Sorry for the long post:
A few years ago (April 25, 2023) I made my first significant edit to wikipedia on the Linus Pauling article, which was not up to date on its discussion of how Vitamin C affects cancer (2005-09 era papers).
The crux of the issue is that route of administration affects what Vitamin C does in the body, with opposing effects (pro-oxidant vs anti-oxidant and also changes how much vitamin C can get in the blood by orders of magnitude), so it’s almost a different drug depending on how take it. See review article in a few paragraphs.
The Wikipedia article focused on the lack of benefit of oral Vitamin C supplementation while barely mentioning recent successes in human trials or that attempts to repeat Pauling’s cancer trial didn’t use IV vitamin C.
So after this sentence in the article lead “None of his ideas concerning the medical usefulness of large doses of vitamins have gained much acceptance in the mainstream scientific community.” I added this: “However, attempts to replicate Linus Pauling's work did not use the exact method of delivery and specific molecules as the original experiments promoted by Pauling.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Linus_Pauling&dif...
And cited this secondary source, which itself cites reviews of multiple human clinical trials as well as a mouse study offering a potential mechanism: Archived link: https://web.archive.org/web/20230414222229/https://www.cance.... The article now lives at this URL: https://frederick.cancer.gov/news/intravenous-high-dose-vita...
I also replaced this sentence from the main text: “Results from most clinical trials suggest that modest vitamin C supplementation alone or with other nutrients offers no benefit in the prevention of cancer”, with this:
“Although there is no consensus in the literature on whether IV high dose vitamin C can affect cancer treatment outcomes, recent pre-clinical mouse studies have revealed a beneficial effect when high dose IV vitamin C is combined with immunotherapy. The effect was only observed in immunocompetent mice, suggesting that the anti-tumor effect depends in part on a functional immune system, rather than unspecific pro-oxidant activity.”
With this primary source: Vitamin C selectively kills KRAS and BRAF mutant colorectal cancer cells by targeting GAPDH https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scitranslmed.aay8707
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Linus_Pauling&dif...
MrOllie reverted all of the edits and saying they were profringe, “blatantly fail WP:MEDRS requirements” yet couldn’t actually go into detail as to how they broke the WP:MEDRS rules, and how anything I wrote was ‘fringe’.
He was really hard to talk to, did not seem engaged in good faith discussion and seed to be wrong on the merits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:MrOllie/Archive_17#c...
I reported him and was then quickly blocked by Bbb23 for a week for ‘edit warring’, with no discussion of anything else. Bbb23 refused to talk to me at first, and asked me not to write on his talk page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Pazimzadeh?markasrea...
Thankfully Bbb23 has retired and it’s clear from from his page that I wasn’t the only one he wasn’t so nice to.
To be fair, I did not understand how wikipedia works at all at the time. There are many thing I could have done better - for example at the time I didn’t know you’re supposed to edit the article talk page for controversial topics, and didn’t know what edit warring even was and how that's counted. I also would have worded my edits slightly differently focusing on human trials more, leaving the negative effect of oral Vitamin C, and would have emphasized the secondary sources more. And would have edited the Vitamin C page instead of Linus Pauling's.
But upon close reading of WP:MEDRS and my edits, I don’t think my additions actually violated either the spirit or the letter of the rules. I used a secondary source which itself cites reviews of human clinical data, and I clearly used hedging language when discussing mouse studies. While it's a controversial topic, nothing that I said was pro-fringe either, or unsaid in the NIH Cancer post I cited. Even the primary source I did use was from the single most rigorous/mainstream journal Science.
Anyway, the experience turned me off of attempting edit Wikipedia for along time, and it feels like there is a cabal of senior editors/admins with poor/lazy reading skills that don’t positively contribute anything to wikipedia but are happy to aggressively police what they consider wrong and seem to have each others’ backs. It’s great to see that Bbb23 is gone though.
A few years ago (April 25, 2023) I made my first significant edit to wikipedia on the Linus Pauling article, which was not up to date on its discussion of how Vitamin C affects cancer (2005-09 era papers).
The crux of the issue is that route of administration affects what Vitamin C does in the body, with opposing effects (pro-oxidant vs anti-oxidant and also changes how much vitamin C can get in the blood by orders of magnitude), so it’s almost a different drug depending on how take it. See review article in a few paragraphs.
The Wikipedia article focused on the lack of benefit of oral Vitamin C supplementation while barely mentioning recent successes in human trials or that attempts to repeat Pauling’s cancer trial didn’t use IV vitamin C.
So after this sentence in the article lead “None of his ideas concerning the medical usefulness of large doses of vitamins have gained much acceptance in the mainstream scientific community.” I added this: “However, attempts to replicate Linus Pauling's work did not use the exact method of delivery and specific molecules as the original experiments promoted by Pauling.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Linus_Pauling&dif...
And cited this secondary source, which itself cites reviews of multiple human clinical trials as well as a mouse study offering a potential mechanism: Archived link: https://web.archive.org/web/20230414222229/https://www.cance.... The article now lives at this URL: https://frederick.cancer.gov/news/intravenous-high-dose-vita...
I also replaced this sentence from the main text: “Results from most clinical trials suggest that modest vitamin C supplementation alone or with other nutrients offers no benefit in the prevention of cancer”, with this:
“Although there is no consensus in the literature on whether IV high dose vitamin C can affect cancer treatment outcomes, recent pre-clinical mouse studies have revealed a beneficial effect when high dose IV vitamin C is combined with immunotherapy. The effect was only observed in immunocompetent mice, suggesting that the anti-tumor effect depends in part on a functional immune system, rather than unspecific pro-oxidant activity.”
With this primary source: Vitamin C selectively kills KRAS and BRAF mutant colorectal cancer cells by targeting GAPDH https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scitranslmed.aay8707
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Linus_Pauling&dif...
MrOllie reverted all of the edits and saying they were profringe, “blatantly fail WP:MEDRS requirements” yet couldn’t actually go into detail as to how they broke the WP:MEDRS rules, and how anything I wrote was ‘fringe’.
He was really hard to talk to, did not seem engaged in good faith discussion and seed to be wrong on the merits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:MrOllie/Archive_17#c...
I reported him and was then quickly blocked by Bbb23 for a week for ‘edit warring’, with no discussion of anything else. Bbb23 refused to talk to me at first, and asked me not to write on his talk page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Pazimzadeh?markasrea...
Thankfully Bbb23 has retired and it’s clear from from his page that I wasn’t the only one he wasn’t so nice to.
To be fair, I did not understand how wikipedia works at all at the time. There are many thing I could have done better - for example at the time I didn’t know you’re supposed to edit the article talk page for controversial topics, and didn’t know what edit warring even was and how that's counted. I also would have worded my edits slightly differently focusing on human trials more, leaving the negative effect of oral Vitamin C, and would have emphasized the secondary sources more. And would have edited the Vitamin C page instead of Linus Pauling's.
But upon close reading of WP:MEDRS and my edits, I don’t think my additions actually violated either the spirit or the letter of the rules. I used a secondary source which itself cites reviews of human clinical data, and I clearly used hedging language when discussing mouse studies. While it's a controversial topic, nothing that I said was pro-fringe either, or unsaid in the NIH Cancer post I cited. Even the primary source I did use was from the single most rigorous/mainstream journal Science.
Anyway, the experience turned me off of attempting edit Wikipedia for along time, and it feels like there is a cabal of senior editors/admins with poor/lazy reading skills that don’t positively contribute anything to wikipedia but are happy to aggressively police what they consider wrong and seem to have each others’ backs. It’s great to see that Bbb23 is gone though.