Biotech5771

Lactopontin article

Hello, thanks for creating this article and I'm looking forward to seeing how it develops.

I can't seem to find any articles on this protein under this term on Pubmed. Is this a commonly used name? If it's a specific company's trademark for the chemical, the article may need to be moved, since Wikipedia prefers to use generic and nonproprietary names. Blythwood (talk) 21:29, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

More about lactopontin

Thanks for the reply. There are a couple of things I need to warn you about.

Basically, Wikipedia's guidelines for notability (whether something should have an article on it) depends on having multiple sources that exist right now, today, that I can read, sitting here at home with a glass of wine on a Friday night. As you can imagine, there are a lot of people who try to add articles on their band that's totally going to be famous the second they write some songs, get a recording contract, play anywhere besides their garage, find a singer and a guitarist...et cetera. Or their drug that's going to cure cancer the second the Illuminati stop claiming it isn't real...et cetera. Or this fashion line that's totally the hottest thing in that city over there, honest. So Wikipedia's guideline is simple (and I didn't write it): if it ain't in a paper yet, it ain't getting an article. Basically, what's in Wikipedia is meant to be based on published papers, not original research or opinion.

So what that means is that, while I'm sure that the researchers at UC Davis and UIUC (I'm guessing that's what you meant?) you've talked to are right, if sources aren't available that use the term 'lactopontin' at the moment it might be best to just leave the article for now until there's a clear source available besides the ClinicalTrials.gov document. I notice that someone else has tagged the article for possible deletion already, presumably (and I haven't discussed it with them yet) using the same reasoning. But I'm keen to see what your colleagues add.

I hope this doesn't sound too discouraging, since Wikipedia can always do with people interested in contributing on science topics. The idea of Wikipedia's policy is that it follows where sources lead. Deciding whether something is a good topic for an article right now (not next year, or when your colleagues add more content to it) is hard, and I realise that this can be frustrating. (I think on one of the guideline pages there's a note on how the first article on Twitter got deleted because there weren't enough sources to justify an article on it back then.) If you're not sure if something you want to write about can stand as a freestanding article, I recommend putting a draft on your sandbox and contacting someone (say from the teahouse project or from the articles for creation process, or the sciences reference desk) to read through it and decide if it's worth going further.

Let me know here if you want to ask anything - always keen to help. Blythwood (talk) 00:41, 16 January 2016 (UTC)