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:::::Anybody watching this page: Do you think the colorful examples would be really helpful? If not, then I'm happy to skip them. [[User:WhatamIdoing|WhatamIdoing]] ([[User talk:WhatamIdoing#top|talk]]) 05:38, 7 October 2024 (UTC)
::::::I can imagine somebody coming along with a primary source which ''does'' say "Wonderpam is a breakthrough in cancer cures" and arguing that MEDRS allows it because it only prohibits things "that aren't actually in the source". I applaud the use of contractions though. Wikipedia is stuffy about those. [[User:Bon courage|Bon courage]] ([[User talk:Bon courage|talk]]) 06:49, 7 October 2024 (UTC)
::::::MEDRS has certainly grown. Some of it is explanation which isn't really guideline material and could be moved to an essay or project page. Wrt redundancy, I think there is a little danger here that our familiarity with other policy/guidelines pages is not shared generally and so where we might see redundancy with some sentence 2/3 way down WP:V, or whatever, it is that sentence that MEDRS is actually building upon with relevance to medical content. I think it is important to concisely explain and continually remind the community that MEDRS is built on top of our core policies and is a ''consequence'' of them, not some clique-guideline where editors imposed a local consensus of higher standards (disinformation I'm sure WAID knows many experienced editors repeat).
::::::In the above example, the paragraph of redundancy and source of problems is arguably the second one. Once you have said to base article text on secondary sources like reviews and textbooks, it is technically ''redundant'' to say that primary source are discouraged, and not perhaps wise I think to spend time on examples of the worst practice rather than good practice. But redundancy is not always bad. Sometimes it helps to say the same thing from another angle.
::::::In the first example, an aside about onions being high fibre may appear uncontroversial and safe to cite a primary research source, but what if the article noted that blueberries where a good source of antioxidants, which have been shown to prevent cancer and slow aging. That aside is not uncontroversial but it is still a "supplementary detail", in an article about blueberry muffins.
::::::The second example is one that simply fails WP:V. Don't use ''any'' source to say things that aren't actually in the source. We don't need MEDRS to deal with things an editor just made up. It is needed more for the more subtle claims that wonderpam has been found to be beneficial for some lung cancer patients, or that a trial in 2021 found that melanoma was eliminated in some patients taking wonderpam. Such statements lack all the caveats and red flags that the medical-professional author of a good secondary source would be seeing.
::::::Assuming a revised MEDRS contained the same overall structure, a "basic advice" section may well summarise (like a lead) advice that is covered in more detail later. A brief mention here that, ok, when we said to use secondary sources, we didn't mean ''these'' secondary sources: newspapers. Avoiding the popular press is one of the fundamentals of MEDRS, so I wouldn't drop that from "basic advice". Elsewhere on Wikipedia, the popular press and news websites are often a key source, particularly for current controversies, and often where readers/editors first learn about some medical advancement or health conditions. So it is surprising to many to find Wikipedia discourages that. Similarly, it is really surprising for many, particularly with an academic background, that a primary research paper in the Lancet or BMJ or NEJM, all top tier sources of medical research and science of the highest quality, isn't what we want. Thirdly, it is surprise that PubMed/GoogleScholar/etc will find research in low quality journals and that "peer reviewed journal" is not a guarantee that all articles are peer reviewed or are sufficient for including on WP. I wonder if these three things are the core messages of most use to most editors. Are there others? While the advice about primary research papers is mainly a DUE matter, the other issues about newspapers or weak journals or opinion/editorial articles are more RS. -- [[User:Colin|Colin]]°[[User talk:Colin|<sup>Talk</sup>]] 12:11, 7 October 2024 (UTC)
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