User talk:BruceSwanson

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Adrian J. Hunter (talk | contribs) at 13:05, 23 June 2010 (I don't think it's necessary). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Welcome!

Hello, BruceSwanson! Welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions to this free encyclopedia. If you decide that you need help, check out Getting Help below, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and ask your question there. Please remember to sign your name on talk pages by clicking or using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your username and the date. Finally, please do your best to always fill in the edit summary field. Below are some useful links to facilitate your involvement. Happy editing! DanielRigal (talk) 00:27, 14 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
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Talk page use

Hi Bruce. The idea of a talk page is that people use it to send you messages and you can reply. It is probably a bad place to write a draft of a new article as that will get mixed up with the messages making it harder to publish the article once you are ready to do so. This is fairly easy to tidy up. What you should do is make a separate user subpage for each new draft article you want to work on. User subpages are still accessible to other users so you can invite people to help with your draft article. You can use the "move" option to make them into real articles when you are ready. They even keep their history. Here is what to do:

  1. Click this link to make a new user subpage for your draft article: User:BruceSwanson/Inventing the Aids Virus
  2. Edit this talk page and copy the part that corresponds to your draft article into the new subpage. Copy the source (with all the Wiki markups) so that you don't lose all your formatting and links.
  3. Save the new subpage and make sure it looks OK. Make sure to put it on your watchlist or bookmark it so that you can get back to it in future.
  4. Remove the the part that corresponds to your draft article from this talk page.

If you like, I can do this for you. I didn't do it without asking because it is considered impolite to rearrange other people's user and talk pages without permission.

Finally, I see that Inventing the AIDS Virus is currently redirected. You will need to ask for the redirect to be deleted to make way for your new article. Wait until the new article is ready before you do that. Such deletions are a formality and won't take long. --DanielRigal (talk) 08:50, 2 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Re Article

Thanks for the advice. I've moved the article to the subpage. I'll be posting it soon. Bruce Swanson 18:47, 2 April 2010 (UTC)

Re: Thanks

No worries, always a delight when a new contributor can create well-written and well-referenced content. In hindsight I agree with Hamiltonstone about changes to be made before it's moved to mainspace.

I see you're a professional copy editor, which is great; Wikipedia never seems to have enough people with the inclination and competence to review others' writing, and you've surely noticed poor prose around the place. You might be interested in the Guild of Copy Editors. You might also be interested in this page created by User:Tony1, also a professional editor, who's seeking feedback about it. Adrian J. Hunter(talk•contribs) 05:47, 8 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I'll give them a look. Thanks for the tip. Bruce Swanson 13:04, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

Combining Deusberg Hypothesis with Inventing the AIDS Virus

The trial page is here

DYK for Inventing the AIDS Virus

Updated DYK query On April 21, 2010, Did you know? was updated with a fact from the article Inventing the AIDS Virus, which you created or substantially expanded. You are welcome to check how many hits the article got while on the front page (here's how, quick check ) and add it to DYKSTATS if it got over 5,000. If you know of another interesting fact from a recently created article, then please suggest it on the Did you know? talk page.

Thanks for this one Victuallers (talk) 18:02, 21 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]


You're quite welcome. It jumped the page-count by 54, as of now.

Sig and other issues

Please fix your signature so it includes a link to, at the very least, your talk page. You can do this in Special:Preferences. See WP:SIG for guidelines about signatures.

Also, your contributions to the DYK project are being discussed at WT:DYK#Editor rejecting many DYK nominations. rʨanaɢ (talk) 04:28, 27 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

April, 2010

Please do not delete or edit legitimate talk page comments, as you did at Peter Duesberg. Such edits are disruptive and appear to be vandalism. If you would like to experiment, please use the sandbox. Thank you. WLU (t) (c) Wikipedia's rules:simple/complex 17:43, 29 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

No, my deletion wasn't intended as vandalism or an experiment. I think your remarks were inappropriate for a Talk page, but I have no further interest in them. BruceSwanson (talk) 17:59, 29 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Please review the talk page guidelines then.
My remarks are not inappropriate. Duesberg's hypothesis is pseudoscience, the scientific consensus is that it is nonsense. At wikipedia we give due weight to the scholarly majority. We are obliged to treat Duesberg's ideas as nonsense, not as a valid, competing hypothesis. That is the reality of wikipedia. WLU (t) (c) Wikipedia's rules:simple/complex 18:16, 29 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia and advocacy

Please don't mistake Wikipedia for an appropriate venue to advocate AIDS denialism. Wikipedia is not a soapbox. The reliable sources state that HIV is infectious and the cause of AIDS. Keepcalmandcarryon (talk) 20:32, 29 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

You wrote: "Please don't mistake Wikipedia for an appropriate venue to advocate AIDS denialism." Exactly to what are you referring? Please be specific. BruceSwanson (talk) 21:21, 29 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Peter Duesberg is an AIDS denialist. His research and opinions are seen as clear, unambiguous AIDS denialism. Any effort to portray his work as having any merit is soapboxing (promoting, advocating for a position) for a wrong (as well has actively harmful) idea about the causes of AIDS. Duesberg's ideas can be briefly summarized, accompanied by an immediate juxtaposition of the scientific consensus, plus any specific statements about where he is wrong and why. WLU (t) (c) Wikipedia's rules:simple/complex 22:29, 29 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Given the user's recent edits and comments concerning HCV, I suspect that the soapboxing extends beyond mere HIV denialism. Do viruses exist at all? There are websites where such suspicions can be discussed and debated. Wikipedia is not one of them. Keepcalmandcarryon (talk) 14:43, 30 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
My edits and comments concern the purported HCV image, not the virus itself. But to answer your question Do viruses exist at all? Yes, they do. As for my alleged "soapboxing", presumably you will be as specific in your examples as you were, above, about my using Wikipedia as a venue for "AIDS denialism". BruceSwanson (talk) 17:26, 30 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Talk page guidelines

Please review the talk page guidelines. In particular, please thread your posts. WLU (t) (c) Wikipedia's rules:simple/complex 00:51, 30 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Exactly to what are you referring? Please be specific. BruceSwanson (talk) 01:47, 30 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
You should specifically read the guidelines I pointed to, and the page on conversational threading. I was particularly referring to when you post on talk pages, please add one leading colon to the left margin of each post you make, so it is easy to tell who said what, when, without having to check the datestamp for each post. This is known as conversational threading and is common practice throughout the web and on wikipedia talk pages. WLU (t) (c) Wikipedia's rules:simple/complex 10:31, 30 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Do not edit archives

Please do not edit archives as you did here. Archives are for historical purpose and should not be modified. Further, no-one will notice your comment since editors do not monitor archives (they are normally maintained by bot accounts). I have undone your change. If you have a concern, bring it up on the talk page. However, regarding the Hep C image issue, it appears that no-one else believes your objections have merit, so I would suggest not bothering. WLU (t) (c) Wikipedia's rules:simple/complex 23:19, 20 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Lead sections

Note that per WP:LEAD, citations are not necessarily required in the lead so long as they are provided in the body. The section in the lead is now over-cited, but also expanded. In the future, please only tag information like that if it's genuinely not in the body. WLU (t) (c) Wikipedia's rules:simple/complex 13:47, 12 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Advocacy

In light of your recent editing, please remember that Wikipedia is not the proper venue for advocacy, such as the promotion of fringe theories including AIDS denialism. Keepcalmandcarryon (talk) 22:01, 15 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I shall try to remember that. Please do the same. BruceSwanson (talk) 19:00, 16 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Except, of course, KCCO isn't selectively removing 404 references that are trivial to relocate and replace, and doesn't have a history of rejecting the well-established mainstream opinion on HIV, nor an anti-science screed on his talk page. Civil POV-pushing is still POV-pushing and is still looked down upon. Fringe theories and nonsense like AIDS denialism are at an enormous disadvantage on wikipedia, deliberately. Because otherwise people would abuse the open editing format to push all sorts of nonsense and we'd end up looking like this piece of garbage. WLU (t) (c) Wikipedia's rules:simple/complex 19:38, 16 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

That's not garbage. This is garbage. BruceSwanson (talk) 08:01, 18 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding this comment, and this board posting, note that wikipedia takes a very dim view of meatpuppetry and encouraging like-minded people to try to swamp the pages. All that will happen is a page lock, series of blocks, and chances are your editing privileges will be suspended. The issue also isn't one of "those big meanies on wikipedia won't listen to our Brave Truth." The problem is, you're on the wrong side. HIV causes AIDS. That's an established fact, with a shitload of evidence that AIDS denialists resent and try to either ignore or downplay. Your beliefs about HIV and AIDS are simply wrong, and you should accordingly cease editing the related pages. There are debates within the scientific community about AIDS - but they're not about whether it exists and whether it is caused by HIV. Wikipedia won't change until the scientific community changes their mind - and unless some very surprising evidence shows up, that's unlikely to happen. WLU (t) (c) Wikipedia's rules:simple/complex 23:18, 16 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Shitload is right -- and you said it.

I doubt that encouraging dissident editors to use their real names while enforcing one of Wikipedia's own rules governing primary sources can qualify as meatpuppetry. As for members of the HIV/AIDS scientific community changing their minds, that reminds me of what Peter Duesberg wrote at the end of Inventing the AIDS Virus regarding such orthodox scientists:


Email address

Hi Bruce,

Apologies for editing your user page, but I noticed you had your email address written in plain text. That's risky, as there are robots that crawl the web looking for email addresses to add to their evil masters' spam lists. The template I applied hides your address from these robots. Wikipedia's article on the topic is Address munging.

Cheers, Adrian J. Hunter(talk•contribs) 07:24, 17 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, Adrian. Wikipedia, like the universe and like onions, has dimensions continually revealed. BruceSwanson (talk) 07:54, 17 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

My 2c on the AZT quote

Hi again. I happened to see the note on your userpage about the sentence in AZT just last night and I'd been thinking about it, so since it's come up at Talk:HIV today, I thought I might as well comment. If I'm understanding you correctly (and I'm not 100% certain of that), you're not disputing that the second paper, at least, really does show a 100-fold difference in vitro. Your concern is that the results are being misused by being discussed in the context of human disease treatment. A few thoughts:

  • There's no sharp line that separates preliminary, tentative, in vitro results from final, indisputable, in vivo results. We can't just peer into a human with HIV and count how many molecules of AZT are binding viral enzymes and how many are binding human enzymes. Any measurement we could possibly make would have to be in some kind of artificially prepared experimental setup. The experiment might use purified enzymes and AZT in a test tube; it might use a line of cells in cell culture; it might use a model organism. But whether it's in vitro or in vivo, it would nevertheless be some kind of artificial model.
  • If I came across any statement of the form "molecule X has 100-fold greater affinity for molecule Y than molecule Z", I would assume that statement to be based on an in vitro experiment. That's just the most common and standard way to get that kind of data. That's not due to laziness – it's the highly successful reductionist approach to molecular biology: gaining insight into a complex system by isolating and experimenting on its parts. That approach is not specific to HIV/AIDS research.
  • It's appropriate for an article on a drug to summarise what is known about its mechanism of action. That kind of information will, in general, be based on in vitro experiments and be reported in primary sources.
  • In the AZT example, the abstract of the second source states, "Azidothymidine triphosphate competed about 100-fold better for the HIV reverse transcriptase than for the cellular DNA polymerase alpha." The Wikipedia article restates that in simpler language. An educated person can verify the statement in the Wikipedia article by checking the cited source. Granted, in this case, the person does need to be quite well-educated to understand the source, probably to roughly first-year uni level biology. But they don't need the kind of specialised knowledge that would be required to interpret raw experimental data, for example; they don't even need to read beyond the abstract. There's no interpretation involved. The sentence in the Wikipedia article does not draw any conclusions that aren't stated in the primary source, so I don't see any issue of original research. Maybe I can better explain how I see it by example: if one primary source said AZT had 100-fold greater affinity, and another primary source said the hypothetical "BZT" had only 50-fold greater affinity, and Wikipedia's article cited those two primary sources to support the new conclusion "AZT is better than BZT", that would be original research. All I see here is appropriate use of a citation to a very high-quality journal to support a straightforward claim. You might be interested in WP:MEDRS, which discusses sourcing in the context of medical articles and complies with WP:OR as it is widely understood.

Anyway, sorry if that seemed rambling, but I guess the bottom line is this: as a scientist-in-training (not published yet, will submit my first article for peer review next week), with little or no prior interest in the HIV/AIDS connection (my few edits to HIV have been mostly gnome-ish and I knew nothing about the science behind the link before editing the article you created), I don't see anything dubious or dodgy about extrapolating from an in vitro binding assay to the mechanism by which a drug that's been proven effective works, nor do I think the sentence in AZT violates either the letter or the spirit of WP:OR.

Adrian J. Hunter(talk•contribs) 16:08, 18 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

By the way, I'm sure it wasn't your intention but you came across as a little incivil at Talk:HIV. Tim's volunteering his time here like the rest of us, so it's not fair to put him on the spot at threat of public humiliation. And please don't comment on people's grammar in a talk page post unless you're actually unclear on what they meant. Adrian J. Hunter(talk•contribs) 16:29, 18 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

On Primary Sources

I didn't intend to be uncivil to Tim Vickers. Remember that by implication I asked the same question of all the other real-name editors with an interest in this matter. And now it's their turn in the spotlight.

The issue here is the use of primary sources. To prevent their misuse, Wikipedia requires that any conclusions drawn from them be documented by reliable secondary sources. Does the sentence I objected to on my user page misinterpret its two primary sources? I contend it does and I propose to let the error be demonstrated by real-name readers of this post. Here is the sentence in question, footnotes intact.


If you click on footnote [1] above (presently corresponding to footnote [8] in the article), and then access the full article, you get this. Now do an article search for "DISCUSSION". Read the first paragraph in that section.

If you click on footnote [2] above (presently corresponding to footnote [22] in the article), and then access the full article, you get this. Now do an article search for "DISCUSSION". Read the first paragraph in that section.

Real-name editors! As the whole world watches, Does the sentence quoted above correctly interpret its two sources?

And now go to the latest article revision of that sentence. Is it any better?

And finally, does everyone now understand why Wikipedia demands that conclusions drawn from primary sources be documented by reliable secondary sources? BruceSwanson (talk) 21:34, 19 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I still think you're misreading WP:OR. Policy does not demand "that conclusions drawn from primary sources be documented by reliable secondary sources". It prohibits Wikipedia contributors from drawing their own conclusions based on primary sources. It does not prohibit the citing of a primary source for a conclusion written in that primary source. Another example: if a Wikipedia article says Source 1 says A[1], and source 2 says B[2], therefore we can conclude C, policy demands that C is documented by a reliable source. C cannot be a novel interpretation by a Wikipedia contributor – that would be original research. But there's no problem with sources 1 and 2 being primary sources, and claims A and B being the conclusions of those sources.
I read the discussion paragraphs you linked above, but I still don't see any problem. The discussion of the first paper is stressing that it had not yet been demonstrated that the compound would be an effective drug in humans. But the paper is not being cited support a claim that the compound is an effective drug in humans – that was established subsequently and reported in this paper, which is cited earlier in Wikipedia's article on AZT. The first paragraph of the discussion of the second paper simply summarises the paper's conclusion, and I'm not sure why you're drawing attention to it.
Adrian J. Hunter(talk•contribs) (my real name), 04:50, 20 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

To justify this edit:


What do you think? BruceSwanson (talk) 01:36, 21 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

If I haven't answered that in the above two sections, then I'm afraid I'm not understanding your question. Adrian J. Hunter(talk•contribs) 05:51, 21 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

My question is simply whether you see the need for the phrase in vitro in the sentence quoted above. BruceSwanson (talk) 23:08, 22 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think it's necessary, mainly for the reason I tried to explain in the second bullet point in the above thread: I really can't see any way that information could be obtained except by an in vitro experiment. Nor do I think the fact the experiment was in vitro warrants special skepticism about its applicability in vivo, especially given the later findings about the drug's success in treating humans.
It doesn't seem to be common in Wikipedia to add in vitro as some sort of disclaimer to any scientific finding determined in a test tube. From a super-quick search, Genetics, Metabolism, Virus, DNA repair and Cell nucleus are all featured articles that would surely contain information that has been determined through in vitro experiments, yet none of them contains that term. Adrian J. Hunter(talk•contribs) 13:05, 23 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

References

  1. ^ a b Mitsuya H, Weinhold K, Furman P, St Clair M, Lehrman S, Gallo R, Bolognesi D, Barry D, Broder S (1985). "3'-Azido-3'-deoxythymidine (BW A509U): an antiviral agent that inhibits the infectivity and cytopathic effect of human T-lymphotropic virus type III/lymphadenopathy-associated virus in vitro". Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 82 (20): 7096–100. doi:10.1073/pnas.82.20.7096. PMC 391317. PMID 2413459.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  2. ^ a b Furman P, Fyfe J, St Clair M, Weinhold K, Rideout J, Freeman G, Lehrman S, Bolognesi D, Broder S, Mitsuya H (1986). "Phosphorylation of 3'-azido-3'-deoxythymidine and selective interaction of the 5'-triphosphate with human immunodeficiency virus reverse transcriptase". Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 83 (21): 8333–7. doi:10.1073/pnas.83.21.8333. PMC 386922. PMID 2430286.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
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