Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Newsletter/July 2014

The Pulse on the heartbeat news beat for WikiProject Medicine: July 2014

What's new · What's happening · Focus · Contribute a story

Issue 2                                  Previous issue

The Pulse is a newsletter intended to document the goings-on at WP:MED. A notification has been provided to all the talk pages of WP:MED members bearing the User WPMed template here, listed in this category. To opt-out, please leave a message here or simply remove your name from the mailing list. Please let us know what you think, and if you have any ideas for the future, leave a message on our talk page.

What's new
The following articles have been promoted to good article status: Other articles are awaiting review. Any editor can review a nomination, and instructions are provided here.
 * Articles
 * Cervix
 * Plantar fasciitis

If you will be in London in early August, and would like some sort of medical meetup, please let's have your views on what to do, and when, at Wiki Project Med/Wikimania 2014 meetup. We would be very grateful if people could post this to other language equivalents. Of course this is for all medical editors not just members of the Wiki Project Med thorg or local projects.
 * Wikimania 2014

Retirement of a WikiProject Medicine member
In a thread titled "I am leaving" announced his retirement. One interpretation of his reason for leaving could be that he was dissatisfied with the Wikimedia' communities to resolve disputes. His particular concern was the unpleasantness of being reviewed which can come from criticism during the good article review process.

As a result of this editor leaving, some other editors have discussed establishing an "A" rank for medical articles. In the an earlier grading scheme for articles, it was thought that "A" could be conferred by individual WikiProjects with subject matter expertise, and that "Good article" and "Featured article" status would be comprehensive reviews done by the entire Wikimedia community. However, WikiProject Military History is the only WikiProject which has ever been organized enough to provide "A" level reviews. There is some discussion that if WikiProject Medicine offered A level reviews, it would be a way for this project to give feedback in a more closed and friendly environment which is more accustomed to reviewing health content.

FDA rules on Wikipedia
reports that the United States Food and Drug Administration is issuing guidance for pharmaceutical companies on the correction of misinformation on health topics on social media websites. Some guidance is for any "Internet-based, interactive, collaboratively edited encyclopedia" that people might find. followed up a suggestion that Wikipedians interested in health should present comments to the FDA on this guidance.

Cancer Research UK's Wikipedian in Residence
The programme as described in this Wikimedia Foundation blogpost is under way. Initial quick reviews have been posted for esophageal and pancreatic cancers, with brain and lung coming shortly. Various links and comments, and for those who like reports, John's for May and June, are collected at the project page here - do please drop by to take a look and join in.

Article feedback
In Wikipedia article review and feedback are considered separate things. Review is a check on accuracy and completeness, whereas feedback is usually imagined to be comments or suggestions for improvement.

continues to ask questions about changing processes to solicit more article feedback for health articles.

A major Wikimedia project, Article feedback, was part of the MediaWiki software, but because of community concerns, it development was stopped and it was disabled.

External links in infoboxes
Infoboxes are data-based boxes in the top right of some Wikipedia articles that provide summary data putting the article in context.

has proposed changing the template "Infobox disease" by moving external links from this infobox to the "External links" section of the article. This is an effort to reduce the prominence / favoritism granted to these links. This proposal was made after eMedicine changed it url structure, breaking many of the links to their website.

The issue in question has been partially fixed and as there was not clear consensus for its removal the links have been restored until consensus develops.

Efforts are ongoing at Wikidata to add the links to the websites of the "National Cancer Institute", "National Library of Medicine", "patient.co.uk", and "emedicine" that correspond to our disease related articles.

The question still remains of whether Wikipedia should link to this site in any case, and if so, how. Many people like this site with each having some issues.

FDA medication warnings
A NEJM article, Drug Safety in the Digital Age, comments on how quickly Wikipedia's medication articles are updated to contain FDA warnings. They found 23% of articles are updated within 2 weeks and 64% are updated within a year. Doc James has contacted the FDA to see if they are interested in collaborating to improve this situation.

Medical Translation IEG
The Medical translation project over at the Translation Taskforce has received an Individual Engagement Grant from the Wikimedia Foundation. This means the project will receive a welcome push towards getting already translated content live, and in organizing itself. To help out, head over and signup to the project or for the newsletter.

Focus: Writers wanted
You are invited to write this newsletter! This newsletter is intended as a record of the activities of WikiProject Medicine members. A regular report of the interests and work of WikiProject Medicine members is encouraging and inviting to guests and future members of the project. If you would like to write stories for this newsletter, the please do so. Even 2-5 sentence reports are useful.

The current proposed format is that in each newsletter, activities from the previous month are reported.