User talk:Nick Barnett

A belated welcome![edit]

Here's wishing you a belated welcome to Wikipedia, Nick Barnett. I see that you've already been around a while and wanted to thank you for your contributions. Though you seem to have been successful in finding your way around, you may benefit from following some of the links below, which help editors get the most out of Wikipedia:

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Again, welcome! McGeddon (talk) 11:06, 30 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry[edit]

I just reverted you at Leukemia. I think you're on the right track, but your first try wasn't quite right, and I couldn't come up with an improvement off hand. Please have another go at it? The main point is that the survival rates are variable. We need something that more strongly implies that numbers in between 60 and 90 are valid and relevant, and "60 or 90" doesn't have that feel. (Also, I think JMML is less than 60%. Maybe it just needs to be re-written with a more recent source.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:44, 2 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Yes: “the five-year survival rate is greater than 60 to 90%, depending on the type of leukemia”.

How about:

“the five-year survival rate is greater than 60%, and, depending on the type of leukemia, greater than 90%”

or

“the five-year survival rate is greater than 60% or even 90%, depending on the type of leukemia”.

It’s still not satisfactory, is it, but the original is innumerate; there’s no such thing as “greater than 60 to 90%”. My edit was for the numeracy, not for the medical facts. (I did, coincidentally, work for a medical publisher on its journal Acute Myeloid Leukemia, but it was nearly 20 years ago, and I am not a medic.)

The reason I was on this page yesterday is that my best friend is in hospital with it. It’s a bit of a shock. I hope an actual medic will read your suggestion of a rewrite using more recent literature — of 83 references, only 8 are from 2017, and only 6 from years since.

In the meantime, I can’t improve on the above, What, so I’ll hand back with my two additional suggestions. Nick Barnett (talk) 18:22, 2 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I've put your second suggestion in, and "pinged" you in the edit summary, so you should be able to find the change if you want. The fact that you recognize innumeracy and want to fix it is one of the reasons I want you to keep editing. :-)

I'm sorry to hear about your friend. Leukemias are a bit like skin cancer, in that they're highly variable. I hope that your friend has one of the more easily treated types. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:36, 3 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Azeem Rafiq[edit]

Thank you for your query on Azeem Rafiq. I've been through and done quite a lot of work on it - although the racism stuff itself is something I've not gotten to beyond the basics yet (I want to do it properly which is going to require some time and careful thought). If you get the chance could you take a look and see if what's been done helps to answer your questions? Ta. Blue Square Thing (talk) 11:13, 7 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

References behind pay walls[edit]

Is there any wikipedia guidance or instruction to cover referencing web pages which are behind pay walls? I ask because I occasionally doubt what I'm reading in an article and so I follow up by trying to check the reference . . . and then find I can't unless I decide to pay money. I expect this is not the place to post this, so I will look for somewhere better. Nick Barnett (talk) 16:01, 14 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

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