Re: [DIYbio] Re: Anybody working on Lyme Disease?

Given that lots of senior editors on Wikipedia use revert-bots to revert
a broad class of edits on principal (the reasoning being: if you are a
good contributor, you'll edit-war the bot, and it'll cave), I'm pretty
skeptical of Wikipedia's odds on issues like this.

To win *any* battle of fact against fancy, you've got to have someone on
your side with advanced privileges on Wikipedia, so they can lock out
badly programmed revert-bots and manchild "editors".

On 20/07/12 23:22, Nathan McCorkle wrote:
> On Jul 20, 2012 5:48 PM, "Adam Levine" <adamlevinemobile@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> That's a problem with Wikipedia, it's become a very entrenched culture in
> places. Don't take it personally.
>>
>
> That's disgusting, what can we do? We've got enough people who know when a
> citation is needed or when scientific bias is happening.we shouldn't stand
> idle
>
>>
>> Adam B. Levine
>> http://MindToMatter.org
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Jul 20, 2012 at 2:40 PM, Phil <philgoetz@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Wednesday, 18 July 2012 16:14:39 UTC-4, Gavin Scott wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Wednesday, July 18, 2012 1:41:41 PM UTC-5, Phil wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Okay, let me try to respond to this in a non-angry way.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> You can be angry if you like; you have a much bigger stake in the issue
> than I do :)
>>>
>>>
>>> What I'm angrier about is the Lyme Disease Wikipedia page.
>>> It has three sections on chronic Lyme disease. These are all written
> with
>>> a very biased viewpoint, putting "chronic" in quotes, claiming that
> belief in
>>> chronic Lyme is a "minority" opinion "not recognized by mainstream
> medicine"
>>> that only a "small number" of doctors hold, and that "most insurance"
> will not
>>> pay for continued treatment of Lyme. In reality, most doctors who have
> Lyme
>>> patients use continued treatment; the only doctors I've met who follow
> the IDSA
>>> guidelines on Lyme are general practitioners who have little experience
> with it.
>>>
>>> When I change the biased language to neutral, or write [citation needed]
>>> after one of these unsupported claim, my edit is removed as being biased
>>> language or as needing a citation!
>>>
>>> I downloaded the references that are ited in the Wikipedia article to
> show that
>>> there is no such thing as chronic Lyme disease. There's about 10 of
> them.
>>> They were published in different medical journals, and by committes from
> different
>>> organizations, including the IDSA, the American Association of Neurology,
>>> the NIH, and the "ad-hoc committee on Lyme disease", whatever that is.
>>> And, guess what, it's just the same doctors writing the same stuff over
> and
>>> over! The key three doctors, who are listed as authors on every original
>>> source and were on every committee, are Shapiro, Wormser, and Halperin.
>>>
>>> I corrected some of the most-biased language, and added text pointing
>>> out that all of the citations used to claim that chronic Lyme denial is a
>>> broad medical consensus are actually written by the same people.
>>> Two anonymous Wikipedia editors, "Novangelis" and "Mast cell",
>>> revert my corrections minutes after I make them, citing Wikipedia
>>> guidelines that fail to apply as justifications. When I pointed out that
>>> all of the arguments against the existence of chronic Lyme are made
>>> by the same people, Novangelis retracted this as "not being neutral
>>> point of view". I restored it, and "Mast Cell" retracted it as
>>> "inappropriate synthesis". (I listed 8 different citations and observed
>>> they were all by the same authors. Mast Cell calls this "inappropriate
>>> synthesis" because none of the articles themselves mention the fact
>>> that they are all written by the same authors).
>>>
>>> Additionally, Novangelis is the same Wiki editor who retracts
>>> edits from the Aspartame page that are not biased in favor
>>> of aspartame! I became acquainted with the aspartame controversy
>>> about 2 years ago, when I wrote a proposal to study the effects
>>> of gut microbes on the safety of artificial sweeteners. I found
>>> that the approval process was highly influenced by lobbyists;
>>> the articles cited by governmental bodies to claim
>>> that aspartame is safe were written (often without
>>> any conflict-of-interest notification) by staff scientists of the
>>> companies producing aspartame; opposing studies were
>>> simply ignored by the regulatory agencies. ALL of the reviews
>>> of the aspartame literature cited by regulatory agencies were
>>> written by staff scientists for chemical companies.
>>> Reading the reviews, they were heavily biased, taking
>>> studies showing safety uncritically, but coming up with
>>> convoluted counter-arguments against each study that
>>> did not show safety, or simply ignoring those more difficult
>>> to dismiss.
>>>
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>>>
>>
>>
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