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It's not clear to me if the above "To-do list" is a WikiProject Medicine effort, i.e., something we, as a WikiProject, have decided (via consensus) to establish, or if it was one (unidentified) editor's idea, or something else. Can someone clarify? Mark D Worthen PsyD (talk) [he/his/him] 03:51, 4 May 2021 (UTC)
There seems to be at least a vague consensus both on- and off-site to avoid possessives in names of conditions, i.e. that Down's syndrome and Asperger's syndrome are now an obsolete style. I know I have encountered advice to this effect in multiple offsite style guides, and it's weird to me that MOS:MED doesn't cover it. I'm also occasionally running into article titles like Milroy's disease which seem like they should move, but there's not an entirely clear basis on which to RM them. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 20:46, 22 January 2024 (UTC)
Editorials against the possessive are pretty common, e.g. the one already cited above and [14] [15] [16] [17] (though two [18] [19] I have not yet found full-text access to, including via WP:TWL). There are also some polemical counter-essays that rely on traditionalism notions or appeals to what non-medical writers prefer, e.g. this one which only cares what general-audience dictionaries like, and this one with right-wing dogwhistling like "a really silly example of political correctness run amok" (despite this not being a political question); another here includes some rationale why Pascal's principle and similar terms for eponymous laws, procedures, devices, and so on, should still be possessive (though it tries to over-apply this to non-parallel cases like diseases, syndromes, and other conditions), but also concludes with a similar rant against gender-neutrality and in favor of traditionalism and against the natural process of language change. Some essay and other material on this subject is simply neutrally observational that both styles exist but that their conflict/inconsistency is problematic in various ways: [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26]. Most dictionaries are very slow to produce new editions or otherwise update their material (though most of those updated within the last generation or so include both possessive and non-possessive forms for the conditions with names commonly encountered in everyday English), and some general-audience style guides are as also slow to update. But the Associated Press Stylebook (dominant guide for American news writing) has made the no-possessive switch. I've not yet checked Mosby's Medical Dictionary or Taber's Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary yet, nor gone over various other mainstream style guides on this question, like Chicago and New Hart's/Oxford current edition; Chicago 16th preferred no possessive, but also said that the possessive form "may be preferred in a general context" (§ 8.143).
So, regarding actual medical usage, "leave it to some international committee to decide .... best left to committees, making it 'somebody else's problem'" essentially has already happened for almost exactly 50 years, with a now generally dominant no-'s result (though some terms seem more resistant to it) that has become our problem. The fact that it was discussed before, some time ago, on WP doesn't mean it should never be discussed again nor emerge with a clear resolution to say something about it in MOS:MED. A literal "some international committee" is basically a red herring: "there is no central body regulating the use of [medical] eponyms. Any changes in designation or use thus must reflect a naturally occurring, emerging, and broadly based consensus ... in effect a reflection of a decision by a [medical] 'court' of opinion." [27]. While not every journal and other medical publisher is in exact agreement on this (and actually British ones that retain the possessive are more common that American ones; so much for the "possessive is an Americanism" ENGVAR claim, also refuted here and here, citing multiple sources), and the decline rate in possessive form of one syndrome versus another is not constant [28], it's clear that the possessive usage has greatly declined since the 1970s. At what point is all of this evidence of a shift, at least within literature competent on the subject, "enough"? I'm often critical of attempts to impose specialist-source writing conventions on Wikipedia, but those concerns do not apply when the best-practice usage in such source material does not actually conflict with a non-specialist writing norm (e.g., we have no problem at all adopting the italics and capitalized-genus format for Homo sapiens and E. coli, nor the space-between-unit-figures-and-symbols standard, and standardized symbols, for 3 mm and 560 cu ft). Here, there is no particular norm but completely random usage in non-specialist sources; the avoidance of the possessive form will not be an "astonishment" for readers, and there is no compelling reason not to standardize (while there are good reasons to do so).
Using the shorter form on WP would not only better agree with the modern source material it would also align better with WP:CONCISE policy. There's also a WP:CONSISTENT argument to make: not only does using a possessive in a few "hold-out" cases like Milroy's disease and Parkinson's disease conflict with most such other articles, various terms of this sort (especially those named after multiple parties such as Tay–Sachs disease and Chédiak–Higashi syndrome) are virtually unattested in possessive form, so normalizing in the opposite direction would not actually be possible. Also, it's worth noting that the Austrlian Government Style Manual [29] draws a distinction we might find useful here, and which seems to encapsulate where the actual usage is going anyway: "If it is a disease named after people who had the disease, use the possessive case. Lou Gehrig's disease, Legionnaire's disease. If it is a disease or anatomical part named after the person who discovered, studied or described it, don't use the possessive case. Alzheimer disease, Down syndrome, Henle loop." And all the material in all the works agree that ones named after places (Ebola virus disease, St. Louis encephalitis, and Lyme disease) never take a possessive. Same with ones named metaphorically after historical, literary, or mythological figures (Marie Antoinette syndrome, Pickwick syndrome, Oedipus complex). PS: Some bodies and works (including Mendelian Inheritance in Man) go further, and suggest replacing all medical eponyms entirely (and there are published debates on the idea [30]), but this seems a bridge too far, especially for WP, which is bound to a pretty strong extent by WP:COMMONNAME. However, that is not a style policy, and whether to possessivize something would seem to be a style question (plus a redirect should always exist from the -'s form and from the curly -’s form as well). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 23:44, 26 January 2024 (UTC)
A PubMed search for article title + abstract text for exact string match. For example: "down's syndrome" in 1983.
Table of stats
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These show that for PubMed article titles and abstracts:
Here are also the Ngram stats:
The ngram results show the possessive is way ahead of the non-possessive for all three conditions and the only chart showing some meaningful variation is the one for Down's syndrome where the possessive is becoming steadily less popular but still a long way to go.
Personally, I dislike searches like these as it is so easy to make mistakes or misinterpret the results. Please let me know if they are misinterpreted or incorrect. I remain unmoved from my position that the differences are almost entirely to do with pronunciation and uncertainty about how to form a possessive rather than invented reasons like whether the person had it or the doctor had it. Other examples mentioned above are Tay–Sachs, where the the second guy is called Sachs and very few people on planet Earth are sure how to make that possessive or enjoy saying it. And similarly, Chédiak–Higashi syndrome is a disease named after two people, and even fewer people on planet Earth are confident to make that possessive, and many might even assume it is a place name. The general trend with diseases is to avoid and sometimes replace those named after people or places. For example, Ebola would not get that name in 2023. Worrying about whether there's an apostrophe in a name that still clearly refers to the doctor/patient generates a remarkable amount of publications. Don't doctors have more important things to do, like treating patients?
SMcCandlish research contains a lot of useful links but there are two dozen sources cited, which disagree, most of which acknowledge this is an ongoing area of dispute. Consistency of article titles might be an argument for picking one style over another. It would be more persuasive if the usage patterns for possessive vs non-possessive, particularly for ...disease, were similar, or that there was a consistent trend away from the possessive for ...disease forms. But currently there's really no love for Parkinson disease or Alzheimer disease on either side of the Atlantic, and if anything, it is getting rarer. I wonder if this is a result of SEO practices when writing papers, that there's a strong pressure to pick the more popular search term. Also note that I only searched for the full name of these diseases/syndromes. Searching for the abbreviated form (e.g., "Parkinson" without "--- disease") is left to the reader (I had a go and it didn't surprise me at all that the possessive form was very popular and non-possessive rare, but there are contaminants from other uses of that name). -- Colin° Talk 16:48, 13 February 2024 (UTC)
"Do not describe suicide or other self-harm actions as being successful, unsuccessful, or failed. This is unclear and judgmental."
Ironically, this is unclear and judgmental.
How about: "This is unclear about whether the action was fatal, and implies intent that may not be known." LesbianTiamat ( talk) 10:57, 9 February 2024 (UTC)
Colin° Talk 20:27, 22 February 2024 (UTC)Just a few decades ago, the word “suicide” was also almost unsayable – and unprintable. Soon after it opened in 1972, Mieli’s crisis centre in Helsinki changed its name from “suicide prevention centre” to “crisis prevention centre” because there were objections to publishing the word in the phone book. For many older Finnish people, Sihvola says, “suicide” is still a difficult word to say; as with the word “bear” – as in the animal – there is a sense that saying it will bring it closer.
I have noticed that this article contains a long excerpt from Digital media use and mental health, which lists many systematic reviews and describes them in detail, for example:
Do you think these violate WP:MEDSAY? Bendegúz Ács ( talk) 18:55, 26 March 2024 (UTC)
This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
Manual of Style/Medicine-related articles page. |
|
Archives: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17Auto-archiving period: 90 days |
This project page does not require a rating on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to multiple WikiProjects. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
It's not clear to me if the above "To-do list" is a WikiProject Medicine effort, i.e., something we, as a WikiProject, have decided (via consensus) to establish, or if it was one (unidentified) editor's idea, or something else. Can someone clarify? Mark D Worthen PsyD (talk) [he/his/him] 03:51, 4 May 2021 (UTC)
There seems to be at least a vague consensus both on- and off-site to avoid possessives in names of conditions, i.e. that Down's syndrome and Asperger's syndrome are now an obsolete style. I know I have encountered advice to this effect in multiple offsite style guides, and it's weird to me that MOS:MED doesn't cover it. I'm also occasionally running into article titles like Milroy's disease which seem like they should move, but there's not an entirely clear basis on which to RM them. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 20:46, 22 January 2024 (UTC)
Editorials against the possessive are pretty common, e.g. the one already cited above and [14] [15] [16] [17] (though two [18] [19] I have not yet found full-text access to, including via WP:TWL). There are also some polemical counter-essays that rely on traditionalism notions or appeals to what non-medical writers prefer, e.g. this one which only cares what general-audience dictionaries like, and this one with right-wing dogwhistling like "a really silly example of political correctness run amok" (despite this not being a political question); another here includes some rationale why Pascal's principle and similar terms for eponymous laws, procedures, devices, and so on, should still be possessive (though it tries to over-apply this to non-parallel cases like diseases, syndromes, and other conditions), but also concludes with a similar rant against gender-neutrality and in favor of traditionalism and against the natural process of language change. Some essay and other material on this subject is simply neutrally observational that both styles exist but that their conflict/inconsistency is problematic in various ways: [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26]. Most dictionaries are very slow to produce new editions or otherwise update their material (though most of those updated within the last generation or so include both possessive and non-possessive forms for the conditions with names commonly encountered in everyday English), and some general-audience style guides are as also slow to update. But the Associated Press Stylebook (dominant guide for American news writing) has made the no-possessive switch. I've not yet checked Mosby's Medical Dictionary or Taber's Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary yet, nor gone over various other mainstream style guides on this question, like Chicago and New Hart's/Oxford current edition; Chicago 16th preferred no possessive, but also said that the possessive form "may be preferred in a general context" (§ 8.143).
So, regarding actual medical usage, "leave it to some international committee to decide .... best left to committees, making it 'somebody else's problem'" essentially has already happened for almost exactly 50 years, with a now generally dominant no-'s result (though some terms seem more resistant to it) that has become our problem. The fact that it was discussed before, some time ago, on WP doesn't mean it should never be discussed again nor emerge with a clear resolution to say something about it in MOS:MED. A literal "some international committee" is basically a red herring: "there is no central body regulating the use of [medical] eponyms. Any changes in designation or use thus must reflect a naturally occurring, emerging, and broadly based consensus ... in effect a reflection of a decision by a [medical] 'court' of opinion." [27]. While not every journal and other medical publisher is in exact agreement on this (and actually British ones that retain the possessive are more common that American ones; so much for the "possessive is an Americanism" ENGVAR claim, also refuted here and here, citing multiple sources), and the decline rate in possessive form of one syndrome versus another is not constant [28], it's clear that the possessive usage has greatly declined since the 1970s. At what point is all of this evidence of a shift, at least within literature competent on the subject, "enough"? I'm often critical of attempts to impose specialist-source writing conventions on Wikipedia, but those concerns do not apply when the best-practice usage in such source material does not actually conflict with a non-specialist writing norm (e.g., we have no problem at all adopting the italics and capitalized-genus format for Homo sapiens and E. coli, nor the space-between-unit-figures-and-symbols standard, and standardized symbols, for 3 mm and 560 cu ft). Here, there is no particular norm but completely random usage in non-specialist sources; the avoidance of the possessive form will not be an "astonishment" for readers, and there is no compelling reason not to standardize (while there are good reasons to do so).
Using the shorter form on WP would not only better agree with the modern source material it would also align better with WP:CONCISE policy. There's also a WP:CONSISTENT argument to make: not only does using a possessive in a few "hold-out" cases like Milroy's disease and Parkinson's disease conflict with most such other articles, various terms of this sort (especially those named after multiple parties such as Tay–Sachs disease and Chédiak–Higashi syndrome) are virtually unattested in possessive form, so normalizing in the opposite direction would not actually be possible. Also, it's worth noting that the Austrlian Government Style Manual [29] draws a distinction we might find useful here, and which seems to encapsulate where the actual usage is going anyway: "If it is a disease named after people who had the disease, use the possessive case. Lou Gehrig's disease, Legionnaire's disease. If it is a disease or anatomical part named after the person who discovered, studied or described it, don't use the possessive case. Alzheimer disease, Down syndrome, Henle loop." And all the material in all the works agree that ones named after places (Ebola virus disease, St. Louis encephalitis, and Lyme disease) never take a possessive. Same with ones named metaphorically after historical, literary, or mythological figures (Marie Antoinette syndrome, Pickwick syndrome, Oedipus complex). PS: Some bodies and works (including Mendelian Inheritance in Man) go further, and suggest replacing all medical eponyms entirely (and there are published debates on the idea [30]), but this seems a bridge too far, especially for WP, which is bound to a pretty strong extent by WP:COMMONNAME. However, that is not a style policy, and whether to possessivize something would seem to be a style question (plus a redirect should always exist from the -'s form and from the curly -’s form as well). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 23:44, 26 January 2024 (UTC)
A PubMed search for article title + abstract text for exact string match. For example: "down's syndrome" in 1983.
Table of stats
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|
These show that for PubMed article titles and abstracts:
Here are also the Ngram stats:
The ngram results show the possessive is way ahead of the non-possessive for all three conditions and the only chart showing some meaningful variation is the one for Down's syndrome where the possessive is becoming steadily less popular but still a long way to go.
Personally, I dislike searches like these as it is so easy to make mistakes or misinterpret the results. Please let me know if they are misinterpreted or incorrect. I remain unmoved from my position that the differences are almost entirely to do with pronunciation and uncertainty about how to form a possessive rather than invented reasons like whether the person had it or the doctor had it. Other examples mentioned above are Tay–Sachs, where the the second guy is called Sachs and very few people on planet Earth are sure how to make that possessive or enjoy saying it. And similarly, Chédiak–Higashi syndrome is a disease named after two people, and even fewer people on planet Earth are confident to make that possessive, and many might even assume it is a place name. The general trend with diseases is to avoid and sometimes replace those named after people or places. For example, Ebola would not get that name in 2023. Worrying about whether there's an apostrophe in a name that still clearly refers to the doctor/patient generates a remarkable amount of publications. Don't doctors have more important things to do, like treating patients?
SMcCandlish research contains a lot of useful links but there are two dozen sources cited, which disagree, most of which acknowledge this is an ongoing area of dispute. Consistency of article titles might be an argument for picking one style over another. It would be more persuasive if the usage patterns for possessive vs non-possessive, particularly for ...disease, were similar, or that there was a consistent trend away from the possessive for ...disease forms. But currently there's really no love for Parkinson disease or Alzheimer disease on either side of the Atlantic, and if anything, it is getting rarer. I wonder if this is a result of SEO practices when writing papers, that there's a strong pressure to pick the more popular search term. Also note that I only searched for the full name of these diseases/syndromes. Searching for the abbreviated form (e.g., "Parkinson" without "--- disease") is left to the reader (I had a go and it didn't surprise me at all that the possessive form was very popular and non-possessive rare, but there are contaminants from other uses of that name). -- Colin° Talk 16:48, 13 February 2024 (UTC)
"Do not describe suicide or other self-harm actions as being successful, unsuccessful, or failed. This is unclear and judgmental."
Ironically, this is unclear and judgmental.
How about: "This is unclear about whether the action was fatal, and implies intent that may not be known." LesbianTiamat ( talk) 10:57, 9 February 2024 (UTC)
Colin° Talk 20:27, 22 February 2024 (UTC)Just a few decades ago, the word “suicide” was also almost unsayable – and unprintable. Soon after it opened in 1972, Mieli’s crisis centre in Helsinki changed its name from “suicide prevention centre” to “crisis prevention centre” because there were objections to publishing the word in the phone book. For many older Finnish people, Sihvola says, “suicide” is still a difficult word to say; as with the word “bear” – as in the animal – there is a sense that saying it will bring it closer.
I have noticed that this article contains a long excerpt from Digital media use and mental health, which lists many systematic reviews and describes them in detail, for example:
Do you think these violate WP:MEDSAY? Bendegúz Ács ( talk) 18:55, 26 March 2024 (UTC)