Talk:Safety in numbers

message: This article seems to exist mainly to support claims against helmet use on the bicycle helmets page. The article is referenced but the references are cycling helmet references, not references about 'Safety in numbers' as a concept. That makes it original research.
Prospect77 04:39, 5 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Relation to cycling

message: This document ("Review of Safety in Numbers") has been flagged for removal because it doesn't meet Wikipedia standards. Wikipedia:No original research, Wikipedia:Verifiability It is self-published at the author's web site. It has not been printed in any reliable source such as a peer-reviewed journal, textbook, magazine, book published by a respected publishing house, or mainstream newspaper. Lisamichellemurdock (talk) 17:33, 22 June 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Verifiability of sources

message: It seems that most of the material here about cycling would be better placed in Bicycle safety, and so it would be good to move it there.  Melcombe (talk) 12:00, 23 June 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Proposal to move content 

message: Forgot to log in before editing... I removed the OR Flag under Case Studies, and the "citation needed" to the Saari paper. Lisamichellemurdock (talk) 04:28, 24 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Miscellaneous 

message: of one heading to Examples of substantial increases in cycling associated with reduction in danger. The reason for this is to give a literal and accurate account of what the section says. It is a collection of primary sources which give some support to the idea of SiN. They are not - as would be ideal - secondary reviews of attempts to test the hypothesis of Safety in Numbers. Such reviews would be based on sound primary science, systematically looking at good-quality correlations of numbers with injury levels. I don't know of any such review, though I haven't looked very hard. The examples listed, so far as I can make out, are selected (important, but selected) examples. They are very low-grade evidence of the possible general rule. 
As such, what I'd suggest is that this whole section should be collapsed into, perhaps, a single sentence saying that "There are many recent examples of substantial increases in cycling associated with reduction in danger" followed by the references. This strikes me as quite sufficient weight. 
Before I make a bold edit, I'd appreciate comments, especially perhaps from De Facto and Lisamichellemurdock. Richard Keatinge (talk) 12:49, 17 March 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Retitling

message: See Wikipedia:Citation overkill. There is a single sentence, "the risk to the individual pedestrian or bicyclist decreases where there is more people walking or bicycling.", with some 24 footnote after it, each with a lengthy quote. This is very poor style, and it suggests original research. Rather than citing a few high quality secondary sources showing there is wide agreement that something is a fact, an editor has gathered their own primary sources and assembled them to make a point. It suggests Tendentious editing, or at least that an editor was trying to win an argument on the talk page, rather than serve the needs of the reader.<P>For now i've bundled them, per WP:BUNDLING, but they need to be clean up and reduced to a reasonable number of WP:SECONDARY sources. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 21:45, 9 June 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Wikipedia:Citation overkill 

message: The authors don't seem to recognize that "safety in numbers" is not new and was not created for bicycle traffic.  See Smeed's Law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smeed%27s_law and Predator Satiation (cited but not referenced in the article).
Perhaps useful parts of this page could be moved to the Smeed's page?
128.101.142.153 (talk) 19:37, 18 May 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Smeed's Law is a general statement about safety in numbers, but the aspect related to cyclists and pedestrians is a special case, arguing that that driver behavior changes when there are enough pedestrians or cyclists present. We might want to merge Safety in numbers to Smeed's Law, but also think about a separate discussion of the special case of cyclists and pedestrians, and how that drives some opposition to mandatory helmets. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 20:14, 18 May 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Rehash of Smeed's Law