User talk:Zad68/Archive 2014 Mar

Latest comment: 10 years ago by MediaWiki message delivery in topic The Signpost: 26 March 2014


GAN March 2014 Backlog Drive

The March 2014 GAN Backlog Drive has begun and will end on April 1, 2014! Sent by Dom497 on behalf of MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:01, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

Baby colic Do not use primary source when secondary source available.

The template for flagging articles no longer tells people to delete primary sources. It tells them to find secondary sources. I could do it, and as you can see in the edit history and talk pages, I have a doctor to flunk. The last time I successfully put a source in, I needed risk ratios. Those were only available in a primary source. The same accessibility of verifification goes for the fact that my primary source in your deletion was a double-blind, placebo-controlled, cross-over study, which is extremely difficult for a secondary source to overturn or ignore. So, if you are so sure that my citation has been reviewed, it is more polite and helpful to support your idea. Bohgosity BumaskiL 75.152.124.54 (talk) 22:30, 4 March 2014 (UTC)

You will need to work to gain consensus for your suggested changes, as they have been challenged. If the primary source is indeed of good quality I see no harm in waiting for a secondary source to pick it up and put it in context. Zad68 05:15, 5 March 2014 (UTC)
Why should an experimenter be ignorant of her subject's being a control? 172.219.255.215 (talk) 06:21, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

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1517 pogroms

Hi,

You participated to a discussion on that article. A short mind would be welcome here. Pluto2012 (talk) 17:57, 16 March 2014 (UTC)

AN/I discussion regarding Providence (religious movement)

  You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive833#Large amount of properly sourced content is being continually deleted from Providence Religious Movement Article. ... Since you previously responded in Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive817#Long-term edit warring at Jung Myung Seok, I thought your consideration of the case would be of value. Sam Sailor Sing 11:25, 18 March 2014 (UTC)

I noticed your name at WP:Cochrane and wonder if you might get me started on looking for the answer to a question. I have been asked (by Ocaasi) to count the external links to Cochrane publications each month over the last year or so. The idea is to get some evidence for Cochrane to show that continuing or expanding the free subscriptions for editors would be worthwhile. I have done that in the past for some other services (example).

I run various scripts to extract and count external links using data extracted from a dump of the external links database that is published for en.wiki each month. The live data from LinkSearch looks like this.

The problem is that there appears to be no way to identify a link to Cochrane library documents because there are zillions of other links to various Wiley pages that have similar URLs but which are unrelated to Cochrane. For example, the first of the following is for Cochrane, but the second is not:

I'm wondering if there is some magic in the URL that I cannot see which would in fact identify it as a Cochrane link. I'm hoping I do not have to visit the target page and search for "Cochrane" to determine whether an external link is for Cochrane. Any ideas on the problem, or where I might ask for someone familiar with the Wiley setup? Johnuniq (talk) 04:19, 19 March 2014 (UTC)

Hey Johnuniq, thanks for asking. I can't 100% guarantee this but it appears that DOIs that point to documents published by the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews start with "10.1002" and have the string "CD00" in them. You'll have to see if you can't find false positives or negatives but this appears to be the case. Let's take a look at DOI 10.1002/14651858.CD003590.pub4. The start of a DOI identifies the registration agency and registrant, so in "10.1002", the "10" indicates CrossRef (I'm pretty sure) and we're guessing that "1002" is assigned to Wiley's Cochrane. I can't be 100% sure because I cannot figure out how to ask CrossRef to decode a registrant number or encode a publishing entity. The stuff after the / ("14651858.CD003590.pub4") is assigned by the registrant to identify the specific document. I looked at a bunch and all the Cochrane reviews seem to have CD00 in them, but, again, can't guarantee. More research is needed down this path but it should bear fruit.

If you're going to do this you might also consider looking at the PMID instead or in addition to, because NOT all cites have the helpful URL with the DOI in them. There are plenty of {{cite journal}}s that point to Cochrane reviews but don't have a URL in them, or might have a URL in them that points to a Cochrane review but (for whatever reason) the URL points to it somewhere other than at wiley.com so you can't parse the URL for the DOI, looking for magic strings. Also there are {{cite PMID}}s that don't have a URL. So what you can do is use PubMed's XML lookup for a PMID and in the result look for something like "<Title>The Cochrane database of systematic reviews</Title>". I wrote a bit of bot code to do this sort of thing for me, and I'd be happy to share that with you if you'd like, send me an email.

I hope this is a helpful start. I've got to say I've noticed you around recently doing great stuff, really appreciate it! Zad68 06:17, 19 March 2014 (UTC)

Yikes, I was having quite a good day until I read your reply! This might be tricky. I must have had my brain switched off and missed noticing the "CD00", thanks. I found this example showing that "10.1002" is not sufficient: not Cochrane. I'll think about the issue in the next few days, and may email re the code, thanks again. Where does your bot run? On a local machine or at WP:Labs? Just taking the URL issue and ignoring what you mentioned about extras for the moment, it occurred to me that one tedious but effective technique would be to make a list of all likely URLs now, then spider them and make a list with "yes" or "no" for each URL depending on whether the wiley.com response includes some string (perhaps just "Cochrane"). Then my script could use that list to evaluate each URL it finds in the external links dumps for each month in the last year. I'll ponder all that later and will let you know my thoughts, and thanks for your encouragement! Johnuniq (talk) 06:50, 19 March 2014 (UTC)
Johnuniq hopefully not too tricky. It might be the combination of "10.1002" and "CD00" but looks for cases where there's a Cochrane review with something other than 10.002. If you can get the PMID that would be better, the XML result from PubMed is more reliable and more easily parse-able than the Wiley webpage, which could change its response style daily. My bot was just a utility I ran ad-hoc locally when I wanted it, I have used it to produce tables of sources for medical articles, so that the sources could be reviewed for currency, type of source (primary vs. secondary), etc. so the code isn't anywhere published. Zad68 04:49, 20 March 2014 (UTC)
Thanks, I'll ponder all that, but it might not be for a few days as other things are going on. FYI I was hoping to work on the dumps of external links that I have for each month over the last two years. That way, I can get historical data to show how the number of links has changed. I'll have to find some examples of a PMID link to a Cochrane document and think about whether the same ref might end up being counted twice if I parse both PMID links and Wiley links. And I imagine there are lots of cases where there is a Wiley link but no PMID, so an analysis could not be based on PMID only. I'll have to see if PMID 1234 (PMID 1234) generates an entry in the external links table—I suppose it might not. Johnuniq (talk) 10:14, 20 March 2014 (UTC)

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