User talk:Dr Margaret Ashwell

Welcome!

Hello, Dr Margaret Ashwell, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions, especially your edits to Waist-to-height ratio. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few links to pages you might find helpful:

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Please remember to sign your messages on talk pages by typing four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or , and a volunteer should respond shortly. Again, welcome! -- Rrburke (talk) 10:58, 1 May 2017 (UTC)

WtHR

Hi. If you claim a "wealth of publications" you are supposed to cite a wealth of sources. Also, you are not supposed to remove critical studies. Last but not least, editing in fields you are involved in (especially citing ones own studies) is a confict of interest. Please keep that in mind. Thanks. Kleuske (talk) 11:43, 1 May 2017 (UTC)

I don't agree it is a conflict of interest, as long as the studies have been published in a reputable journal with independent peer review.Dan88888 (talk) 11:38, 11 April 2022 (UTC)

Likewise "refs to come" is not an acceptable basis for major changes such as you made, it is WP:disruptive editing. I am about to revert your edits again. Please use talk:Waist-to-height ratio to propose and justify a draft of the changes you believe should be made. If you reinstate your changes without such discussion and consensus, you may expect them to be reverted until you stop and discuss. See Wikipedia policy WP:BRD. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 16:30, 14 September 2021 (UTC)

Citing sources

Fyi, Wikipedia has a policy/help article, WP:citing sources, that you may find useful. Alternatively, you could look at an article like Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, which is heavily cited. A look at talk:Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 may give you a clue about our reasons to be so guarded! --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 13:53, 15 September 2021 (UTC)

To save you some time, you might just want to concentrate on understanding how to use template:cite journal, since I suspect that is one you will want to employ. And template:cite book, though that one is very open-ended as a first plunge.--John Maynard Friedman (talk) 14:23, 15 September 2021 (UTC)

It occurs to me that the hard part is finding and evaluating reliable sources: anybody can make citations look pretty. So if you would do the former, I an happy to do the latter. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 17:46, 15 September 2021 (UTC)

Hi John I'm happy to work with you as I'm one of the leading serious scientists in this field but I am a novice at editng Wiki. Do you live in UK or USA? Dr Margaret Ashwell (talk) 19:36, 21 September 2021 (UTC)

thank you, I was worried that I had intentionally annoyed you away.

I live in UK.

Please don't worry about using Wikipedia's citation style in your draft, I will be very happy to reformat them, ignore my earlier suggestions. Mostly we use Harvard style, wrapped up in a structured template so that metadata is easily grabbed. But feel free to use whatever you find convenient.

Welcome again to Wikipedia. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 19:55, 21 September 2021 (UTC)

May I suggest that you may find it useful to read the Wikipedia policy Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources (medicine)? It may save you some time to know what is expected, though I rather suspect that you didn't achieve your Doctorate and subsequent career milestones by being sloppy about such things. Conversely, I trust that it will give you confidence that you are not wasting your time. Regards, --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 00:13, 22 September 2021 (UTC)

Thank you. Very busy rest of this week but will return to this next week. do you live near Milton Keynes or do you just have an interest in the City? Are you a professional Wiki editor? I would find it much easier to continue our conversation by email. Can we please?Dr Margaret Ashwell (talk) 09:49, 22 September 2021 (UTC)

No rush as far as I am concerned.

I will need to set up a throwaway email address; when done, I will send details to your personal domain contact address. This is most unusual and, if you decide to improve other articles (body shape, for example) I'm afraid you will have to learn from how we do the WtHR article and generalise.

No, there are (officially) no professional editors [we are all 'contributing editors', there is no-one with a green eyeshade and blue pencil!]. From time to time we see people engaged in the business of 'reputation repair' and good old-fashioned "pump'n'dump" but such editing is contrary to the Conflict of interest policy. They (mostly) get seen off the premises quickly. It seems not to be widely known that a mention in Wikipedia does nothing for search rankings because of the way the system is configured.

Yes, I live in MK: I caught the "Wikipedia bug" some time ago when correcting some silly myths and 'knocking copy' about the place that was stated without support from any reliable source. Then one hyperlink led to another and then three more etc etc. Nowadays it is just a pastime. There must be a PhD thesis in here somewhere as to what motivates so many people to give their time for free. I suspect that we enjoy being a smarty-pants. :-D

My interest in the waist/height ratio article comes from an interest in ancient art: see Artistic canons of body proportions and Body proportions#Ratios. I decided to stop before getting into Body shape (in medicine) which, as I'm sure you know, is an ideological minefield. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 16:29, 22 September 2021 (UTC)

Sandbox

I have copied to the version of the article after you edited it but before I reverted, into your wp:sandbox, see User:Dr Margaret Ashwell/sandbox. You can work on it there until it is ready to go live. I trust you will find this useful as I really should have asked you first, sorry. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 17:46, 15 September 2021 (UTC)

New guidance released, needs new citation

Thank you for your update to the WHR article. With regret, I have had to revert because the citation given is still the one from April. As I said before, policy WP:MEDRS requires unbending adherence to the citation standards for health-related topics (as I suspect you would expect to be the case).

But you don't need to do anything. I expect that the BMJ or national papers will pick up the story in the next few days, whereupon I wil reinstate your edit but with the new citation. Regards --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 15:04, 10 September 2022 (UTC)

Google News doesn't seem to identifying up any recent news reports for the 'official' announcement. I'm searching for waist height "National Institute for Health and Care Excellence" (and also using "NICE" and "NIHCE"). Can you suggest a more effective search argument? (for example, some words from the title of the press release). Best regards --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 10:10, 16 September 2022 (UTC)

Strangely, the media has not picked up this announcement so I have just updated Waist-to-height ratio to add a note that NICE has adopted it: In September 2022, NICE formally adopted this guideline. I trust that this is does the job adequately. --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 10:09, 23 September 2022 (UTC)

Another draft

Hi John I have now writtena word doc to show how I think WHtR shd be updated to refect the new NICE report. I've sent it to you by email. I do hope you will be able to help me with this? Dr Margaret Ashwell OBE Dr Margaret Ashwell (talk) 14:32, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

I have made a start on it (see User:Dr Margaret Ashwell/sandbox). Adding metadata to the citations takes a lot of time. More tomorrow. I think it would be best if I can get one of the medical editors to advise on how best to move forward as this now seriously above my pay grade. I suspect that they will say that your proposed text needs to have a more world-wide perspective, that there are way too many citations (one or two at most, unless the topic is controversial and the preponderance of expert opinion needs to be shown), and that it is pitched at too professional a level for the Wikipedia readership (UK A-level student, for a topic such as this maybe GCSE). But best I don't prejudge. --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 16:58, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

Sandbox second interation

What you have done on Sandbox is great John! Thank you. My major concern is that you have left out the part abput Prospective studies. This is strange because the NICE conclusion is based primarily on prospective evidence and they ony use cross sectional evidence if there is not enough prospective evidence in any population group. If it helps I can leave out the article published in a MEDCrave journal although i did not pay for publication and i did go through the peer review process. What can I do now? Dr Margaret Ashwell (talk) 16:32, 12 October 2022 (UTC)

First, much of the thanks for successfully importing your draft goes to Boghog who dug me out of the morass. I turns out that I was doing it the hard way, there is a far more clever mechanism to import MsWord documents than my "brute force and ignorance copy/paste/edit/edit/edit and edit again" approach.

I hope I didn't mislead you into believing that your draft could be pasted wholesale over the existing article. I anticipated that the editors with medical background would select appropriately from it and I believe that Boghog and WhatamIdoing have done that. If you believe it needs further work, please use talk:Waist-to-height ratio to explain your rationale because I can't sensibly make the value judgements needed and would rather leave it to those who can.

I didn't for a moment believe that you paid for the MedCrave listing but rather that they are using your material to "salt" the mine.

I may have misunderstood "prospective evidence"? I thought you mean pre-print papers? (For the policy on that, see WP:PREPRINT). I suspect that this demonstrates why my decision to step back and leave it to the experts, was justified.

Best regards. --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 19:55, 12 October 2022 (UTC)

I see that WhatamIdoing has revised the article using most of your draft, with recognition for you as author in the edit summary. ----𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 00:00, 14 October 2022 (UTC)

I think she meant Prospective cohort study. The problem with studies (as opposed to, say, systematic reviews, meta-analyses, or practice guidelines) is that some people cherry-pick the one study that says what they want, instead of citing the 99 that say the usual thing. Although it's restrictive, and we know it's especially limiting when we have someone working on an article who has the skills to differentiate good science from bad, overall we've had better luck with having the same rules for everyone: original reports of actual research should be avoided in favor of review articles and similar sources that endorse those original studies. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:42, 14 October 2022 (UTC)

Thank you so much to those who have helped with putting this together.

Yes i did mean Prospective cohort studies (in peer reviewed publications) which NICE call prognostic. They base their recommendations on meta-synthesis of these prognostic studies. So really the citations to the prognostic studies are the most important. Can someone take these from my word document and insert them into wiki? Dr Margaret Ashwell (talk) 14:21, 14 October 2022 (UTC)

References