattkait, I've re-assessed it as B-class. Thank you. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:20, 2 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Ketoacidosis recently updated Pattkait (talk) 17:41, 10 October 2019 (UTC)
 * ✅, C class WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:30, 2 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Intermittent fasting - significant updates, notably adding AHA guidelines + illustrations + other high quality sources added. Currently rated start. --Signimu (talk) 17:48, 17 October 2019 (UTC)
 * ✅, B class. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:34, 2 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Postpartum blues - significant updates to article and references. Had not been previously rated on WikiProject Medicine. Mlshulk (talk) 14:59, 18 October 2019 (UTC)
 * ✅, C class. Thank you. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:37, 2 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Very-low-calorie diet - entire revision, adding guidelines and systematic reviews on RCTs refs + illustration. Not previously rated by any project. --Signimu (talk) 15:10, 19 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Someone already rated it as C class. Signimu, if you still have an interest in this, could you do a quick search for a few more recent sources?  In an ideal world, we wouldn't use sources from the 20th century for any type of Biomedical information. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:40, 2 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Ramon Guiteras: Significant expansion, especially to references. Currently rated as "Stub" quality, I think it now merits a "Start" or possibly a "C", but not higher.  (Anyone want to take over developing it?) —DocWatson42 (talk) 07:06, 26 March 2020 (UTC)
 * DocWatson42, the current version contains six (very amply cited) sentences. Less than 10 sentences is one rule of thumb for identifying stubs. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:41, 2 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Okay. I hadn't checked or been aware of the rule.  Thank you.  (My question about someone else working on it still stands—I'm more of a copy editor than a writer.) —DocWatson42 (talk) 02:00, 3 September 2020 (UTC)
 * It's a "rule of thumb", not a hard requirement. This page is not watched by very many people.  I'm not sure where to find someone who might be interested, but I'll post it on a page or two, and maybe we'll find someone. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:05, 3 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Cardiopulmonary bypass - article expanded, references updated, illustration added. DLEMERGEBM (talk) 14:38, 14 April 2020 (UTC)
 * ✅, B class. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:43, 2 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Neutralizing antibody - article expanded and merged with Neutralisation (immunology) article. The number of page views of this article has increased significantly in the last month (possibly because neutralising antibodies are discussed as a treatment option of COVID-19). It might be good to increase the article's importance rating. Huhny (talk) 06:44, 28 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Someone has rated it as B-class, which is the highest rating possible through this process. I've updated the priority rating to Mid, since we're working on this more often. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:45, 2 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Chronic fatigue syndrome significant recent changes in the field are not being reflecting, eg CDC and Dutch Health Council abandoning previous treatments CBT and GET which dominate the page, PACE trial 2016 data release showing null effect. Controversial topic missing most medical advances since 2015. Separate Controversies related to chronic fatigue syndrome page and treatment pages also exists. Please consider regrade to C and increase priority. Amousey (talk) 15:31, 26 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Someone has rated the article as B-class, which is the highest quality class possible through this process. The current priority is not unreasonable, and changing it will not have any practical effect. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:46, 2 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Dermatofibrosarcoma protuberans Article expanded, references updated WikiTegan (talk) 09:10, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
 * WikiTegan, thanks for your work. You might find some ideas for further expansion in Manual of Style/Medicine-related articles.  This article is correctly rated as C-class. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:48, 2 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Health Bureau - New article. Not sure on including his here. Ominae (talk) 11:34, 19 June 2020 (UTC)
 * ✅, start class. Thank you, Ominae. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:50, 2 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (Macau) - Expanded a slight bit. Ominae (talk) 11:34, 19 June 2020 (UTC)
 * ✅, stub class. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:52, 2 September 2020 (UTC)
 * WHO Surgical Safety Checklist -- Added content and references as part of the Osmosis.org Wikipedia-Editing Course. Currently rated as "Start" quality and has a banner mentioning over-reliance on primary sources; hope to upgrade the quality class and that the added references provide enough information from secondary sources.  Winged Scapula (talk) 20:57, 26 June 2020 (UTC)
 * ✅, B class. Thank you, Winged Scapula. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:55, 2 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Pheochromocytoma - Significant article expansion with almost complete overhaul and revision. Updated references and illustrations Katherine Ilona (talk)
 * Extensive use of primary sources, off-topic content, and problems with WP:NOTADVICE and unencyclopedic tone make the current C-class assessment correct. Sandy Georgia  (Talk)  23:26, 2 September 2020 (UTC)
 * ✅, B class anyway. While the article needs some work, I am confident that this work will not change these rather blunt assessment categories. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:58, 2 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Sensory processing disorder Suggestions from previous review were followed. Unnecesary symptom descriptions, argumentative language and unsourced elements were deleted. Better images were selected. Diagnosis controversy posted on first paragraph as suggested. Chibs007 19:48, 14 July 2020‎ UTC
 * ✅ B/mid. Thanks for your work, Chibs007.  WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:12, 3 September 2020 (UTC)
 * José María Esquerdo newly added Zedgamer9128 (talk) 16:11, 19 October 2020 (UTC)
 * ✅! Promoted to Start class based on the decent prose, the lack of sectioning, and the amount of relevant content. Bibeyjj (talk) 10:49, 17 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Foreign body aspiration Article expanded. Significant edits made including images and references in addition to the new content. Peer review process involved. Thank you in advance for your time! User: Logan6465
 * ✅! Promoted to B class based on the broad coverage, the good prose, the excellent referencing, the perfect sectioning, and a recommendation from Rater. Bibeyjj (talk) 10:49, 17 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Respiratory syncytial virus - Significant article expansion with almost complete rewrite and several new sections. Updated all references and added new images. Page previously focused almost exclusively on bronchiolitis, expanded to be more representative of other disease presentations. Also resolved several expansion requests. ACMetro (talk) 15:27, 20 November 2020 (UTC)
 * ✅! Promoted to B class based on the broad coverage, the excellent prose, the excellent referencing, the perfect sectioning, and a recommendation from Rater. I believe that it may be ready for a Good Article Nomination. Bibeyjj (talk) 10:49, 17 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Neurogenic claudication - Greatly expanded the contents of the article, adding new content in existing sections and also adding new sections and additional information, with referencing for all the added information. The information on the article does seem that it has improved from a stub article dramatically. Thank you in advance for the reassessment. --Anonymous221100 (talk) 01:04, 9 December 2020 (UTC)
 * ✅! Promoted to B class based on the broad coverage, the excellent prose, the excellent referencing, the perfect sectioning, and a recommendation from Rater. I believe that it may be ready for a Good Article Nomination (with some modifications to the long lead section). Bibeyjj (talk) 10:49, 17 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Benadryl - Hi I have expanded this stub by adding new content and images and I would greatly appreciate it if it could get reassessed. Thank you in advance!--Redvelvetcake5 (talk) 07:39, 9 December 2020 (UTC)
 * ✅! Promoted to B class based on the broad coverage of the topic, the good prose, the good referencing, and a recommendation from Rater. Bibeyjj (talk) 10:49, 17 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Genodermatosis Article expanded, I added many new sections, links and images, updated all references and improved the infobox. Thank you in advance for the reassessment!--Mavis67 (talk) 02:10, 11 December 2020 (UTC)
 * ✅! Promoted to C class based on the decent coverage and prose, but not to B based on the structure. Bibeyjj (talk) 10:49, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

2021 requests

 * Hip dislocation Restructured entire article and fleshed out data making it more palatable and practicable for a general audience. Thank you in advance for the reassessment!--Kgnwa (talk) 20:39, 5 April 2021 (UTC)--
 * ✅! Promoted to B class based on the broad coverage, the good prose, the sectioning (albeit in an unusual order), relatively good referencing, and a recommendation from Rater. Bibeyjj (talk) 10:49, 17 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Sickle cell retinopathy Hi I’ve redone the majority of the article using new sources and citing more appropriately. I have also expanded on sections that required more information. Thank you in advance for the reassessment TeHilla98 (talk) 08:20, 22 July 2021 (UTC)
 * ✅ B class. @TeHilla98, thank you for your work. Do you think this article could use more links to other/related articles?  We try not to add a link to the same article more than once or twice in a page, but there's a lot of jargon.  Also, if you're interested in expanding it, I think it might benefit from a section on practical life effects, which we usually put under ==Prognosis== (e.g., it is associated with progressive blindness) or ==Society and culture== (e.g., effects on schools or employment). WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:30, 29 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Pagophagia Hello, this article has been expanded; new sections, cited sources, and more recent information has been added following the Manual of Style for medicine-related articles. Edits were also made to the information that was previously present on the article. Thank you in advance! LCapistrano (talk) 17:27, 3 August 2021 (UTC)
 * ✅ B class. @LCapistrano, thank you for your improvements to that article. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:31, 29 December 2022 (UTC)
 * body image disturbance - Significant updates, article expanded, and not yet rated on WikiProject Medicine. Srobodao84 (talk) 02:02, 6 August 2021 (UTC)
 * This has already achieved GA-class. Congratulations, Srobodao84. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:33, 29 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Intestinal pseudo-obstruction - I have expanded this article and carefully combed through the current research and literature on this topic. I have extracted information from the Treatment's section that was not well supported in literature or should be included within a different article. CheckDO (talk) 19:36, 17 November 2021 (UTC)
 * ✅ B class. @CheckDO, I particularly appreciate your efforts to remove inappropriate information. Thank you.  Do you think there is any reliable information on epidemiology or prognosis? WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:35, 29 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Cyanosis - I have significantly expanded this article, added several pictures representing specific populations, and reviewed/added citations.Joshua Cho28 (talk) 14:59, 19 November 2021 (UTC)
 * ✅ C class. @Joshua Cho28, thank you so much for adding those pictures and practically doubling the number of sources.  If you're interested in expanding it even more some day, then you might find some ideas (not all of which will apply, of course) at Manual of Style/Medicine-related articles. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:57, 1 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Cardiac arrest - Kjlockart and I have significantly worked on this article culminating in changes in structure/organization of the article for better flow, enhanced readability with precise layperson language, and expansion upon sub headings such as Causes/Mechanisms, Prevention and much more. Citations and images were also reviewed and added.Vsnguyen.em (talk) 15:10, 19 November 2021 (UTC)
 * This has previously been assessed as B-class, which is the highest rating available through this process. Good article nominations is the next step, if you want to take it that far. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:59, 1 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Heartburn - this article was originally a start article and has been almost entirely rewritten. Significant additions to the sections on differential diagnoses and treatment have been included. Article has organizational changes promoting readability for the medical professional or patient alike to read. CheckDO (talk) 22:48, 2 December 2021 (UTC)
 * ✅ C class. @CheckDO, if you get a moment, could you look at the ref used in Heartburn?  That paper appears to have been retracted. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:01, 1 January 2023 (UTC)

2022 requests

 * Coronary Perfusion Pressure- this article was originally a stub but I have added significant additions, sections and clarified previous language. 221MD (talk) 19:27, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
 * ✅ C-class. Thank you for your improvements to this article, @221MD. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:52, 16 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Platform trial- I initially wrote this article and would appreciate an initial assessment! Thank you 221MD (talk) 06:49, 20 February 2022 (UTC)
 * @Bibeyjj rated this as C-class, which I agree with. The biggest change I'd recommend is adding a lot more links to other Wikipedia articles, especially for technical terms or other words that you wouldn't expect everyone (high schooler?  English major?  bartender?  grocery store cashier?) to know.  There's no need to add the same link three or four times in the article, but try linking to as many medical/scientific articles once as you can.  You can get a general notion of what I mean at Coronary perfusion pressure, where I just added a bunch of links.  I'm not holding that up as a perfect job, but it's better than it was. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:12, 16 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Artificial intelligence in healthcare - I updated the article to be more thorough, added citations, and removed uncited or biased information and would appreciate an assessment for upgrading its class. Thank you. Daspj (talk) 15:35, 25 February 2022 (UTC)
 * ✅ B class. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:00, 23 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Tirzepatide - I'd like a ballpark as to how far I am from GA status, and I don't think a C rating reflects that. Thank you. X-750 List of articles that I have screwed over 21:04, 21 August 2022 (UTC)
 * @X750, it is currently listed as C-class, as you noted in your request. The ORES system estimates B-class, which I think is fair.  I suspect that whether it would pass GA now would depend largely on how familiar the reviewer is with Identifying reliable sources (medicine).  For example, the ==Pharmacology== section cites a press release, which is IMO legitimate (because it's talking about what the company did in a particular year), but which some reviewers might reject in a biomedical-focused section. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:07, 1 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Tuberculoma - Not my article and I haven't been working on it, but it doesn't seem to be a stub anymore. Lalaithan (talk) 03:13, 4 November 2022 (UTC)
 * This was re-rated as C-class. @Lalaithan, you are welcome to re-rate articles yourself, if you'd like. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:04, 23 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Thank you. I'm just now learning how to rate well so I wasn't confident in rating (at the point I posted that). Lalaithan (talk) 20:58, 26 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Phobia - Currently rated as a start class article. I updated the article with more recent references. Added additional sections previously missing to align with wikimed manual of style. Joeception (talk) 20:06, 25 March 2022 (UTC)
 * ✅ B class. @Joeception, would you do me a favor and make sure that the DSM-5 description is not quoting the exact words out of that source?  We've had significant problems with plagiarism and copyright violations from that source in the past. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:07, 23 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Cardiovascular disease in women - Currently rated as a C class article. I have added in appropriate and significant sections, including a history, treatments and prevention methods, and others. I have also updated the article with more recent references to ensure there is up-to-date information present. Sahrishmasood (talk) 15:03, 14 April 2022 (UTC)
 * ✅ B class. There is still a lot of room for improvement in this article. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:05, 15 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Tetraplegia - Originally rated as a start article, I began working to update both the references and the overall content in every section of this article. Multiple references were added from expert subject matter on the topic of spinal cord injury. Completed goals: significant expansion of knowledge within the article throughout all sections of the article, added illustrations for clarification of topics, added specific etiologies, and added an anatomical explanation of tetraplegia and how it relates to the injury Tdaprano (talk) 14:40, 18 November 2022 (UTC)
 * ✅ B class. @Tdaprano, thank you for your work on this article. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:23, 29 December 2022 (UTC)

2023 requests

 * Aspirin-exacerbated respiratory disease - Currently a C-class article. I've updated or rewritten significant portions of the article and added new sections based off of the latest research as there has been a lot of development in the last few years. I've tried to make the article more cohesive and based off of reviews and less a collection of observations from various one off studies, among other general clean up and improvement attempts. Lyall0 (talk) 02:17, 16 January 2023 (UTC)
 * ✅ B class. Very nicely done, @Lyall0.  Thank you for the really substantial improvements and your dedication to using review articles.  If you want to consider the Good articles process, I think you'll need to replace some of the older (10+ years) sources with up-to-date information.  (It might be possible to simply swap in some of your recently added sources for some of the older ones.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:31, 16 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Carcinoid syndrome - Currently a start class article. I have made significant changes to all aspects of the article, updated the sources, and made the treatment section more neutral in tone. JackNagam (talk) 14:46, 3 February 2023 (UTC)
 * ✅ B class. @JackNagam, that outdated orange tag at the top, complaining about the references back in 2013(!) is something you can remove yourself. Once you fix a problem (or see that someone else fixed the problem), we really do want you to remove it.  There's no need to wait for someone else to double-check.  (If someone disagrees, they can stick it back in.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:03, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

Tropical ataxic neuropathy
I made the Tropical ataxic neuropathy article in 2020, using every source I could find (there aren't many, and the article is not very good; medicine doesn't know much about this topic). The topic is classed as low importance, which is the category for "very rare diseases"; but the sources suggest it is a common disease among people who don't have doctors. Does lack of medical attention make a topic lower-importance? HLHJ (talk) 00:55, 10 March 2024 (UTC)


 * @HLHJ, not really, but being a rare disease does. Being common in "certain populations" doesn't make a disease relatively common overall.
 * I wish that the  parameter said   instead, because its primary uses (for WPMED) are to decide which articles go into the WP:1.0 offline releases and which articles the group wants to polish up first (i.e., the 100 "top" and 1,000 "high" articles).  "Low" effectively means "unlikely to turn up on a list of articles for suggested improvement". WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:25, 11 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Unfortunately there seem to be no statistics on global prevalence. I haven't even seen wild guesses; my wild guess that it's fairly common is based on a guess that "poor tropical populations in environments that can grow cassava, ish" is a fairly large population, and multiplying that by an often-large proportion of that population affected would make it fairly common. I could well be very wrong, multiplying very vague guesses. "Unknown prevalence" doesn't fit very well in the rubric. HLHJ (talk) 03:59, 11 March 2024 (UTC)
 * If you think it makes more sense to be Mid-importance, I've no real objection. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:05, 11 March 2024 (UTC)