MEpedia talk:Science guidelines

Old ideas
Some possible ideas to consider:

1) Quality of references: should be peer-reviewed journal articles or reputable textbooks

2) In the absence of good research, anecdotes can be cited under certain conditions (what conditions?) so long as in the text of the article, the information is not passed off as an established fact and the source of the information is clear. For example, "some clinicians have observed...." or "many patients have reported...." There still needs to be an external citation.

3) Avoid where possible citing health blogs or other third party sources for information that is considered to be scientific fact, especially where a first party source (i.e., a journal article) is available. Blogs, forums, etc. *can* on a case by case basis be reasonable sources for anecdotal or observational information.

4) Where available, always report both negative and positive results. If you do a search for, say, muscle biopses in ME patients, report both the studies that found evidence of abnormalities and studies that did not.

5) Where possible, report information about the design of a specific study or series of studies if they help the reader to grasp the quality and reliability of the findings. For example you might point out features of the design that decrease our confidence in the outcome: small sample sizes, lack of controls, open label. You might also point out information about the design that increase our confidence: randomized, double blind, large N, proper controls, finding replicated. This does not need to be done in great detail but you might say, "Several small n studies have found...." Or "A large, randomized trial found......"

--Meaction (talk) 13:41, 21 November 2015 (PST)

Volunteer Slack?
Under the "Less is more" subsection, it says "go to the Volunteer Slack". What is a "Volunteer Slack"??? Pyrrhus (talk) 21:31, 14 March 2019 (EDT)
 * Pyrrhus, Slack is a technology that's basically a very fancy chatroom service; you can make a Slack for a specific group and then it offers the possibility of having different, easily searchable threads for different topics. I take it there is an MEpedia Slack, although I'm not part of it and don't know the Slack's name or who to ask for an invite, so eventually we should probably try to find out how users who wish to can join (personally I don't love using it; I find it overstimulating and would rather discuss with editors here, but it's good to offer different options as different people will undoubtedly have a variety of different preferences and accessibility requirements.) Meanwhile if you want, you can check out the tech at Slack.com though; the basic service is free, you only pay for upgrades (like storage if your group has more than 10,000 messages, etc.) Poking around, I do see an MEAction Volunteers Slack (meaction.slack.com) and you can sign into it if you have an meaction.net email address. But I don't know if MEpedia has a separate one or if MEpedia is a "channel" in that one; also don't know if you have to get an meaction.net email or if possibly existing members (or especially, moderators) can add send invites to others to join the Slack, if that is the right one. So many questions! Sorry I'm probably giving more questions than answers here! Canele (talk) 19:29, 19 March 2019 (EDT)
 * Thank you so much Canele! That is very very informative.  I prefer discussing things here on MEpedia too, but we desperately need to enable communication between contributors any way we can.  I'll ask around to see how I could join.  Now, whom do I ask?  That would be a good question for the Slack group! ;)
 * Pyrrhus (talk) 21:12, 19 March 2019 (EDT)
 * The best bet as far as I know would be User:JenB, or maybe she can suggest who best to go to with MEpedia questions if it's someone else? (I'd also love to ask about either adding to the CAPTCHA whitelist or getting set up to take of that myself, which I'd be happy to do, just don't know who best to ask for the necessary permissions.) Thanks for any guidance! Canele (talk) 22:13, 19 March 2019 (EDT)
 * I’m now in the Slack group, so if there’s anything you want me to bring up, let me know. The CAPTCHA whitelist has already been brought up.  Is the only thing needed there is admin privs to edit the file?  Or is the CAPTCHA whitelist more complicated than that?
 * Pyrrhus (talk) 16:02, 29 March 2019 (EDT)
 * Oh, thanks so much Pyrrhus. Yeah as best I can tell, it's just admin permissions that's required to edit that page and then appropriate URLs only need be pasted in. As Njt has pointed out, the best would be if we could set up a user right group that automatically turned off the CAPTCHA for trusted users (discussed further here: MediaWiki_talk:Captcha-addurl-whitelist), but setting that up is beyond my personal technological capacities, so until someone who is capable has the time to take up that project, I think granting someone who is around more (you, me, whomever) permission to add to the white list would go a long way to improving accessibility. (My personal opinion would be that whomever is delegated that authority should only whitelist the most rock-solid science and reference sites. Other kinds of sites are important to include on MEpedia but I've seen a fair number of places where they're not used in accordance with MEpedia:Science guidelines and I think it maybe wise to leave the speed bump up at least for now.) Canele (talk) 19:01, 29 March 2019 (EDT)
 * User:Canele If you wanted to join Slack's MEpedia group you can email the info meaction.net email address, on contact User:JaimeS. Some discussion goes on in the Facebook group (linked to from the MEAction website) but not much. I have recently discovered that auto confirm by email address may remove the Captcha, fixing the email feature has been flagged up since there's a new issue with it. notjusttired (talk) 18:42, 29 March 2019 (EDT)
 * Thanks Njt for the head's up about how to join the Slack. I may do so later; I find the tech a little overstimulating so I like discussing here where things don't move quite as rapidly. Meanwhile though, that sure would be great if eventually there were an automatic user right to disable the CAPTCHA. I suppose one thing I would say is, my ideal world would disable the CAPTCHA after a user has made a certain number of manual edits (500?) rather than just after confirming their email address, because it's so easy for spammers to dummy up an email address, confirm it, and then go to town. On a site about science, I do worry about manipulation by folks with a financial interest. But, we'll wait to see what's possible, I suppose? Canele (talk) 19:01, 29 March 2019 (EDT)
 * That's a good suggestion on number of edits - could be put in the Dev queue. I would set it much lower - say 50 edits - the Captcha is easy to lookup for people so I presume it's mostly there to stop robots / automated edits. With automated edits I'm not sure how easy it is for robots to do the email confirm or if any have tried. Njt notjusttired (talk) 17:14, 30 March 2019 (EDT)
 * Good idea, I'll add it to the dev queue! You're probably right that 50 would do the job for now. I know Wikipedia deals with folks that for-profit, not-necessarily-reliable sites are paying to go in and manually add many links to that site; I was thinking the CAPTCHA would be at least a speed bump for that. But no real reason to have it be so high until/unless that becomes an issue here. I assume once that feature is in place, it wouldn't be so hard to adjust the specific number. Canele (talk) 18:21, 30 March 2019 (EDT)

Rename to MEpedia:Science guidelines
Any objection if this page "Science Guidelines" is renamed to "MEpedia:Science guidelines"? Since this page is about the MEpedia project itself, it really should belong in the MEpedia namespace. ("MEpedia:") Pyrrhus (talk) 20:43, 18 March 2019 (EDT)
 * I'm for it! (Again!) Canele (talk) 19:30, 19 March 2019 (EDT)
 * Done!
 * Pyrrhus (talk) 16:04, 29 March 2019 (EDT)