Wikipedia:WikiProject Alternative medicine

Welcome to the WikiProject on Alternative Medicine.

These project pages are only suggestions, as all WikiProjects are, that are designed to stop the madness of edit wars or editing articles in a never ending spiral of circular editing on articles related to alternative medicine.

Scope and goals
This WikiProject aims primarily to facilitate the development of professional articles on all aspects of complementary, alternative and integrative medicine. The scope of this WikiProject will be referred to throughout our project pages simply as CAM (complementary and alternative medicine).

Scope
The scope of a Wikiproject identifies the types of articles that participants of a project will be working on.
 * Glossary of alternative medicine - Short definitions of important terms and concepts unique to CAM. This annotated list is the primary introduction to alternative medicine and a comprehensive gateway to Wikipedia's articles on CAM.
 * List of branches of alternative medicine
 * Famous people in alternative medicine - This list directs readers to articles about historical people in CAM.
 * Category:Concepts in alternative medicine - These articles are about an alternative position on health, healing, and/or illness; or are related to these topics.
 * Issues related to the promotion and definition of health, wellness and healing.
 * Illness, along with its prevention, conception, and specific forms targeted by alternative treatments.
 * History of alternative medicine - These articles are about the history of CAM. Here, CAM is approached from the perspective of how CAM developed historically.
 * what about evidence base?

Goals

 * 1) To improve the number and quality of articles edited by our participants.
 * 2) * To develop and promote standards of quality guidelines to be followed in CAM related articles participating in this WikiProject.
 * 3) * To help stabilize controversial CAM articles and reduce edit warring.
 * 4) * To support the use of the highest-quality sources, not merely the sources that support the "right" conclusions.
 * 5) To develop and promote classification systems that are suitable for comparing the various systems or schools of CAM to each other.
 * 6) To function as the centralized sounding board or watchlist for all CAM-related issues.

Related WikiProjects

 * WikiProject Alternative education
 * WikiProject Alternative Views
 * WikiProject Chiropractic
 * WikiProject Paranormal
 * WikiProject Medicine

Participants
Participants in this WP:WikiProject may do as little or as much as they'd like. As with all Wikipedia articles, anybody may edit articles related to CAM.

You may place   on your user page to display the following userbox:

This template will add your user page to:
 * Category:WikiProject Alternative medicine participants

Standards of quality guidelines
Our Standard of Quality Guidelines are the unofficial advice from our participants. They are not part of "official" Wikipedia policy, but they may provide useful advice. Similarly, the official guideline, WP:Manual of Style (medicine), is often useful.

This project fully supports the main content policies: WP:Verifiability of all material in published sources, WP:No original research or use of personal experiences by Wikipedians, and WP:Neutral point of view as determined by the overall balance of reliable sources. Be careful not to pretend that all viewpoints are equally accepted.

Substantial formal research has been conducted on CAM. Information about finding and understanding research papers is available at WP:Identifying reliable sources (medicine). To find recent medical articles about alternative medicine, look for recent reviews of complementary medicine in medical journals at PubMed.

Infoboxes
Many CAM articles benefit from inclusion of Infobox alternative medicine.

Project banner
This project tags articles, lists, categories, and templates within its scope. To tag a page, paste at the top of its talk page. The template looks like this:

We use the Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment standards, and articles should be tagged as stub, start, C, or B class. (See section Article assessment)

NCCAM classifications
The U.S. National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) was renamed National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health in December 2014.

These classifications have been adopted by our WikiProject. They are to be used for tagging only the branches of CAM articles. The article definitely should be mostly about CAM.
 * 1) Alternative medical systems
 * 2) Mind-body interventions
 * 3) Biologically based therapy
 * 4) Manipulative methods
 * 5) Energy therapy

Userboxes
Participants may choose to paste on their user pages. This displays this userbox:

CAM Portal
Portals are pages intended to serve as 'Main Pages' for specific topics or areas. Portals may be associated with one or more WikiProjects; unlike WikiProjects, however, they are meant for both readers and editors of Wikipedia, and should promote content and encourage contribution.

This WikiProject supports Portal:Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

Unlike normal articles, the content of portals are spread over dozens of different pages or files. Please do not edit the main CAM portal page without a working knowledge of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). However, you are encouraged to edit its many subpages, which work very much like regular articles.

The CAM Portal is built around 13 boxes in 10 rows. Each box is assigned a number in ascending order. When the portal page is displayed, either two boxes share one row, or one box fills the full width of the row.

Most of the boxes contain static information about CAM and this project, and these boxes are easy for anyone to improve. Just click on the edit hyperlink in the box's title bar, and edit like any other page. (If it contains a code that you'd don't understand, just leave the code alone.) Section headings used in any display box should be ===Level 3=== headings. Using section headers levels 1 and 2 will mess up the box number count sequence.

Four of the boxes are special: They display different content each time the portal is viewed. These boxes can be maintained with introductions to various articles, biographies, pictures, and quotes.
 * The main CAM portal page contains a separate random number generator for each of these specific boxes. If, for example, the project has written 24 quote pages, then you would set the quote random number generator to 24 (i.e., ). A smaller number would also work, but won't display the content of additions that are greater than the respective number.
 * Each new quote page/file should be created sequentially (i.e., /Quotes/24) on the More Quotes... page. Adding additional introductions to selected articles, biographies, and pictures would work essentially the same way.
 * With due care, most editors should be able to correctly maintain these files. See our Open Tasks, below, for additional details.

Open Tasks
Participants of this project are expected to edit stuff on Wikipedia on their own initiative, unless someone is attempting to organize a group project on our talk pages. A few good places to start would be:
 * Glossary of alternative medicine -- A major list of the terms and concepts used in alternative medicine. Always something to be fine tuned or added to this gateway to CAM articles.
 * Category:Alternative medicine stubs -- You can help Wikipedia by expanding these articles. Then be sure to remove them from the stub category.
 * The abandoned Template:Alternative medical systems series of templates / infoboxes should be adopted by this WikiProject since they have been accepted by the Wikipedian community, to date.
 * Whoever started this series of infoboxes did not complete the task.
 * Some of the sub-category infoboxes were never created.
 * Some of the tagged articles are using the wrong template/box, when another one would be more appropriate.
 * Not all of the branches of alternative medicine articles have been tagged with this template/infobox.
 * Our Wikiproject's Official To Do List of New Topics -- List of Missing Topics that our participants would like to see covered.
 * Maintain our Portal:Complementary and Alternative Medicine
 * There are some 1,000+ CAM related articles, all of which a short introduction can be written for and added to our archive of articles. The introductions should be copied directly from the respective articles, along with the read more hyperlink teaser.
 * Selected Articles box
 * Selected Biographies box
 * Copies of the pictures used to illustrated CAM related articles can be added to our Selected Pictures box.
 * Simply copy the image coding directly from the article. The coding, however, should be changed in order to center the image, before saving it.
 * CAM related quotations can be added to our Quotes box.

Article assessment
Volunteers for the project may rate articles for quality and completeness. The Wikipedia article rating system uses letter grades to indicate how complete an article is. The first step in this process is to place our Wikiproject banner on the talk page of a CAM article.

Core Project Articles
The following lists/categories are considered important to our WikiProject.

Core Lists
Every CAM article in Wikipedia needs to be represented in one of these master lists. Otherwise, people may not be able to find our articles.


 * 1) Glossary of alternative medicine
 * 2) List of branches of alternative medicine
 * 3) List of famous people in alternative medicine

Core Categories

 * List of


 * Search for subpages belonging to this WikiProject