User talk:Alexander Davronov/Archives/2021/March

Xen is a hypervisor, not a virtual machine

I have reverted this edit you made to the Xen article. In the talk page you can see it confused at least one person. Sypwn (talk) 21:17, 19 March 2021 (UTC)

@Sypwn: Yeah, seems like I made a mistake here. It's host for the VMs, not VM itself. Thanks. AXONOV (talk) ⚑ 07:49, 20 March 2021 (UTC)

Some advice

Hello - let me introduce myself. I am a long time user of Wikipedia for information, but only during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic (when I had oodles of free time especially at work due to the large overreaction in overstaffing at my job due to expected COVID-19 related workloads that mostly didn't materialize) did I actually begin to edit. I've also, over the years prior to beginning editing, seen news articles about Wikipedia's medical content - meaning I had an idea of why things are the way they are wrt medical topics here (based on a secondary [news] source to boot). To put it simply, the big question to ask yourself when trying to add medical content is this: is this simply "data", or is it important in the grand scheme of things? If it's important in the grand scheme of things, you can virtually always find it referenced in secondary sources such as reviews. To put it bluntly, if professionals in the field writing review articles or guidelines don't care enough to include it, it's virtually certain that it's not "important" enough for Wikipedia (see WP:DUE - a policy - for basis). That's not to say that significant primary sources cannot be significant enough for coverage of them to be due weight - but the bar is extremely high and is almost never met. On the other hand, while primary sources are only reliable for what that source says, secondary sources are reliable for what Wikipedia says - the difference between "attributed voice" (ex: A study found XYZ) and "Wikivoice" (ex: XYZ) where something is stated as fact. One way to look at this objectively is to do a search for "pancreatic cancer" on pubmed and filter only primary sources (i.e. trials and RCTs for sorting) - there's over 3,700 results. If each of those results is given even a one sentence mention in that article, it would be by far the largest article on Wikipedia. While we do have discretion to come to a consensus regarding the inclusion of significant primary sources (i.e. results of single studies), another policy comes into play - WP:NOT - specifically not being an indiscriminate collection of information. The short version is this: single studies, or collections of a couple, are very rarely due weight to include in articles.

I'll note that you went straight to questioning the guideline which prompted the reversion of your edit, rather than attempting to comply with the guideline by finding secondary sources. If we instead, on pubmed, search for "pancreatic cancer fungus" and filter to systematic reviews, reviews, and meta-analyses, we get 243 results. I realize that not everyone has access to paywalled resources, but of the first 20 results, 12 are free - either through PubMed Central or the publisher themselves. I make no comment here as to whether any individual source is reliable (PubMed is like Google - sources linked may be predatory or otherwise non-reliable) but it seems likely to me that if you feel pancreatic cancer really needs a mention of its relation to the gut microbiota, one of those hundreds sources would be likely to include some information on said relation - and it's likely that a free one likely does too if you can't access some of the paywalled ones. If the findings of the two studies you cited in your edit don't have any mention in any secondary source, even two to three years later, it begs the question of why not? There are two potential reasons I can think of - either the evidence/data is too new to have become mainstream belief in the scientific world, or there is much more evidence suggesting otherwise, such that the secondary sources don't even give it a mention. Either way, inclusion of such data would violate Wikipedia policy - you'll note that the two linked sections of my last sentence are both policy pages.

This isn't to say that your edit was deserving of some of the responses you got (or their insinuations) - I don't think your edit is anywhere near the MMR-autism debate, nor do I think that featured articles should somehow be protected from introducing new sections. However, I think that at most, you could've added one sentence to the article (likely in the Pathophysiology/Precancer section or the Risk factors section) which stated merely the following: Studies have been done to investigate the link between (fungal) gut microbiota and pancreatic cancer, with some suggesting a link between the two. To be quite honest, I'm not sure even that would be due weight given two primary sources, but at the same time, that would've been much more acceptable than an entire level 2 and 3 section on the issue. I encourage you to look deeply at other articles where primary sources are validly used in medical articles - some (in my opinion) good examples for your perusal being parts of the following: Asthma (references one study for its significant number of genes found to be potentially linked), Opioid use disorder (where a study is attributed and used to provide a concrete example of a general statement in the preceding sentence), and Remdesivir (which discusses multiple primary sources/single studies in the context of their significance in leading to emergency authorization/approval or reconsideration thereof). Contrast these examples with your addition - which is worded and formatted in a way that implies much more - reversion was appropriate because of the fact you created a brand new section/subsection for this, implying that it is exceedingly significant (as much so as the entirety of the diagnosis or management of the disease) as well as the wording you used (such as "at least" implying that more exist, using a correlation found in one study to imply causation, and using the word "directly" to imply more of a link than the study itself does).

To end this long advice, it's important to realize that applying Wikipedia policies to medical content requires a lot of care and is much different than applying them to other topics such as politics, social science, or history. That is the primary reason for and purpose of WP:MEDRS - to guide editors in applying policies appropriately in medical topics, based on longstanding consensus which formed to appropriately view policy's application in the medical topics on Wikipedia. I'll note that you've made some very good and MEDRS compliant additions to other articles - I'd like to explicitly call out this edit where you cite a review article to include a new section on (differential) diagnosis, and this edit where you used a review article to provide a comparison to another medication. I'll note neither of those edits were reverted - and while I think the wording of each could be improved, I doubt anyone would think they need complete reversion altogether. Those are the types of additions to medical articles (even featured articles) that are appropriate - and I think this is more a problem of you found an interesting (set of) fact(s) and tried to add them without considering policies on WP:NOT and WP:DUE. I only wish that the person who reverted you had taken the time to explain this instead of making a snide remark to you in an edit summary and bringing up a completely minor policy violation which could've been remedied easily instead of reverting completely (referring to ENGVAR and had there not been the other reasons for the revert).

To end, I don't think this one example was handled well by anyone, nor do I think that you have a misunderstanding of medical topics altogether - I think it simply was a misunderstanding that led you to question a guideline because the guideline is based in policy, but it is impossible to clearly articulate how and why without using 1000 examples - even my explanation here likely wouldn't be good on the WP:MEDRS page because it's not always true. I hope you don't get discouraged from editing medical topics because of this whole situation, and while I doubt any changes will be made to MEDRS based on your current suggestion, if you can think of ways to improve it that make the policy basis for the MEDRS guideline clearer, please do suggest them (instead of suggesting removal of part of the guideline altogether). I'd also like to offer myself as a point of contact if you have any questions/concerns about this in the future - while I'm certainly not the longest tenured editor in the medical field, and while I've recently (for months now, in fact) been too occupied with real life (or too tired from work) to write articles, I do have a few good articles in the medical field under my belt, and I'd like to think I could provide guidance therein. I won't say I will be able to do any in-depth analysis of sources or due weight for you, but if you have simple questions that need answering or want an opinion as to inclusion of information (and are willing to wait a couple days), please feel free to ping me.

Regards, -bɜ:ʳkənhɪmez (User/say hi!) 04:17, 21 March 2021 (UTC)

@Berchanhimez: You and your advice are welcome here. Let me also express my appreciation for your distinguished opinion above. I read it in full and I find it worth to take it into account (I see you even went so far as to checkout my contributions! well well well!) I've little to disagree over here with you tbh and I'm always open to this kind of friendly advises. Cheers! --AXONOV (talk) ⚑ 17:24, 21 March 2021 (UTC)