Talk:Sigmoid colon

Please

Please do not do further edits on this page. Edit the page colon (anatomy) and put in the sigmoid subsection anything appropriate. The original sectioning of colon into its parts prevented general edits on the colon from getting into the entries on the subsections. The strategy is to put everything under colon. Kd4ttc 17:33, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

Sex talk?

the Anal Sex artial mentions damage that can be done to the Sigmoid Colon during unusually deep anal sex. i dont know if a similar mention would be worth noting here (especially with the simple warning against inserting "long" objects into the rectum). my question then is: should we mention anal sex specifically as a risk factor in the sigmoid colon? --Whiteknight 02:28, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

as an addendum, the anal sex artical also mentions that the sigmoid colon, in places, is as strong as a "wet paper towel." i wonder if that "fact" should be confirmed in this artical, or disparaged in the anal sex artical. --Whiteknight 02:31, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

The sigmoid is a lot stronger than that. Sounds like an urban legend. Could you be so kind to correct it? JFW | T@lk 07:28, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Images

I've made a note to get rid of the very low quality and old images here and to replace them with newer images. We shouldn't have anything that refers to the pelvic colon, as this is no longer correct terminology. CFCF (talk · contribs · email) 15:57, 23 May 2014 (UTC)

Length of sigmoid colon in the diagram is not 35-40 cm.

"The sigmoid colon (or pelvic colon) is the part of the large intestine that is closest to the rectum and anus. It forms a loop that averages about 35–40 centimetres (14–16 in) in length. The loop is typically shaped like a Greek letter sigma (ς) or Latin letter S (thus sigma + -oid). This part of the colon normally lies within the pelvis, [...]" says the beginning of the lead section. But 35 cm is the distance from one side of the abdomen to the other, while the sigmoid colon in the diagram is at most half that. So either the diagram is wrong or the given length, or so it seems to me.

What are your thoughts? Polar Apposite (talk) 06:33, 29 October 2023 (UTC)

My thoughts are that you should explain how other editors should respond to your question. Fabrickator (talk) 00:19, 30 October 2023 (UTC)

I just meant, is the diagram wrong, or is the given length wrong, or are both wrong, or am I wrong? Polar Apposite (talk) 03:51, 30 October 2023 (UTC)

All I asked is that you explain how you think other editors should respond to your question, but unfortunately, you have decided to ignore that request. I really don't think I should let you get away with this, but I suspect we would just go around in circles, and that gets tiring, so I'll just overlook the fact that you've ignored my request.

However, I will cite a rule that I don't necessarily agree with. You are trying to evaluate the validity of the reported typical length of the sigmoid colon based on this diagram plus your knowledge about the dimensions of the pelvis, and your attempt to ascertain what might be a reasonable value for this length constitutes WP:OR.

If you are skeptical of the information provided (i.e. the range of lengths of the sigmoid colon), you might look for other sources. Doubtless, there is a distribution of lengths among any given population, and there may also be differences in just how this measurement is determined. However, this creates a bit of a conundrum, because you'll realize that there is inconsistent information. So do you just pick the one that you like, or do you take an average or establish that one source is more reliable than all the rest?

All that's required on WP is a WP:RS. Arguably, once you've seen the variations in the reported measurements, they can't be unseen, even if the rest of us have no way of knowing you've seen the reported variations in this measurement. Fabrickator (talk) 05:51, 30 October 2023 (UTC)

"All I asked is that you explain how you think other editors should respond to your question, but unfortunately, you have decided to ignore that request." I didn't decide to ignore your request. Maybe quit speculating about the motivations of other editors.

How about you give me an example of what you mean by "explain how you think other editors should respond to your question"? I thought it was clear that I wanted other editors to *answer* my question, but that is seemingly not what you want. So tell me what exactly you want me to do, and I will try to do it. Polar Apposite (talk) 06:05, 30 October 2023 (UTC)

I suggest that other editors should respond to your request the way I responded to your request, i.e. by telling you that this the talk page is a place to discuss how to improve the article. What you are suggesting is WP:OR, and we're supposed to avoid that. More specifically, these talk pages aren't places for general discussion, everything's supposed to be about how to improve the article. The only thing you need is a WP:RS. We could discuss other sources and the relative merits of each, but that should be independent of what value they specify. We should not really consider whether one has a more plausible answer than another, though I'm sure somebody would try to claim that an outlier value would make the source dubious for that specific information.

It's so easy to find other sources, yet you don't mention that you've done that. For the sake of discussion, if you did check other sources, and none of them come up with a range that corresponds to your estimate, yet they also have similar diagrams, then I guess you will suffer some cognitive dissonance.

You're so perplexed about this that I'm allowing myself to go into some hazardous territory. You might try examining some diagrams of the pelvic area to see if there's a way that the sigmoid colon could take a route that's not the most direct route (e.g. by "doubling back"). I don't know, maybe they measure it while it's stretched out and that accounts for the discrepancy. This assumes, or course, that other sources show similar lengths to this source. As I say, for our purposes here, we don't actually care, the principle on WP is reliable sources, even if they provide incorrect information. Fabrickator (talk) 07:00, 30 October 2023 (UTC)

Nowithstanding the fact that this conundrum doesn't really affect things from a Wikipedia perspective, I am curious about what your personal thoughts are on the apparent incongruity beweeen your estimate of what the length should be and what multiple sources report. Fabrickator (talk) 09:13, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

Maybe they measure it stretched out, like you said. Polar Apposite (talk) 17:27, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

The length is exactly as it should be, for example the large intestine is about 1.5 metres in length.You wouldn't measure a length of string when it was rolled up would you? Theroadislong (talk) 10:40, 4 February 2024 (UTC)