Sdeyrup

TCM is not valid medical content

Your course has the potential to mislead students into believing TCM is valid as a medical discipline. It is pseudoscience and quackery. Please review and share this with your students, and encourage them to read WP:MEDRS for choosing high-quality sources that support content on evidence-based medicine. Zefr (talk) 23:05, 4 December 2022 (UTC)

Dear Zefr,

Thank you for your concern about my course and for my students. My course already includes the training that you suggested along with 10 other training modules for responsibly editing Wikipedia. I can assure you that my course does not espouse TCM as a replacement for Western medicine. However, I think it is an important topic for people to learn about given the widespread use of herbal medicines worldwide, and the increasing popularity of TCM in the United States (where my school is located). I do recommend that you do a little more looking into TCM with an open mind before dismissing the entirety of it as "pseudoscience and quackery". I have a strong feeling that Nobel Prize laureate Tu Youyou, who won the Nobel Prize in medicine for discovering the active anti-malarial compound from a TCM herb that was used to treat malaria, would disagree with you. You may also be interested in looking at the NIH website and what they have to say about TCM (https://www.nccih.nih.gov/health/traditional-chinese-medicine-what-you-need-to-know). Sdeyrup (talk) 23:56, 4 December 2022 (UTC)

I appreciate the effort and hope your students will learn the status of science for what are evidence-based drugs and health effects. And we all hope they will become fact-based Wikipedia editors.

If herbs had scientific evidence of affecting diseases, the extracts and processes would be patented and called prescription drugs. Several of your students are already on the wrong path, such as here and here. Senior editors who have monitored herbs and altmed articles for years have seen this misunderstanding before. Zefr (talk) 00:34, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for linking to some of their edits that have issues. I will talk to my class about not making headers like "Medicinal Uses" for TCM information. I also see an issue in the way some of the information was presented. For instance, it would be helpful to list the chemical constituents of ginseng, however listing out uses that have only been studied preliminarily is certainly problematic. Sdeyrup (talk) 01:01, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

Some chemicals in ginseng can be mentioned if solid reviews support their predominance, as is done in the article here for saponins and ginsenosides. The encyclopedia is for general users, not for advanced students and professionals in chemistry. Listing many or all would undermine WP:NOTCATALOG. Further, my opinion is that these topics of surmising TCM health benefits from the presence of certain phytochemicals is far beyond the capability of undergraduate students at Siena College. Zefr (talk) 04:58, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

I will emphasize fact-based edits. I do think that mentioning TCM use of something is fact-based as long as the wording is such that it doesn't make a value judgement about that use. Also, not conflating TCM use with Western medicine use is important, and I will emphasize that. However, I hope you agree that TCM is at least cultural phenomenon (you may consider it somewhere between historical study, religion, and a science), and that cultural uses of organisms is worthy of mention.

However, as you point out, these are undergraduates who are learning a skill. I do not expect them to edit Wikipedia perfectly, no matter how many training modules and exercises I have them do, and no matter how much I tell them. The idea is that at least some will learn how to do this properly and will move on to productive members of a resource that they use and appreciate. Sdeyrup (talk) 11:58, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

How are you intending on identifying what the fact-based uses are? All the sources your students seem to have found are either of the sort that they are published in poor-quality journals or they are in compendiums that offer little in the way of assurances that this is somehow a standardized use of a plant. How do we know that a certain plant is considered to help "vital organs"? Is there some unified authority that they are pointing to, or is it just a statement they read? The fact that certain forms of TCM are actually derived from propaganda tools of the Chinese Communist Party while others have completely different attestations as in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, or the Chinese diaspora makes the idea of a "fact-based" program more than a little fraught. How are you dealing with this in your course? jps (talk) 12:33, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

I have to agree that there have been many mainspace edits by your students which appear to use very poor sources. Further, I don't see much on-wiki that is pointing your students to WP:FRINGE and WP:MEDRS which are the relevant guidelines for this subject material. I just removed a sentence from black pepper that was sourced to a predatory journal arguing that the substance was full of Yang Qi and could help various organs. At the very least, we would require a independent source to document such. I wonder whether it might be a good idea to put a moratorium on editing this content until such time as the students are able to understand more completely how to distinguish usable sources from unusable ones.

Your comment to Zefr above makes me very uncomfortable. I am not sure that Wikipedia is a good fit for what you intend on doing here. jps (talk) 00:56, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

• That a plant or a plant product has ethnobotanical and/or traditional medical uses is clearly relevant to a plant article, and this information should be included. A possible approach is to say that the plant or plant product has been used in the belief that it may have medicinal effects, listing those effects. This needs to be supported by references that meet the general standards applied here. Then go on to present evidence as to whether it does have those effects, supported by MEDRS-compliant review sources. Peter coxhead (talk) 11:57, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

  That was certainly my thought on this when I designed this project through the WikiEducation template. Sdeyrup (talk) 12:05, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

  The problem here is that in every single case that I've looked at, the students were using extremely poor sourcing. Ethnobotany is great, but when students write: "PLANT X is used to treat Y" without the proper attribution, that is absolutely not okay. A proper treatment might look like "PERSON A said that they recommended PLANT X in PREPARATION Z if a person complained of Y." Even then, the source needs to be one that offers proper context from the standpoint of this being a likely WP:PROMINENT use of the plant (why should anyone care what PERSON A said? If there is a decent attestation that they are somehow important or recognized or indicative as a holder of some broadly held belief -- cool -- but the source needs to be able to identify that as well). None of this seems to have been addressed in the way students approached adding "facts" to Wikipedia. jps (talk) 12:24, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

Sdeyrup, the main issue is that for health-related content in general, your students were supposed to follow this training module. We should have talked about this before the class started, but these kinds of guidelines aren't optional.

I agree that WP:MEDRS is a very blunt instrument, and there are ways to add nuance that it doesn't seem to allow. But these are rather challenging for novice editors - there are huge swaths of Wikipedia that we don't teach students just because they aren't things most people can learn in their first few months on the project. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 15:45, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

@Ian (Wiki Ed): for plant articles, another area that causes problems for new editors is "Cultivation" sections, where the problem is following WP:NOTHOW. (This is of course much less serious that not following WP:MEDRS.) An important difference for me is that I have a short list of FA articles with good cultivation sections to which I can direct new editors. I don't have this for plant articles with traditional medicine uses. Good examples are badly needed in my view; they are much easier for new editors to follow. 16:07, 5 December 2022 (UTC)Peter coxhead (talk)

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Thank you for the welcome! I have gone through the training, and my students are using a structured course page approved by Wikieducation. Sdeyrup (talk) 12:03, 5 December 2022 (UTC)