Wikipedia talk:Reference desk/Guidelines/Medical advice

Marked as a guideline page

Noticed today that this page was demoted to an essay from a guideline. I assume there is some sort talk on the matter somewhere. Can we get a link for historical purposes please.....last rfc on the matter was long ago here .--Moxy 🍁 18:26, 9 August 2020 (UTC)

The one thing that makes me hesitate is that this page focuses on the wrong target. We can’t control what questions people ASK at our Reference desks... and I don’t really think that ASKING for medical or legal advice is necessary wrong.

What we DO have control over (and want to prevent) is our editors GIVING medical or legal advice. That is where we could get into trouble.

So before we promote this page back to guideline status, I think it would need a minor re-write... shifting the focus from “asking” to “giving”. Blueboar (talk) 19:16, 9 August 2020 (UTC)

Promoting this page back to guideline status would violate existing Wikipedia policy.

WP:PROPOSAL is crystal clear on this: "Proposals for new guidelines and policies require discussion and a high level of consensus from the entire community for promotion to guideline or policy. Adding the {{policy}} template to a page without the required consensus does not mean the page is policy, even if the page summarizes or copies policy."

Please note that the page is currently untagged, not tagged as an essay. I did not want to assume that "has no more status than an essay" equals "is an essay".

Per our policy at Wikipedia:Consensus#Levels of consensus, an RfC on Wikipedia talk:Medical disclaimer can not override a policy or guideline. (Also, Wikipedia:Medical disclaimer contains nothing that resembles the so-called "guideline" that the RfC discussed.)

Again per Wikipedia:Consensus#Levels of consensus, until this "guideline" has been formally been approved by the community through the policy and guideline proposal process, it has no more status than an essay.

If someone wants to go through the process of making this into a real guideline, I suggest first editing out the portions that clearly contradict existing policies such as WP:TPOC, then proposing the new policy or guideline at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy) or at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals). --Guy Macon (talk) 19:31, 9 August 2020 (UTC)

So I am guessing that there is no talk on this matter....just your interpretation of what constitutes a guideline page and how they were tagged in the past. So how do we move forward here....does one editor and their interpretation of past events override past RFC and longstanding tag on the matter? As of now this looks bad because the normal demotion process or even disputed process was not follow and involves a change by someone in a dispute on the content. We are talking and a page tagged for over half a decade and referenced hundreds of times in disputes. --Moxy 🍁 20:31, 9 August 2020 (UTC)

I gave you links and exact quotes to the relevant Wikipedia policies and guidelines. Can you explain why you want to violate Wikipedia's clearly-written policies other than "that's just your opinion, man"?

Regarding that "half a decade", in the last five years there has been exactly one edit by one editor -- by you in 2018, improperly adding a content guideline category to a page that has never gone through the process of becoming a content guideline.[1] --Guy Macon (talk) 23:58, 9 August 2020 (UTC)

I understand the policy I helped write very well. But as a long time member your fully aware that the majority of our guidelines and policies did not go thru this process thus you need to explain whats wrong here over arbitrarily making a decision for the whole community. So what we have is someone coming by 7 years after the tag was added to page that was subsequently referenced in hundreds of conversations leading to other consensus saying they "don't like it". As your aware and linked above there is a process to demote a page you have just found that has been longstanding in its classification. Personally have no clue if the content is still valid but can tell you the precedent you're trying to set will cause many problems. So let's do this properly so it does not look like your ducking around with a community endorsed page all on your own with no community input. We had this same problem with the portal guideline and I took lots of input to change....not changed because one person is in a dispute about its content. Serious conflict of interest.-Moxy 🍁 02:23, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

Does this page reflect community consensus

Should this page still be labeled as a guideline? --Moxy 🍁 05:54, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

History

Added to guideline category by User:OlEnglish in 2010 as seen here then subsequently the banner as a guideline was added here in 2012 by User:NTox. In 2020 the guideline categorization and banner were removed based on the fact there seems to be no talk page discussion about it's promotion in the first place ten years ago. Yes it is true that ten years ago our policy promotion protocols weren't strickly adhere to because of the amount of people working on the backside of Wikipedia resulting in pages that many or many not have been categorized/"promoted" as many would say correctly (example WP:POG2019RFC). Thus the question today is not about who did what when...but rather does this page reflect current community consensus and should it be categorized as a guideline today. Does it simply need an update or are the principles wrong altogether thus its categorisation as a guideline should have never happened --Moxy 🍁 04:25, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

Should this be categorized as a guideline or a type of essay

• Neither: The above question presents a False dilemma. Category:Wikipedia supplemental pages is a better choice than either choice listed.

In particular, categorizing this page as a guideline would allow any editor to delete comments from other editors in direct violation of our existing policy at WP:TPOC. --Guy Macon (talk) 05:25, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

Moxy just silently changed the above question from "Should this be categorized as a guideline or an essay" to "Should this be categorized as a guideline or a type of essay" The question should never be changed after editors have commented on it.

The claim that supplemental pages are a kind of essay is factually incorrect. Category:Wikipedia supplemental pages and Category:Wikipedia essays are different categories and generate different headers at the top. Look the the headers at the top of WP:YWAB and WP:BRD to see the difference. --Guy Macon (talk) 05:56, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

Best read over Template:Supplement#Current usage and I take it you're where this is not a talk page were talking about .--Moxy 🍁 06:02, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

Discussion

• Not enough choices: Asking "Should this be categorized as a guideline or an essay" excludes other viable options such as placing it in Category:Wikipedia help or Category:Wikipedia supplemental pages. We have a page on this: False dilemma. --Guy Macon (talk) 05:17, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

• Biased RfC: the author of this RfC failed to write a brief, neutrally-worded question at the top as required by WP:RFCNEUTRAL. Instead they wrote a lengthy paragraph arguing for one particular outcome. --Guy Macon (talk) 05:17, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

  The question at the top is: "Should this page still be labeled as a guideline?", which is quite brief and, possibly apart from emphasizing the word "still", appropriately neutral (IMO).  --Lambiam 14:31, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

  The bias is in the history section, which completely ignores an important fact in the history; that my edit was according to policy. ("Adding the {{policy}} template to a page without the required consensus does not mean the page is policy"[2]) Instead Moxy provides a biased reason for why I made the deletion that completely ignores my clearly-stated reason. Moxy should place his arguments in a !vote like everyone else, not in the RfC header. --Guy Macon (talk) 15:14, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

• Too soon: WP:PROPOSAL says this:

Good practice for proposals

One path for proposals is developing them through steps of

1. {{brainstorming}}
2. {{draft proposal}}
3. {{proposal}}
4. {{policy}} or {{guideline}}

The first step is to write the best initial proposal you can. Authors can request early-stage feedback at Wikipedia's village pump for idea incubation and from any relevant WikiProjects. Amendments to a proposal can be discussed on its talk page. It is crucial to improve a proposal in response to feedback received from outside editors. Consensus is built through a process of listening to and discussing the proposal with many other editors.

Once you think the initial proposal is well written, and the issues involved have been sufficiently discussed among early participants to create a proposal that has a solid chance of success with the broader community, start an RfC for your policy or guideline proposal in a new section on the talk page, and include the {{rfc|policy}} tag along with a brief, time-stamped explanation of the proposal.

In my opinion, this RfC should be voluntarily withdrawn and the author should start with the first step listed in WP:PROPOSAL. --Guy Macon (talk) 05:17, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

Reclassification based on a 10-year old omission in process does not hold much weight after this amount time used as a guideline and seen by thousands... WP:TALKFIRST and WP:HISTORICAL. Besides the fact that this page has been referred to and subsequently influenced countless discussions over the past decade can you explain what's wrong with the content. Why is this page you just found now a concern marked as a guideline besides your POV that's is local and not community-based? Let's forget the gaming and get to the current unknown content problems.--Moxy 🍁 05:43, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

The main content problem is that it violates our policy at WP:TPOC. This has been explained to you before. Here is an example of the kind of comment removal that this page encourages:[3] On what planet is that "medical advice"? --Guy Macon (talk) 06:01, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

Actually, I would call that medical advice, at least borderline. And (hate to say it) your constitutional law needs work. EEng 11:50, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

I tend to agree. It's borderline, but the first paragraph of that removed answer does offer what could be construed as advice for treating or preventing a communicable illness. Also, the answer rather goes off on a tangent and fails to actually answer the specific question as asked. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 15:44, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

Finally an example.....so in response to that edit you demoted this page? So really as per WP:POLCON this should be reviewed and talked about as now is happening.--Moxy 🍁 06:13, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

Nobody "demoted" the page. It was never "promoted" to a policy in the first place. What part of "Adding the {{policy}} template to a page without the required consensus does not mean the page is policy"[4] are you having trouble understanding? --Guy Macon (talk) 06:30, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

Its been here for ten years and used as a guideline by hundreds WP:PGLIFE. ....its wonderful you found it now and dont like it....but we have a process for just this type of thing.--Moxy 🍁 06:42, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

• As currently written, this page is focused on the wrong thing. ASKING for medical/legal advice isn’t something we have any control over, and to my mind isn’t wrong. What we can control is someone GIVING medical or legal advice. Giving advice IS wrong, so THAT is what needs a policy to prevent. Blueboar (talk) 12:32, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

  The page is clearly meant as a guideline on how to deal with questions seeking medical advice, not written for the people posting questions, but for the volunteer respondents. As such it is a useful supplement to the general maxim that Wikipedia does not provide medical advice.  --Lambiam 14:31, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

• Revert demotion; then Discuss. I find it curious, to say the least, for someone to boldly demote a page from its long-standing guideline status to whatever without clear consensus, and then to argue that reverting this demotion amounts to establishing a new guideline. The best course of action, IMO, is to revert the demotion and then have an RfC on a proposal whether to keep or remove the guideline status, with a proper preceding discussion. If people have issues with the wording of the current version, regardless of its status, these should preferably be discussed and resolved first, because they may otherwise work to muddle the discussion.  --Lambiam 14:31, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
•  Comment: I was pinged about this discussion, as I made some significant edits to this guideline back in 2007, based on a proposal I made back then. As I haven't been active on the RD since 2010, I cannot really comment on the subsequent changes made to these guidelines, other than to observe that it (or at least the recommended procedure for dealing with questions asking for medical advice) already differs substantially from the version I proposed and wrote back then (which was, in a nutshell, to promptly replace both the question and any answers with {{RD-deleted}} and let the asker rephrase the question if they feel it was not intended as a request for medical advice). Not being familiar with the current state of the reference desk, I cannot say whether or not the current version of the guideline still serves its purpose, although I also see no obvious reason to demote it from its historical status.

  However, I'd like to respond to some of the arguments made above in favor of demoting this page by noting that the reference desks are not talk pages. They may look a little bit like talk pages, insofar as they also contain threaded discussions, but they differ from actual talk pages in several ways — most notably in the fact that they are part of the public-facing side of Wikipedia in a way that e.g. user and article talk pages (and also most pages in the Wikipedia namespace) are not. As such, the talk page guidelines, including WP:TPOC, do not and should not be assumed to apply to the reference desks in every respect. The refdesks are really their own thing, not exactly like anything else on Wikipedia, but in some respects (e.g. their intended audience) they're really closer to article space than to talk pages.

  Of course, there's a lot of good advice on WP:TPG for smoothly and civilly conducting any kind of threaded discussion on a wiki page, and much of that advice does make sense also on the reference desks. But it should only be applied insofar as it does make sense here and, in particular, it should not be blindly applied where it contradicts guidelines established specifically for the reference desks. (Also, even if both guidelines were applicable to the same pages, and even if there was an apparent contradiction between them, this would still not in itself be a reason to demote one of them: guidelines are guidelines and, as the template at the top of them says, they must be applied with common sense and with the need for occasional exceptions in mind.) —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 15:26, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

  Re: "As such, the talk page guidelines, including WP:TPOC, do not and should not be assumed to apply to the reference desks in every respect", how do you reconcile that claim with WP:TALK, which says that "The guidelines below... apply not only to article discussion pages but everywhere editors interact, such as deletion discussions and noticeboards."? --Guy Macon (talk) 15:36, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

• Another choice that we were not offered: Assume for the sake of argument that someone reading this RfC completely agrees with creating a new policy forbidding asking medical questions but isn't comfortable with letting any editor delete any other editor's comments. Perhaps they think we should have a policy about medical questions but that it should be enforced the way so many other policy violations that are not listed as instantly deletable in WP:TPOC are handled; with a warning template followed by asking an administrator to block them if they keep doing it. Alas, that isn't one of the choices that are being offered in this RfC. Our only choice is to either create a new policy that allows any editor to delete anything that they don't like by calling something as simple as "should I throw away all of my possessions" a request for medical advice or to have no policy at all. --Guy Macon (talk) 15:28, 10 August 2020 (UTC)