Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Old 2012

Welcome to WikiProject Medicine. This project aims to enable Wikipedians to cooperate, organize, make suggestions and share ideas on the improvement of the medicine and health-related articles of Wikipedia. Everyone is welcome to join in this endeavor (regardless of medical qualifications!).

If you have any questions, feel free to ask on our discussion page (also known as the doctors' mess). You can also have a look at some related WikiProjects.

Many suggestions and guidelines have been developed since the project began. A particularly useful collection can be found in the Manual of Style (medicine-related articles), which contains a detailed discussion of issues related to writing medicine articles on Wikipedia. However, these are only suggestions: they should help to give us focus, and inspire our contributions, but no one should feel obliged to follow (or even read) them; this WikiProject is not prescriptive. They should not distract anyone wanting to contribute from our main purpose: to write and improve medical articles!

If you would like to help, feel free to add yourself to the list of participants (no strings attached!), or just look over the How you can help section below. Also of interest is the (featured) Medicine Portal associated with this project.

We hope you enjoy reading and improving Wikipedia's medical articles, -The members

Goals
To produce reliable and neutral information on medical conditions, diagnosis and treatment in a readable and standardized format. It aims to deal with these diseases in every context, from molecular biology, symptomatology and diagnosis to therapeutical issues and historical and geopolitical ramifications. To this end, the WikiProject will collaborate with other WikiProjects relating to the health sciences.

Collaborate

 * Stay in touch. Put this page on your watchlist, along with any task forces that interest you, so you can keep up with announcements and stay in touch with other members.
 * Join a task force. If you are interested in a specific topic area, then join one or more of our task forces.  Most task forces keep a separate list of their most important projects and would be happy to have a new member!
 * Work together. Join in the team effort to improve selected articles in the Collaboration of the Month and the Google Project. Everyone from subject-matter experts to normal readers is welcome!

Other ideas
Would you like to help, but you're not really quite sure what to do? Have an hour free and want to try something different? WikiProject Medicine has many tasks that any editor can do. You don't have to be a physician or have specialized knowledge.


 * Edit articles
 * Adopt a stub! There are thousands of stubby medicine-related articles that have the potential to be excellent articles. Categories containing these stub articles are and .  Add sources and information, and remove the stub template when it's no longer a stub.
 * Create a new article. Many medicine-related articles have been requested for creation. New articles and significantly expanded stubs qualify for our Missing Article Trophy contest and Wikipedia's Did you know?, so be sure to share your achievements with us.
 * Improve existing articles. Some articles want expert attention, but most need help that anyone can provide.  Alternatively, choose any article that interests you from our top-importance, high-importance articles, or 500 most popular medicine-related articles. A guideline that applies to our articles is here.
 * Add high-quality references. Correct and reliable references are vital if the articles produced by this project are to be a verifiable source of information for our readers. Adding references is easy with this tool. Just submit the PubMed ID, ISBN, or other identifier, and copy and paste the resulting output (xxxx) into the page between Alternatively, if you use Internet Explorer or Firefox (2.0+), then Wouterstomp's bookmarklet can automate this step from the PubMed abstract page.
 * Add images..
 * Check for retracted papers. See Category:Articles citing retracted publications for articles that may wrongly cite retracted publications.


 * Work behind the scenes
 * Help evaluate articles nominated for deletion. Help identify deletion discussions that relate to medicine.  Figure out whether these articles with unclear notability should be deleted.
 * Help maintain the Medicine Portal. The maintainers would be happy to tell you what needs to be done.
 * Recruit members. Assist in public relations and outreach by recruiting editors interested in medicine to contribute to Wikipedia.  Invite good editors to join us.  See this section for handy message templates.
 * Tag the talk pages of medicine-related articles. Add   , and assess the article according to our assessment scale.  A bot-generated list of new articles that might be medicine-related is here.  If you add   to your /common.js file, then you can also patrol new articles from that page as well.
 * Sort stubs. See the list of specific stub templates.  Replacing stub or med-stub with a more specific template is very helpful.
 * Improve categorization of articles. Several popular Wikipedia categories like Medicine and Category:Diseases and disorders need people to sort articles into more specific subcategories.  Tools like HotCat may make this easier.


 * Fight spam and vandalism
 * Remove inappropriate external links. Some medicine-related articles attract inappropriate links, such as internet chat boards and advertisements.  You can review the external links in any article, or you can use Special:Linksearch to find articles containing a specific link, such as *.clinicaltrials.gov or *.groups.yahoo.com  Details available in the full guidelines for all of Wikipedia and also the specific guidelines for medicine-related articles.
 * Check for vandalism in the recent changes to WPMED-related pages, using either this tool or this one.

Departments

 * The Assessment department focuses on assessing the quality of Wikipedia's medicine articles.
 * The Review department focuses on reviewing medicine-related featured articles.

Participants
The full list of project participants is located on a separate subpage. Any interested Wikipedia editor is welcome to join this project. If you would like to help, feel free to add yourself to the list.

Article-related

 * - Placed on talk pages of medicine-related articles and used to assess articles.
 * - Used on talk pages to request that photographs be added to the article.
 * - Used on stub articles.
 * - Used to indicate an article in need of references.
 * - The bottom navbox template to be used on articles about broad disciplines of medicine.
 * - Contains all templates used on medicine-related articles.

Inline with article text

 * or - Used after text without a reliable medical source. Generates:
 * or - Used after text with a questionable medical source. Generates:
 * or - Used after text that cites a primary source. Generates:

Infoboxes
WP:Infoboxes have been created for a number of article types including:


 * Template:Infobox disease for articles on diseases
 * Template:Infobox symptom for articles about signs or symptoms
 * Template:Interventions infobox for articles pertaining to procedures
 * Template:Diagnostic infobox for diagnostic test
 * Template:Drugbox for medications
 * Template:Drugclassbox for classes of medication

User-related

 * Welcome messages (all of these substituted onto a user's talk page):
 * {{subst:MedWelcome}} - Welcome template to greet new Wikipedians and invite them to join WikiProject Medicine.
 * {{subst:MedInvitation}} - Invite for established Wikipedians to join WikiProject Medicine.
 * {{subst:MedGreeting}} - After editor added to participation list.
 * - Userbox for members of this WikiProject.
 * - Userbox for those who understand Medical Latin (Babel-compatible; just add  to your Babel template)
 * {{subst:The WikiProject Medicine Barnstar}} - You may award the Medicine Barnstar or other relevant awards to those you feel have done superb work in the realm of medicine-related articles.

Related WikiProjects

 * Abortion (inactive)
 * AIDS (inactive)
 * Alternative medicine
 * Anatomy
 * Biology
 * Biophysics
 * Cell Signaling (inactive)
 * Deaf
 * Death
 * Disability
 * Dentistry (semi-active)
 * Dyslexia (inactive)
 * First aid (semi-active)
 * Genetics


 * Health and fitness
 * Hospitals
 * Microbiology
 * Molecular and Cellular Biology
 * National Health Service (inactive)
 * Neuroscience
 * Nursing (inactive)
 * Pharmacology
 * Podiatry
 * Psychology
 * Tree of life
 * Veterinary medicine (inactive)
 * Viruses

Awards
Writing good medical articles can be hard work! Why not reward someone you've seen do some good work in the area? Any editor may present these awards to any person as a reward for and public recognition of good work.

Look in the list of barnstars and personal user awards at the right, or decorate their user talk page with one of these medicine-specific barnstars:

Tools

 * Main tool page: toolserver.org


 * Reflinks - Edits bare references - adds title/dates etc. to bare references
 * Checklinks - Edit and repair external links
 * Dab solver - Quickly resolve ambiguous links.
 * Peer reviewer - Provides hints and suggestion to improving articles.

Project watchlist

 * Wikiproject Watchlist - WikiProject Medicine