User talk:Mhaeussl

Your submission at Articles for creation: Merafloxacin has been accepted

Merafloxacin, which you submitted to Articles for creation, has been created.

Congratulations, and thank you for helping expand the scope of Wikipedia! We hope you will continue making quality contributions.

The article has been assessed as Stub-Class, which is recorded on its talk page. It is commonplace for new articles to start out as stubs and then attain higher grades as they develop over time. You may like to take a look at the grading scheme to see how you can improve the article.

Since you have made at least 10 edits over more than four days, you can now create articles yourself without posting a request. However, you may continue submitting work to Articles for creation if you prefer.

If you have any questions, you are welcome to ask at the help desk. Once you have made at least 10 edits and had an account for at least four days, you will have the option to create articles yourself without posting a request to Articles for creation.

If you would like to help us improve this process, please consider .

Thanks again, and happy editing!

awkwafaba (📥) 20:27, 9 July 2021 (UTC)

Sources

Welcome to Wikipedia. Just a quick reminder about sources -- typically, Wikipedians take great care not to "break new ground" in terms of selecting publications that will be considered reliable sources. So, for example, you recently thought to use Covid19dataportal<dot>org as a supporting reference, but that website has never before been successfully used as a reference link on Wikipedia. Thus, it's inadvisable to add content to Wikipedia that is anchored to such a website. I encourage you to keep contributing more avidly to Wikipedia! Good luck! - AppleBsTime (talk) 02:41, 21 December 2021 (UTC)

Hi AppleBsTime (talk), sorry I have no idea how to reply to a comment on my talk page. Will you get a note if I mention your name here? (The Wikipedia talk page system looks like a message system forced into the Wikipedia infrastructure). I missed that webpages of academic institutes hosting open letters signed by hundreds of researchers are not a reliable source anymore. So should I cite the Science or Nature article about this open letter then, rather than the open letter? Thank you for your note in any case, I'll try to find the time to read up more on the Wikipedia rules. Maximilianh (talk) 09:18, 21 December 2021 (UTC)

@Maximilianh:@Mhaeussl: Your source (covid19dataportal<dot>org) is problematic as a reference in the article about GISAID for a number of reasons. For one, the open letter does not mention GISAID in any way, so therefore it would be WP:Original Research to attempt to shoehorn it into a Wikipedia article about GISAID. Another problem, and perhaps more importantly, the website is registered to EMBL-EBI, which is promoting its effort to compete with GISAID’s effort to provide a publicly accessible resource for SARS-CoV-2 sequence data, so as a potential source it lacks WP:Neutral point of view.

Perhaps the main crux of why your source neither fits nor supports the creation of a new section you titled "criticism of the GISAID license", is because the open letter referred to simply calls for open data, with absolutely no indication that this goal is contrary to what GISAID offers. It does not even mention GISAID. There are many reliable sources including those from governments or organizations like the WHO, but one in particular that stood out, is a global registry of research data repositories from the leading global providers of DOIs for research data, namely re3data and DataCite. There they show unmistakably under Terms that GISAID offers open database access and open data access.

I wonder if anyone has checked to see whether some of those having signed the "open letter" may have undisclosed conflicts of interest because their own database operating efforts compete directly with those of GISAID. Do we know how many of them are generators or actual users of SARS-CoV-2 sequence data, or possibly involved in the management and operation of databases that compete for taxpayer funds? While the "open letter" calls for submission of "consensus/assembled SARS-CoV-2 data to the databases of the INSDC" it does not call for the exclusive submission to these databases with *anonymous access to and usage of data*, which might distinguish it from the GISAID sharing model.

Even if you were to cite the two articles you propose, we need to be mindful of all of the pertinent information they and their authors provide -- not just the headlines. News outlets are known to seek eyeballs through sensational headlines, but Wikipedians are obligated to look beyond the headlines for the real information that can be supported by evidence. For example, Meredith Wadman, the reporter responsible for the Science News article, appeared shortly thereafter on WNYC "On the Media", to say about GISAID, "the more that goes into it, the more people want to deposit there, because they know that that's where everyone is going to be turning to find coronavirus sequences of interest for study." Wadman added "the momentum now is so strong for deposition into GISAID." She further critiqued how GenBank does not encourage collaboration that advances scientific careers the way GISAID does. So, if one were to include one perspective from Wadman, one would need to include her other balancing perspectives, too. That is how the Neutral POV policy works. The Nature article also states that GISAID does "encourage fast sharing while protecting data providers' rights", that the GISAID license terms are a "feature not flaw", and that "its terms of access are a benefit, because they encourage hesitant researchers to share data online speedily, without fear that others will use the results without credit."

Another important rule for Wikipedians to observe is that we do not use Wikipedia as a platform to feud over personal views, since we must collectively ensure the neutrality of articles. In at least two articles outside of Wikipedia, you appear to be critical of GISAID. In a letter to Nature on 3 March 2021, you provided an interpretation of a portion of a sentence appearing in a 2006 Correspondence to Nature that has been argued on the Wikipedia talk page as being a mischaracterization. In the same letter you claim that "GISAID’s terms are inconsistent with scientific norms," albeit one could argue that GISAID is seen as the norm among the community of influenza and SARS-CoV-2 researchers. Barely four weeks later, in a manuscript that you co-authored and which apparently did not pass peer review, you claim "that nucleotide sequences of pandemic coronavirus in GISAID are rejected due to automated quality controls…", which is a claim refuted by the GISAID EpiCoV curation team. It can be difficult, but we must strive to refrain from bringing outside disputes onto Wikipedia.

As fellow Wikipedians, we can certainly discuss which sources give the reader a representative and proportional depiction of GISAID, but as Wikipedia editors, we should certainly not cherry-pick the most sensational sources and clauses from any source. It's unfair to say that we're giving the reader an encyclopedic summary of a topic, when really all we’re doing is WP:Coatracking the article to make it more about a tangential subject than the nominal subject. Were we not to practice this editorial self-restraint, our article about Earth, for example, would contain whole paragraphs, rather than the current one sentence about some peoples' belief that our planet is flat. - AppleBsTime (talk) 18:56, 29 December 2021 (UTC)