Medicine Template‑class
This template is within the scope of WikiProject Medicine. Please visit the project page for details or ask questions at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Medicine.MedicineWikipedia:WikiProject MedicineTemplate:WikiProject Medicinemedicine articles Template This template does not require a rating on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.

I see two distinct ways that articles can be non-compliant with Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources (medicine). One is simply lacking sufficient reliable medical sources. The other is an over-reliance on primary sources (even when MEDRS-compliant sources are also present). Can the wording of this template be expanded a bit to accommodate this? I suggest changing "This article needs more medical references for verification" to "This article needs more medical references for verification or relies too heavily on primary sources". I have gone ahead and made this change, but if anyone objects, please revert me (WP:BRD) and we can discuss it. -- Ed (Edgar181) 13:56, 19 June 2012 (UTC)Reply[reply]

When using this template with |talk=1, it seems to provide a link to 1. Notice that Heart rate turbulence, Nocturnal emission, and User:GoingBatty/sandbox are all listed on Special:WhatLinksHere/1. What's the best way to change the template so it doesn't generate the WhatLinksHere entry? Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 02:58, 10 December 2014 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I think I have fixed the problem, in Template:Medref/sandbox. I have not copied it to the main template. This edit, from 2012, appears to have changed or eliminated the |talk= parameter's functionality. – Jonesey95 (talk) 06:07, 10 December 2014 (UTC)Reply[reply]

You should probably ask MSGJ (talk · contribs) why the edit was necessary, and what the consequences of reverting it will be. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:47, 10 December 2014 (UTC)Reply[reply]

In 2012 I added the same or similar functionality into Template:Ambox, which is activated with the talk parameter. This paramater can either be the name of the talk page where the discussion is taking place, e.g. |talk=Talk:Sausage would provide a link to Talk:Sausage, or the name of the section of the current article's talk page, e.g. |talk=Foo would provide a link to the #Foo section of the talk page. I have no idea where, how or why 1 is being linked. Talk:1 would make a bit more sense as there are some ifexist checks in there. The template has since been converted to Lua (Module:Message box), so perhaps there is an error in the module code. Any ideas Mr. Stradivarius? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 11:58, 10 December 2014 (UTC)Reply[reply]

This is a similar problem as described at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 119#Template links duplicated in article namespace. In Scribunto, the surest way of finding out whether the talk parameter is a talk page or not is to create a mw.title object for it, and creating a mw.title object creates a link in "what links here" for that title. The alternative would be to try and get the same result with Lua string matching, which would have some tricky edge cases, or to preprocess ((FULLPAGENAME)) and ((TALKPAGENAME)), which is slower than using native Scribunto functions. But before we try either of those, I saw that Jackmcbarn submitted a patch for mw.title yesterday which would reduce database accesses, and I wonder if it would help in this case. Jack, does your change affect what would appear in "what links here"? — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 12:38, 10 December 2014 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Yes, that patch does affect what links here. Jackmcbarn (talk) 15:10, 10 December 2014 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Thanks. So this problem will go away when Jack's patch gets accepted. Hopefully that won't be too far in the future. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 15:33, 10 December 2014 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Jonesey95, Redrose64, MSGJ, Mr. Stradivarius, and Jackmcbarn: Thanks to all of you for working together to discuss the appropriate solution! GoingBatty (talk) 00:45, 11 December 2014 (UTC)Reply[reply]

The documentation for this template does not appear to match the functionality that MSGJ describes above. Should it be changed? – Jonesey95 (talk) 00:48, 11 December 2014 (UTC)Reply[reply]

There is a move discussion in progress on Template talk:Refimprove which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 09:45, 30 December 2017 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I think this template needs a removal notice. Please add one if you can. 86.29.64.45 (talk) 16:18, 16 November 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I have removed the recently added phrase "with questionable factual accuracy" because I think that it very often doesn't apply where this template is used. In cases where unreferenced medical content has questionable factual accuracy, that content should be immediately removed instead of being tagged with this template. This template is generally used in cases where the medical content appears reasonable, but needs medical citations to support it. -- Ed (Edgar181) 19:08, 8 January 2019 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Agreed. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 14:39, 9 January 2019 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Disagree. According to WP:MEDRS, how can medical content be reasonable or accurate without enough or strong citations attached? --It's gonna be awesome!✎Talk♬ 15:15, 9 January 2019 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Content can, of course, be entirely accurate without having a reference attached. The most common use of this template, as far as I can tell, is in situations where factual accuracy isn't being questioned, but rather in situations where references are needed to establish confidence in its accuracy and demonstrate verifiability. -- Ed (Edgar181) 16:53, 9 January 2019 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Template documentation doesn't say about your observations. Were most of those articles tagged with this template written by medical specialists? How do general public know if an unsourced statement is factually accurate or not? It's like telling people that all not-well-sourced medical contents on Wikipedia are highly likely correct, otherwise would have been removed. In such context, general public should not judge an unsourced content correct until proven by verification from medical sources. --It's gonna be awesome!✎Talk♬ 07:54, 10 January 2019 (UTC)Reply[reply]

The template documentation does match what I'm talking about: "This template is intended to be placed at the top of articles or sections with medical or health content that need additional references or are using sources that are unreliable and/or outdated, and are, therefore, in need of attention." It says nothing about questionable factual accuracy. If you would like to argue for a change to the purpose of this template, that's fine. But right now the wording of the template, the wording of its documentation, and the current use of the template are all consistent. If you would like to widen the purpose of the template to extend to situations of questionable factual accuracy, then I think the template and its documentation and its current transclusions will all need to be reexamined together. -- Ed (Edgar181) 13:14, 10 January 2019 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Hi, maybe I was wrong. On the other hand, I think "... medical or health content that ... are using sources that are unreliable and/or outdated, and are, therefore, in need of attention." already supports the addition of questionable factual accuracy. --It's gonna be awesome!✎Talk♬ 14:14, 10 January 2019 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Your feedback would be welcome at this discussion concerning the impact of using ((find sources)) in templates that have "section" variants, such as ((unreferenced section)), and others. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 01:05, 23 June 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Background

Recent changes to a series of templates (i.e., ((unreferenced)) (diff), ((More citations needed)) (diff), and ((More medical citations needed)) (diff) ) and their analogous *_section templates altered the output of these templates to add the output of ((find sources)) to the template display. These changes were originally requested in this discussion, and a related follow-up Rfc discussion is here.

The intent of this change was desirable, but caused some undesirable knock-on effects to existing invocations of the analogous section-level templates (i.e., (((unreferenced section)), ((More citations needed section))). These undesirable effects are described in detail along with a proposed fix here. The fix requires changes to templates in pairs, and the fix was implemented for templates ((unreferenced)) (diff), and ((unreferenced section)) (diff) on July 2. The same undesirable effects are present in this template and the analogous section-level template. They need to be fixed in the same way as ((unreferenced)) and ((unreferenced section)) were.

Fixing this pair of templates means creation of, or changes to six files :

Note: this is a transcluded section; if redlinks appear below then just ignore that step or create the files.

• sandboxes: (Template:More medical citations needed/sandbox and Template:More medical citations needed section/sandbox), with changes similar to the ones at Template:Unreferenced (diff) and Template:Unreferenced section (diff)
• additional testcases to be added to Template:More medical citations needed/testcases and Template:More medical citations needed section/testcases, similar to the ones at Template:Unreferenced/testcases#Find and Template:Unreferenced section/testcases#Find; and finally:
• doc file changes to Template:More medical citations needed/doc and Template:More medical citations needed section/doc similar to the ones at Template:Unreferenced/doc (diff) and Template:Unreferenced section/doc (diff).

Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 06:20, 2 July 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Can we remove the link suggesting Newspapers might be a source of reliable medical information sources? HaltlosePersonalityDisorder (talk) 04:04, 8 October 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I have to say that I find both 'Newspapers' and 'News' to be somewhat surprising suggestions to help inexperienced editors of medical content search for MEDRS-compatible sourcing. It's true that newspaper articles may occasionally contain embedded links to potential MEDRS, and GoogleNews results do *occasionally* contain newly published MEDRS, such as from the NEJM, Lancet journals, etc (I've found the latter useful for certain rapidly evolving medical content). Overall, however, these two suggestions seem to me to encourage inappropriate WP:MEDPOP sourcing rather than identification of potential MEDRS. Wouldn't it perhaps be preferable to provide a link to PubMed alongside GoogleScholar? 86.186.94.204 (talk) 14:58, 9 October 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Would strongly support this change, yes. HaltlosePersonalityDisorder (talk) 00:25, 10 October 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]

100% agree with above proposed change (which I take to mean remove news and newspapers, and add PubMed and GoogleScholar)

Agree with the above, too. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 14:30, 7 July 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]

ProcrastinatingReader, see the section right after this one which may resolve this point. Mathglot (talk) 07:03, 10 November 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]

In the wake of the creation of template ((find medical sources)) extending the functionality of the earlier ((find sources)) template, Alexbrn made a request to upgrade this template to take advantage of the new functionality and generate links more appropriate for finding medical sources. This should be easy to accomplish, but requires some feedback from the community to define what it should do.

Background

Before we can discuss what it should do, some background is necessary:

The regular (non-medical) "find sources" capability comes in two varieties, a standard one that produces ten links (top), and a shorter variant called ((find sources mainspace)) (bottom) that produces five links:

Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL

Find sources: "virus" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR

Maintenance templates like ((Unreferenced)) use "find sources mainspace" to generate the shorter list of links (presumably so it doesn't wrap inside the maintenance template box), so it would be natural for "Template:More medical citations needed" to do something similar and also generate a shorter list of links, using ((Find medical sources mainspace)), which however does not yet exist.

But the template ((find medical sources)) does exist, and produces this set of medical links (example shows results for "virus"):

Find medical sources: Source guidelines · PubMed · Cochrane · DOAJ · Gale · OpenMD · ScienceDirect · Springer · Trip · Wiley · TWL

Recommendation

So what I would recommend we do to implement this request, is to create Template:Find medical sources mainspace, with a (possibly) shorter set of links designed for use within maintenance templates like ((More medical citations needed)), on the pattern of Template:Find sources mainspace, which produces a shorter set of links for the general case.

That leaves the question of what links to include in the new template, maybe creating some mockups with different sets of links in them so we can see how it looks when enclosed in a surrounding tmbox that generates the maintenance template.

Note that there's no rule saying we *have* to do it the way other templates do it. Other solutions are possible, such as:

• squish or abbreviate the "find sources" label on the left
• make the font smaller so we can have more links all on one line
• hang the whole idea of trying to fit it on one line, include more links and let it wrap to two lines if needed (desktop view on a mobile device in portrait mode already wraps even with fewer links, and mobile view doesn't show any links at all).

Mockups

Here is a "hard-coded" mockup (using tmbox to #invoke the module template config) made by picking several of the medical links to see how it would look boxed in the template. This is not a recommendation of any kind, just a conversation-starter: (live mockup; you can click the links)

Feedback needed

It's up to the community how you would like this to appear. Mathglot (talk) 03:23, 10 November 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]

The flexibility of having a separate list is nice and avoiding the line wrapping is a selling point but my instinct is to say keep it simple and leverage the ((find medical sources)) list... until there is a more substantial need to split the list. - Wikmoz (talk) 01:59, 18 November 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Wikmoz: not sure what you mean about leveraging it, it the standard “find sources” templates are blocked from articles (main space), hence the series of “mainspace” versions intended for use in maintenance templates aimed at articles. Mathglot (talk) 02:42, 18 November 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Ah. I didn't realize it was a technical requirement. Maybe something we can reconsider in the future. I added the mainspace templates to the 'See also' field in the template documentation so they're easier to track. - Wikmoz (talk) 23:05, 21 November 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Sandbox version available

Sandbox version is now available at ((Find medical sources mainspace/sandbox)). No test cases yet, but can be tested in situ by adding ((medref/sandbox)) to the article (not Talk page), or at Special:ExpandTemplates with the context title set to 'Giardiasis' (or any medical article). Adding Wikmoz.

Note that ((Medref)) does not currently have the |find= parameters used by ((More cn)), and this means that the search terms will be the article title, exactly; this can yield poor search results, especially with articles with longer, descriptive article titles which are not often the exact expression used in sources:

The find params could be added, if needed, to ameliorate this if it becomes an issue. Since the top part of the banner already has the link to MEDRS, maybe we don't need the bolded, 'Guidelines' link here, and if we dropped it, we could add another link or two to the list. Mathglot (talk) 21:12, 21 November 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Looks good! I changed "Guidelines" back to "Source guidelines" since it could otherwise be confused for a link to condition guidelines. Given the context, I think we can shorten the label to simply "Find sources" to save some characters. - Wikmoz (talk) 23:05, 21 November 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]

The sandbox version currently generates an error when used in mainspace (e.g., from any article); there's a config in the module to allow mainspace usage, which I adjusted here, so not sure why this is still occurring, yet; maybe a cacheing issue? Will have to check later. Mathglot (talk) 00:11, 24 November 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Wikmoz, can you take a look at this? Try Special:ExpandTemplates with contextTitle=Giardiasis and wikitext =

# ((more citations needed))
# ((more citations needed/sandbox))
# ((medref))
# ((medref/sandbox))

Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 00:43, 24 November 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I believe the issue was that the sandbox implementation (Template:Find medical sources mainspace/sandbox) was pointed to the corresponding sandbox module (Module:Find sources/templates/Find medical sources mainspace/sandbox), which didn't have your fix. I pointed it to the production version of the module and the error went away. - Wikmoz (talk) 02:47, 24 November 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Thanks! Mathglot (talk) 09:19, 24 November 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Mathglot, safe to push this one live? - Wikmoz (talk) 18:49, 1 December 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]

What does "relies too heavily on primary sources" mean? Why is this phrase linked with the phrase "needs more medical references for verification"? Apologies for asking too many questions, I am trying to understand what is the reasoning behind combining these two phrases in this banner. --kupirijo (talk) 12:05, 25 January 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Per WP:MEDRS, primary sources should generally not be used for assertions about biomedicine. So if they're used they're often unreliable. Alexbrn (talk) 13:32, 25 January 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Alexbrn: Thank you. Isn't a citation of a scientific article in a peer-reviewed journal a primary source? Could you give me an example of a primary source in medical citations that should be avoided? Thank you once again and apologies if my questions seem very basic. --kupirijo (talk) 14:37, 25 January 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I suggest as background to WP:MEDRS, WP:WHYMEDRS and WP:MEDFAQ. An example of a primary source would be pmid:33017106. Alexbrn (talk) 14:42, 25 January 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Alexbrn: Thank you! --kupirijo (talk) 14:46, 25 January 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]