Talk:British surfers catch more than waves: Scientists find antibiotic-resistant bacteria

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As always, collaboration is welcome. I will spare you some of the other delightful puns available for this subject. Darkfrog24 (talk) 16:35, 15 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I listed the Mayo Clinic source last because its content is almost certainly the oldest. NBD to me if anyone wants to move it. Darkfrog24 (talk) 18:37, 15 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

No paywall, no problem[edit]

I just added content straight from the study. I provided tags saying which part of the study each fact came from, but ping me if you need further translation from science-ese. You may find the non-pdf link easier to work with: [1] Darkfrog24 (talk) 18:14, 15 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

One important point: Early on in the study, they say something like "we examined samples from surfers, bodyboarders and body surfers, hereafter referred to as 'surfers.'" Establishing a for-this-paper-only definition is normal for scientific studies. So if you look at a later part of the study and see "surfers," remember that they mean all three groups of people. Darkfrog24 (talk) 19:40, 15 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

"Beach Bum" pun[edit]

Not offended if anyone deletes the line about the meaning of the words in the survey name but it strikes me as something an international reader might not know. Darkfrog24 (talk) 19:06, 15 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I generally think English speakers would be familiar regardless of where in the world. I don't know how much we are supposed to cater to people with limited English skills. But that's just my opinion. It's probably not taught in schools. --SVTCobra 15:52, 16 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
FYI, I hid all the dictionary stuff and added a Wiktionary link. If readers complain, we can probably unhide. It just really broke up the flow of the article. I'd rather not mention the nickname than have all that stuff in there. But the nickname is "official" and not just in the press. Cheers, --SVTCobra 01:44, 17 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Limits of the study[edit]

Should we highlight that the study is limited? Per the study's methodology: "97 bathing water samples from England and Wales were analysed." It is entirely possible there's something going on in the waters of England and Wales and that global surfers are not as much at risk. Cheers, --SVTCobra 15:52, 16 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The text now explicitly states that all samples were collected from the United Kingdom. Darkfrog24 (talk) 18:26, 16 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

When?[edit]

Day word in lede? --Pi zero (talk) 16:08, 16 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

"Sunday." Did someone delete it? Darkfrog24 (talk) 18:20, 16 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Nope. There it is: "In findings published Sunday in Environmental International." Darkfrog24 (talk) 18:20, 16 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Doh. --Pi zero (talk) 01:02, 17 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Review of revision 4376443 [Passed][edit]

  • I recall acagastya objected at some point (validly) that a reviewer can't assume, just because information occurs in one place to which their attention has been directed, that there isn't something else somewhere else in the sources that the reviewer ought to discover that will cast doubt, or at least a different light, on the information. That's true, of course; but, yeah, it seems to me too that those annotations, used with due caution, can be quite helpful in moving things along. --Pi zero (talk) 01:58, 17 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I agree. But an article, such as this, will ultimately rely on the primary source, which is the study itself. The study is the event, the subject, the center of the article. To know where to look within it is helpful. There is no way around that. I do welcome a second pair of eyes. I spent two hours on the review, but I am not an epidemiologist. Wikinews is, after all, not a peer reviewed medical journal. Cheers, --SVTCobra 02:09, 17 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
BTW, I suppressed what I saw as going too far to explain "Beach bum". Thoughts? --SVTCobra 02:11, 17 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
There's precedent for it. I spelled out the meanings of "pro-life" and "pro-choice" in an article about the March for Life last year even though most native speakers already know them. Two out of three Wikinewsies were of the opinion that a line to the effect of "Ramjan is another name for Ramadan" would have improved an article about a murdered teenager. I got some complaints for not spelling out the meaning of "faithless elector" even though there was plenty of context.
Speaking from my own experience, "bum" meaning "rear end" is not something we say in the U.S. (We say "butt.") I can bet there are plenty of Americans who wouldn't realize that "Beach Bum" was meant to be understood both ways, even though they'd probably figure out what "bum" means in other contexts that don't have a more obvious meaning ready to go. Darkfrog24 (talk) 03:02, 17 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Oh, yeah? If I told you to "Go stick it up your bum, ya bum!" I am pretty sure you'd understand both meanings regardless of the side of the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans. /joke --SVTCobra 03:32, 17 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry about the joke. I wasn't around for the examples you cite. But I didn't delete your work, it can be restored. --SVTCobra 03:36, 17 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Heh. I only mean that because Americans are likely to know what a "beach bum" is, they might think that that's the only thing the study name means. Darkfrog24 (talk) 04:23, 17 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]


Regarding possible mistakes: "we know the exact number: 143 (no need to say "about 150")"[2] I chose "about 150" because "recruited" can mean more than one thing in this context. The project actually recruited 389 people and 154 surfers but did not use the samples from all of them. This is normal for studies performed on humans. If you look at Figure 2 in the study (section 3.3), they spell out who was excluded and why. Darkfrog24 (talk) 03:17, 17 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Well, since we don't mention why anyone was excluded (and we certainly don't mention the numbers you just now brought up, which also are very exact), it seems we can assume the reader will understand that 143 was the number of subjects in the study, anyway. --SVTCobra 03:32, 17 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Darkfrog24: Let me ask you directly: Did I mangle the article so much that it should not have been published in its current form? --SVTCobra 03:45, 17 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Probably not. But you raised the possibility that you could have made a mistake, which I interpreted as an invitation to talk about possible mistakes. I also interpreted your comments as an invitation to provide you with some information about how technical studies like this work.
We wouldn't say why subjects were excluded or even that they were excluded because that's how the system always works. It's like a jury in a trial: In most Wikinews articles about trials, we don't explicitly say that exactly twelve people were selected from a larger pool of people called up for jury duty who underwent voir dire or go into why the others were excused because that's how the system always works. We'd only get into jury selection or study participant selection if the point of the Wikinews article was to discuss the methodology, such as if they made the news for having flawed selection methods. Darkfrog24 (talk) 04:23, 17 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@SVTCobra, Darkfrog24: Just to state the obvious, if there are fixes/improvements wanted, they should be submitted as edits for review sooner rather than later, since we only have 24 hours after publication before our only recourse would be to issue a {{correction}}. --Pi zero (talk) 03:56, 17 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Unlike Israeli Health minister Ya'akov Litzman resigns in protest after Jews made to work on Jewish rest day, that article did not have much to do with Ramzaan, and mentioning "Islamic holy month" was more than sufficient. And the thing you were asked to explain was due to the fact that not all democracies have two major parties, and its affect for the story; story's affect to the ongoing event was strong. Regarding the spelling, why don't you say anything for Mysuru/Bengaluru/Mumbai/Navi Mumbai/Odisha?
•–• 16:28, 17 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I didn't mean that article; I meant the one in which the teenage girl was kidnapped on her way back from religious services. I think it might have aged out. Darkfrog24 (talk) 20:08, 17 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I am aware of what article you are saying -- I can even tell you when I wrote that, I have the documentation. The thing is: for that article, Ramzaan's significance to understand or interpret the story was not much, unlike mention of Shabbath for that Israeli transport minister article.
•–• 22:14, 17 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Stop jumping in the discussions which you do not know anything about.
•–• 22:14, 17 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Sources[edit]

I object, strongly, to the idea that a secondary, and stationary, source should be listed ahead of primary sources, solely on the notion of the date at which it was looked at. I object to this reversal. It is not helpful to the readers, nor anyone for that matter, to list the background encyclopedic article about the E.coli bacteria ahead of the actual study and the articles that comment on the study. Please have some common sense. --SVTCobra 13:00, 17 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Not all date of access accounts for "background information" -- so there can not be a well defined line between which date of access qualifies, and which does not qualify for secondary information. Besides, Wikinews is not a blog suggesting readers which sources to visit first, and which one not to. And if a source is used for an article, it is relevant to the article -- regardless of the information being mentioned in the upper portion or lower portion. If the information from the source is not relevant to the story, that fact should not be stated.
•–• 13:12, 17 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Oh, really? So why do we sort sources at all? We sort news sources by "newest first" for the very reason that they are presumed to be more relevant. An encyclopedic entry is not relevant to the news event. Why do you assume that you know how these policies were developed? --SVTCobra 13:18, 17 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Keep this anger to yourself, and think about how would you draw a line for which DoA is primary and which ones are not. Also, the researches hit the MSM after it is actually published, meaning the actual study, if cited, would be at the bottom, if other MSM's were used as the source [published at least one day after the study was published].
•–• 13:24, 17 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
It's not anger. It's common sense. You didn't answer my questions, btw. --SVTCobra 13:30, 17 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

EDIT CONFLICT: Context: I listed the Mayo Clinic's webpage on E. coli last not because I used it for background information but because it was almost certainly older than all the other sources (January 14 across the board; all sources now shown were accessed January 15). By "almost certainly" I mean I vaguely remember visiting the page before, certainly before January 14, but my memory does not meet WN's reliability criteria under these circumstances. I think the order I used is best but not to the extent that I'd object to moving Mayo Clinic to a January 15 position. Both ways are good enough. Neither creates a problem for the reader. I enjoy conversations like this about what the absolute best way to do something might be. I'm glad we're having it after the article is reviewed so that it's clear we're having an academic decision and feel no need to delay publication. That being said, remember that we're colleagues having a friendly discussion. No need to accuse anyone of anything. Someone may have removed my surf terminology from the article, so here I'll respectfully request that you both deep six the insinuations about who's too angry or who needs more common sense. Hang ten on the formatting and we'll find ourselves in the tube! SVC, your questions to Acagastya look a little rhetorical. Maybe he didn't think the was supposed to answer them. Darkfrog24 (talk) 13:35, 17 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]


Yikes! I composed what I hoped was a straightforward comment for here, noting pros and cons, with a final remark that it seemed to me for this particular article, either approach was reasonable. By the time I went to save it there were a whole pile of additional comments here.

Some undated sources are likely to have older content than any of the dated ones; others are likely to have been updated more recently than any of the dated ones. A Sources section is meant to be a record of where information was draw from, of course, and for that purpose it's useful to note the date-of-access of an undated source, the question being whether to then apply that date to the position of the source in the list. The style guide afaics doesn't make an exception for sources with unknown dates that we suspect are much older — it gives a simple rule, chronological from most recent to oldest, and simple rules are a plus when news writing is already plenty complicated. In some cases there's really no way to even plausibly guess where to put relatively stable undated sources; for example, some of William Saturn's On the campaign trail pieces have some dated sources that are years old. All of which entered into my conclusion of 'murky waters; either choice seems workable for the current article'. --Pi zero (talk) 14:24, 17 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]