Hello, Bosula! Welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. You may benefit from following some of the links below, which will help you get the most out of Wikipedia. If you have any questions you can ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and ask your question there. Please remember to sign your name on talk pages by clicking or by typing four tildes "~~~~"; this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you are already excited about Wikipedia, you might want to consider being "adopted" by a more experienced editor or joining a WikiProject to collaborate with others in creating and improving articles of your interest. Click here for a directory of all the WikiProjects. Finally, please do your best to always fill in the edit summary field when making edits to pages.
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Hi Tony. I've commented here rather than at Talk:Insecticide#Systemic Insecticides as some of what I want to say is not relevant to improving that article. First, you asked about whether using my real name has had any disadvantages. I've found none but I did originally edit as Mikedt10, which I retain as a WP:VALIDALT, but use sparingly. Anyone who bothered to look could easily find out that I retired from Syngenta JH but as I have essentially no Internet presence other than at Wikipedia I'm not bothered by any potential harassment and wise enough to ignore any that did occur. The advice for younger editors sensibly suggests they use a pseudonym but even given my widespread posts at the Teahouse, Help desk and reference desk I've only ever had the sort of low-level hassle that all long-term editors occasionally see.
I'm not sure whether you are aware that pesticides and GMO are among Wikipedia's contentious topics that tend to generate nore heat than light in many cases. For that reason, I rarely edit the articles that are at the forefront (e.g. insecticides, pesticides, herbicides etc) but prefer to do a more chemistry-focused job on individual compounds (see my userpage) and to create lists like list of fungicides which have little text that could be considered controversial. I'm aware that articles like insecticide and pesticide development are in need of modern citations and updates: if you want to improve them, please go ahead (carefully!). Make sure that anything you add is well cited, preferably to secondary sources, and note that you can happily delete anything not properly sourced. This guideline, while not always relevant to pesticides, is well worth a read. Your recent edit to insecticides has the problem that you removed material with, in effect a citation in your edit summary. I think that it would have been better to have improved the text in the article to say something like "Some contact insecticides, such as many pyrethroids, also have residual activity." with reference to doi:10.1002/14356007.a14_263.pub2, for example.
By all means ask me any further questions here in this thread as you gain experience: Wikipedia has a steep learning curve! I'll put this page on my watchlist. Best wishes. Mike Turnbull (talk) 14:47, 9 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Hello Mike, Thanks for the tip I'll keep my code-name in the meantime. Yes I understand and agree that editing a contentious topic needs to be done carefully. One big problem I see is correcting statements like the one about contact insecticides not having long lasting activity. Someone understands systemic insecticides to mean long lasting insecticides and writes that contact insecticides are degraded rapidly. You gave a good example to show the opposite, but is it an exception to the rule? Are systemic insecticides longer lasting? I always imagined the opposite to be true. A compound taken into the plant is subject to metabolism, but a compound on the surface is subject to the elements, and has to be tough to survive. Where would one find data comparing the half-lives of systemic vs contact insecticides, which would justify deleting a sweeping statement, or making such a statement in the first place? There was no data given in the first place to show that the statement was true. Someone can casually make such a generalisation, and then to correct it you have to be holier than the pope. But I see that in a contentious environment it is less likely to cause trouble if you modify a statement rather than deleting it, which irks me a little since it junks up wikipedia.
Just figured I'd stop in here rather than make a new section, but I'll also second Mike's advice above. Back when I commented in November about not using real names, I mostly said that because I'm one of the main science editors that has stuck around the GMO/pesticide and have dealt with some harassment due to that. It's not as bad as it used to be, but even in the past year I had to deal with an editor hounding me about what my personal identity may be despite what I say on my user page stating I don't have anything even close to Mike's old connection mentioned above much less being paid to promote pesticides, etc. as sometimes insinuated. Unfortunately the topic can attract some major battleground attitudes, which often takes time or energy away from editing topics like you highlighted.
So with that, it's great to see someone else interested in this topic and doing a lot of good work from what I can see so far. I just recently undid one of your edits I wanted to comment on though, and that's having to do with WP:MEDRS. Essentially, if we're going to add anything related to research and human health, it should be from secondary sources like reviews since there are issues with using primary sources. IRL an expert can absolutely use those, but there's more musings on that on my user page when it comes to use on Wikipedia.
Feel free to ping me if you ever want a second set of eyes, ref improvment, etc. on pesticide related content. I have a huge to-do of things I've noticed of the years that need work, so it's great to see someone else catching similar things. KoA (talk) 17:43, 11 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hello Koa, Thanks. I take your point. In fact that citation is even worse than you write because the paper deals with the correlation between organic food and cancer, and the authors got the compounding factors I listed from other publications. Anyway it is no problem to get reviews,, which I will do. I simply didn't have them when I got home from the library, and didn't want to wait.
Pesticide poisoning is a very serious matter, and is outside of my area of expertise. In the page;pesticide there is too much detail about exposure and determination of exposure. Much of this belongs in page:pesticide poisoning, leaving a much shorter overview in page:pesticide, but I cannot really do this.
I think it is good that I wrote that I worked for decades in the pesticide industry. People can drill into my background and not be able to pull out "dirty washing", On the one hand people can consider I have been "bought", but because of that experience I am an expert in agrochemistry. Mike's advice to edit carefully was wise. As you so kindly mentioned I edit slowly one small bit at a time, trying to explain each time the problem with the original text.
In general my inclination is not to write new pages. I think there is too much written. Things should be succincter, leaving the details to pages dealing with those details, Bosula (talk) 13:51, 12 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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