Note: You will be emailing your assignment # 3 directly to your tutor, however, please paste a version here that excludes your personal information. This will allow us to support your efforts on Wikipedia prior to editing "live" in the article.
Proposed changed: My first proposed change is to remove the epidemiological sentence found under the mechanism “Most often the radiculopathy found in the patients are located in the cervical spine, most commonly affecting C6-C7 spinal nerves” as well as the associated reference. My second change is to update a couple of the points in the epidemiology paragraph that I found to be outdated or wrong. Firstly, I will be changing the first sentence from “Cervical radiculopathy is less prevalent in the United States than lumbar radiculopathy, with an occurrence rate of 83 cases per 100,000.” To “Cervical radiculopathy has an incidence of 107.3 per 10000 for men and 63.5 per 10000 for women, whereas lumbar radiculopathy has a prevalence of approximately 3-5% of the population.” Rationale for proposed changes: For the first change, upon further inspection of the article being cited for the sentence was not relevant to the information being depicted. The article cited did not discuss the epidemiology of cervical radiculopathy. This sentence was also not in the epidemiology section, and would not add information to the epidemiology section, therefore would be better off removed. The reason I am changing the sentence is that it did not correctly dictate what is mentioned in the literature. After an extensive literature search, lumbar radiculopathy was characterized as prevalence, whereas cervical radiculopathy was characterized in terms of incidence. I wanted this to be reflected in the sentence. Furthermore, the citation used for the incidence of cervical radiculopathy was outdated (from 1994), this new article is a review of cervical radiculopathy from 2015. Reference: Berry, J. A., Elia, C., Saini, H. S., & Miulli, D. E. (2019). A Review of Lumbar Radiculopathy, Diagnosis, and Treatment. Cureus, 11(10), e5934. https://doi.org/10.7759/cureus.5934 and Woods, B. I., & Hilibrand, A. S. (2015). Cervical radiculopathy: epidemiology, etiology, diagnosis, and treatment. Journal of spinal disorders & techniques, 28(5), E251–E259. https://doi.org/10.1097/BSD.0000000000000284 Critique of Source: Both articles meet the MEDRS criteria, as they are review articles posted within the last 5 years, and they are also peer-reviewed articles. A couple critiques of the articles is that they both look at either prevalence or incidence, respectively. This makes it difficult to actually compare the occurrence of disease. It would be more worthwhile to have a similar comparison. However, both markers give an indication to the amount of disease within the population.
What to post on the Wikipedia article talk page?
This will also be covered on Nov 23rd in class. Your group should use the below template to share an outline of your proposed improvements (including your new wording and citations). Article talk pages are not places to share your assignment answers. The Wikipedia community will be more interested in viewing your exact article improvement suggestions including where you plan to improve the article (which section), what wording you suggest, and the exact citation (Note: all citations must meet WP:MEDRS)
You will not be able to paste citations directly from your sandbox to talk pages (unless you are interested in editing/learning Wiki-code in the "source editing" mode). We suggest re-adding your citations on the talk page manually (using the cite button and populating the citation by pasting in the DOI, website, or PMID). You will have to repeat this process yet again when you edit the actual article live.