Caltrops - Callahan's Crosstime Saloon - Re: A constant embarrassment

Forum Overview :: Callahan's Crosstime Saloon

by Furcifer 01/08/2020, 3:59pm PST

WP:MYSTERIO wrote:

These barnyard starred wikipedians (ugh) apply rules according to their own biases & naivety. If they don't know about it, then it's not notable and set to delete. If they don't like it, then the source is unreliable, in bad faith, disputed or unverifiable: set for speedy deletion.

I've noticed this lately with a lot of the medical articles, especially the ones on pharmaceuticals. I used to bypass the shitty WebMD-style guides cribbed straight from the those useless PILs (Patient Information Leaflets) you get from your Pharmacist, and go straight to Wikipedia for an actual in-depth discussion of the history and current research involving a drug. But I've noticed the articles have been getting shorter and dumber over the years. It's hard to track these changes, even if you comb through the editing history looking for specific removals, because there are so many little edits for grammar and formatting that the factual changes get lost in the noise.

Just as one very small example, the article on topiramate used to mention that it was found to have significant positive effects on the symptoms of patients diagnosed with bulimia nervosa during a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial. Topiramate is still being actively investigated as a possible treatment for various eating disorders, and in fact was recently approved by the FDA for the treatment of obesity. The article mentions this last fact in passing, at the very end of a catch-all section titled "Other." However, there is an entire section titled "Pain" which only cites two studies, and relates the incredibly useful and important information that topiramate is completely useless in the treatment of pain.

It would appear we largely have this weirdo to thank for the current state of the article, as he basically rewrote it from scratch in July of 2018, tossing out a bunch of things¹ he didn't personally find important, and inserting the useless sub-headings. Currently, he's pushing to have drug prices added to Wikipedia across the board, something which strikes me as a terrible idea. Fortunately, it seems that a lot of the doctor-editors on Wikipedia feel the same way, and he's getting significant resistance. He's also engaged in a full-blown edit war with an actual psychiatrist over the formatting of the article on Schizophrenia.

---
¹ I called out bulimia specifically because it's the most egregious deletion with regard to the quality of the evidence, but he also tossed out evidence that topiramate may be effective in the treatment of several other serious, potentially debilitating conditions. It was actually the disappearance of cluster headaches from that list that aroused my suspicious, because someone with cluster headaches does not forget when they read that a drug is a potential treatment for cluster headaches.