Australian Vaccine Network

Part of my real life is being a vaccine "expert" (cough, gag, a little bit of vomit in my mouth–more of an advanced amateur then). I noticed that probably best target for snarkalicious commentary would be an article on Meryl Dorey and AVN (probably combining them, since I would hate giving either of them much more advertising). As the basis of the article, I'd like to use some of the info from Wikipedia, since the article has some stuff, but then I'd convert it to the snarky (ok, I'll try not to do that, but they deserve it), more rationally balanced tone of RationalWiki. My question is what's legal, can I start an article, and what hints can you give me (I've read some of the rules, regs, recommendations around here). Also, I can't tell what's the right level of snarky commentary. Some articles seem very serious, with low snark. Some articles are hysterical, but still useful. So, how do you balance it. And trust me, the AVN is easily ridiculed. They recommend homeopathy instead of vaccinations.

Technically, you can copy over stuff from Wikipedia, so long as you give them credit: both Wikipedia and RationalWiki license their content under Creative Commons, so they're compatible. However, we'd rather you didn't straight copy-paste-edit for snark, as it's (1) extremely tacky, and (2) doesn't make for good articles.

It's fine if you use the references from a Wikipedia article, though—their articles can be a goldmine in that respect.

As for snark... that's always hard to judge. Just write what feels appropriate, and if you get it wrong then others will swoop in and adjust it.

I actually started an article on them in my userspace a few days ago. Should I move it to the mainspace and let you turn it into a proper article?

I'm all good with that Peter. Let me throw in a few comments before you start. It'll be fun.

By the way Misanthrope, I wasn't suggesting that I would merely cut and paste, it was cut, paste, and re-edit to fit the style of RationalWiki. As for your comments on snark, I'm not quite getting it. There are really a lot of snarkilicious articles around here. They still make their points and are quite well cited, but still.

OK, I put in my 2 Australian Penny's worth of changes. I like succinct articles too, not spending 10 paragraphs trying to present why AVN might actually not have their heads far up their asses.