User talk:81.155.80.244

Please do not replace Wikipedia pages with blank content. Blank pages are harmful to Wikipedia because they have a tendency to confuse readers. If it is a duplicate article, please redirect it to an appropriate existing page. If the page has been vandalised, please revert it to the last legitimate version. If you feel that the content of a page is inappropriate, please edit the page and replace it with appropriate content. If you believe there is no hope for the page, please see the deletion policy for how to proceed. - Gilliam (talk) 15:15, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Removal of assessment template on Talk:Positional asphyxia

Please see Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment to understand what the ratings mean. From the article history and your edit summaries, I'm assuming you are upset that an article you have contributed to is rated as Low-importance. Note that this rating refers to the topic, not the quality of the article. That the article is rated as Start class is simply because the person who assessed the article deemed the content to be incomplete. I don't think anyone would object to you increasing the rating to C-class based on the guidelines at Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment. But please note, the assessment template is an important part of Wikipedia's quality assessment structure, and repeated removal of it will likely be considered a blockable offense. 66.57.4.17 (talk) 15:59, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Hello again. Literally anybody can assess an article or modify an articles current assessment levels (that includes you!). The person who originally assessed the article is User talk:WhatamIdoing (she did so in this edit). I'm sure that she would be more than happy to discuss with you why she chose start/low -- why not go chat with her about the most appropriate importance rating. Judging by the importance guidelines at WikiProject Medicine -- Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Assessment#Importance_scale -- the Low rating could be because the article "cover[s] a specific part of a more important article," in this case asphyxia. 66.57.4.17 (talk) 17:32, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Comments

I'm sorry that you're unhappy with Wikipedia's rating system. The purpose is to figure out which articles are "finished" (or nearly so) and which ones need more attention. Positional asphyxia is a short article -- perhaps a "perfect stub", in Wikipedia-speak -- but it simply does not meet the requirements for the next highest quality class (e.g., it doesn't divide the material into subsections, and thus doesn't have the required structure). I don't control the quality rating system; if you want to propose changes to it, then you need to talk to the WP:1.0 team.

As for the importance, WP:WikiProject Medicine always rates rare medical problems, like this one, as lower importance than common medical problems. The fact that positional asphyxia is rare -- and therefore not a subject that Wikipedia needs to have a good quality article on right away -- is what drives the "low-importance" rating. If you think of this rating as "How often do people read this article", then you'll have the general idea. Positional asphyxia doesn't appear in the list of the 1,000 most popular medicine-related pages; almost no rare conditions do. If you think that improving this article should be of noticeably more importance than the typical rare medical issue, then please feel free to leave a note at WP:MEDA to request a reassessment. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:17, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Response

If you are not happy with the quality of the article, then surely YOU should improve it.

If people are now being appointed as 'experts' to review other people's work then they need to be an acknowledged expert on the topic - as with the peer reviewed journals. If you are an 'expert' on this subject then please add to the article.

I am not actually happy that this article has been hijacked as a 'medical problem' - presumably by doctors. Most interest I get on this topic is from law enforcement or attorneys. Law enforcement is interested in preventing it, lawyers are interested in litigation after they are dead. It rarely comes up as being of interest to doctors (no money to be made?)

I see from other comments on your talk page that you are also labelling anatomy articles as 'medical', even though this is arguably an area of expertise/interest for several other disciplines as well as doctors. It sounds like the doctors are tying to take over chunks of wikipedia and impose their views on it. Doctors have their own journals/conferences etc which they can dominate and control to exclusion of everyone else, that phenomenon shouldn't be expanded to wikipedia. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.153.121.22 (talk) 08:54, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

(1) There is nothing pejorative about saying "This article's current state is best described by the seventh line in the relevant table -- unless, of course, you're the sort of person who thinks that it's pejorative to say "This child is twelve years old" when the child wishes he were old enough to drive a car. Accurately identifying its current state of development is not a demand that it be further developed. If you seriously think that the article, which contains 13 sentences and two bullet points, is better described by another line on that table, then you can ask for a reassessment at WP:MEDA#Requesting_an_assessment_or_re-assessment. If you're just mad that the table exists at all, then you need to take it up with the people that created the table and need articles assessed according to it, because I can't help you with that problem.

(2) Like every single one of Wikipedia's thousands of WP:Wikiprojects, WPMED is allowed to place a template on the talk page of any article that WPMED says is within its scope. There is no rule to prevent dozens of Wikiprojects from deciding that an article is within their scope; it's not a case of "first come, first served." Death, for example, has been tagged by half a dozen projects. Note please that User:Countincr placed the tag on this article because he believed that it was within the scope of the project. I did not make the determination that this article was within the project's scope; I merely filled in assessment information, which is a task that just about anyone can do.

(2.1) It's not my fault, or WPMED's fault, that the wikiprojects that deal with law enforcement (etc) haven't bothered to find, improve, and/or tag this article.

(2.2) As you admit here, this article is likely to be of much more interest to non-medical projects, and of not very much interest to medicine, which clearly explains why it is assessed as being of low importance to the medical project. Do please remember that "importance" in the WPMED banner means "how important is it that the medical aspects of this article be improved immediately", not "absolute value to the world in general". My determination that the importance of promptly improving the medical aspects of this article is "low" tells you everything that you need to know about why I am not working on improving that article right now.

(3) As you would know if you read the entire discussion, I have not placed WikiProject Medicine tags on articles that are outside of its scope; someone else placed the specific tag that triggered the message, and at the time that the tag was placed, human anatomy was considered to be within the scope of both WikiProject Medicine and WikiProject Anatomy. I have actually been one of the driving forces for getting human anatomy removed from WPMED's scope. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:31, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

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