User talk:Michael A Bekoff

Welcome!

Hello,, and welcome to Wikipedia! I hope you like the place and decide to stay.

There's a page about creating articles you may want to read called Your first article. If you are stuck, and looking for help, please come to the New contributors' help page, where experienced Wikipedians can answer any queries you have! Or, you can just type   on this page, and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Here are a few other good links for newcomers: I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes ( ~ ); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you have any questions, check out Where to ask a question or ask me on. Again, welcome!--Mishae (talk) 02:57, 19 September 2013 (UTC)
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Welcome again!
Hi MIchael based on your edit to Dementia, you appear to be here editing under your own name, and appear to be an expert in dementia (at least).

First, welcome to WIkipedia! We really value experts here. Experts also have some special challenges, on several levels. Please have a look at the essay WP:EXPERT, which may help you get oriented. Please pay special mind to the last bullet there. You may also want to have a look at our conflict of interest guideline, particularly the part about writing about yourself and your work.

You may also want to consider joining one or more of the "projects" here, where people with similar interests and expertise work together to improve and create articles. See WP:MED for example.

A very brief orientation to this place....

Wikipedia is a pretty complex place. Being an "encyclopedia that anyone can edit" means that over the years, Wikipedia has developed lots of policies and guidelines (PAG) to help provide a "body of law" as it were, that form a foundation for rational discussion. Without that foundation, this place would be both a garbage dump of random content and a wild west - a truly ugly place. But with the foundation, there is guidance for generating excellent content and there are ways to rationally work things out - if, and only if, all the parties involved accept that foundation and work within it. One of the hardest things for new people, is to understand not only that this foundation exists, but what its letter and spirit is. (I keep emphasizing the spirit, because too often people fall prey to what we call "wikilawyering")  The more I have learned about how things are set up here - not just the letter of PAG and the various drama boards and administrative tools, but their spirit -  the more impressed I have become at how, well ... beautiful this place is. It takes time to learn both the spirit and the letter of PAG, and to really get aligned with Wikipedia's mission to crowdsource a reliable, NPOV source of information for the public (as "reliable" and "NPOV" are defined in PAG!).

PAG are described and discussed in a whole forest of documents within Wikipedia that are "behind the scenes" in a different "namespace", in which the documents start with "Wikipedia:" or in shorthand, "WP:" (for example, our policy on edit warring is here: WP:EDITWAR not here EDITWAR). You won't find these documents by using the simple search box above, which searches only in "main space" where the actual articles are. However if you search with the prefix, (for example if you search for "WP:EDITWAR") you will find that policy. Likewise if you do an advanced search with "wikipedia" or "help" selected you can also find things in "Wikipedia space". The link in the welcome message above the "Five Pillars" points you to our most important policies and I recommend that you read them all, if you have not already and if you intend to stick around! They guide everything that happens here.

With all that in mind, here are some things that I suggest you read (I know, I know, things to read... but like I said, Wikipedia can be complicated!)
 * WP:OR - no original research is allowed -instead...
 * WP:VERIFY - everything must be based on reliable sources (as we define them - see WP:RS for general content and WP:MEDRS for health-related content)
 * WP:MEDRS - this is our guideline for sourcing health-relating content in Wikipedia.  This is probably one of the key things you will need to mind
 * WP:NPOV - this does not mean what most people think it means. it means that you read the most recent and best reliable sources you can find, and figure out what the mainstream view is, and that is what gets the most WP:WEIGHT.
 * WP:MEDMOS - this our manual of style, for how we write about health-related things.  We are very careful not to discuss pre-clinical findings, as well as initial clinical results, as though they are applicable to medicine.   We are very conservative in that regard!


 * WP:CONSENSUS - Wikipedia has plenty of policies and guidelines, as I mentioned, but really at the end of the day this place is ... a democracy? an anarchy? something hard to define.  But we figure things out by talking to one another.  CONSENSUS is the bedrock on which everything else rests.   If you make a change to an article and someone else reverts it, the right thing to do is to follow WP:BRD (please do read that) - but briefly, when you are reverted, open a discussion on the article's Talk page.  Ask the reason under policy and guidelines why your change was reverted -- and really ask, and really listen to the answer, and go read whatever links you are pointed to.  Think about it, and if there is something you don't understand, ask more questions.  If you and the other party or parties still disagree, there are many ways to resolve disputes (see WP:DR) - it never needs to become emotional - because we do have this whole "body of law" and procedures to resolve disputes.

Anyway, good luck! Jytdog (talk)

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