Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Old 2016

Welcome to WikiProject Medicine! Here we discuss, collaborate, or debate anything related to medical and health content on Wikipedia. We do this on the discussion page. Everyone is welcome to join in!

While you're at it check out our goals, and ways you can help. Wikipedia is a work in progress and there is always something that can be done. We also have a list of Related WikiProjects, so not all health-related articles fall under our scope, but we still care about its quality so feel free to comment on it as well.

Over the years we've developed guidelines, and our typical article style is described in our manual of style which can be helpful to consult when issues arise. We also strongly abide by reliable medical source guidelines found at WP:MEDRS. Neither of these pages are "laws", but are intended to give, inspire, and organize our contributions. They should never prevent anyone from writing and improving medical articles!

If you would like to help, add yourself to the list of participants (no strings attached!) We hope you enjoy reading and improving Wikipedia's medical articles.

Goals
We want to have a worldwide impact and to give the general public as well as health care professionals information that they can read, appreciate, and respect, free of charge. To help organize our efforts, we are currently working towards these milestones:

Goal 1: Get all top-importance articles at B-class quality or above. If you feel a C-class article should be bumped up head over and talk to us at WT:MED.

Goal 2: Have 80 up-to-date featured articles

Goal 3: Have 300 good articles.

Our initiatives

 * Partnering with the field of medical education: see UCSF 2014 elective for current pilot course and proof of concept elective that we are supporting.
 * Collaborative publication: Getting medical Wikipedia articles to high quality standard, and subsequently having them published in peer reviewed journals.
 * The Medical Translation Project: an effort to first improve health-related topics in English followed by translation into as many other languages as possible. It's run by WikiProject Medicine together with Translators Without Borders as well as a number of other actors.
 * Wikiversity Journal of Medicine: A sister project initiative to create original articles

How to help
 Would you like to help, but you are not really quite sure what to do? WikiProject Medicine pages have many opportunities for improvement (even this page, which you can ). You do not need to be an expert.

Edit

 * Improve existing articles. Wikipedia is a work in progress, so nearly all articles could use improvement. An organized list is maintained here.
 * You could help with missing articles or redirects. You might even claim the trophy! You could help us come up with technical ideas and solutions for improving Wikipedia content at WikiProject Med/Tech
 * Add high-quality references. Correct and reliable references are vital. Adding references is easy with this tool (which is explained in detail here and also see step 5b of WP:MEDHOW for an alternate method). 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.
 * Get more pictures. See Pictures for medical articles, a guidance essay that you could also help improve.
 * Check for retracted papers. See Category:Articles citing retracted publications for articles that may wrongly cite retracted publications.

Maintain the integrity of articles

 * Check recent changes to medical articles for accuracy, vandalism, etc., at Recent changes/Medicine.
 * 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.

Collaborate

 * Stay in touch. Put this page on your watchlist, and feel free to communicate on the talk page.
 * Recruit members. Assist in public relations and outreach by recruiting editors interested in medicine to contribute to Wikipedia (Wiki Project Med is a non-profit corporation that shares this goal). Invite good editors to join us. Personal messages are best when inviting Wikipedia editors.

Work behind the scenes

 * 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.
 * Help evaluate articles nominated for deletion. Help identify deletion discussions that relate to medicine.
 * 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.

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.

Taskforces
Our Task forces help organize our medical topics, but these talk pages are not very active. Try discussion at the main talk page first.

Featured and good content
Featured articles are considered to be Wikipedia's very best work; they must pass through a review process as featured article candidates before being selected and being featured on the Main Page. Follow the link above for a showcase of Wikiproject Medicine's finest articles.

Good articles have been evaluated for their quality, but they have not been through the featured article process. For good articles in the biology and medicine category, see. For articles tagged by this project, see Category:GA-Class medicine articles.

Awards
Writing good medical articles and trimming poorly cited article content can be hard work! Why not reward someone you have seen do some good work in the area? Any editor may present an award to any person as a reward for and public recognition of good work.

Current events
 

Article-related
contains all templates used on medicine-related articles.


 * - 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 (here is the complete list)
 * - Used to indicate an article in need of adequate references.
 * - Used to indicate an section in need of adequate references.
 * - The bottom navbox template to be used on articles about broad disciplines of medicine.
 * - placed around requests for medical advice on talk pages (box ends with ).
 * - transcludes the navigation template shown to the right.
 * - template providing links to recent reviews, for use on Talk pages

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 medical condition for articles on diseases
 * Template:Infobox medical intervention for articles pertaining to procedures
 * Template:Infobox diagnostic for diagnostic test
 * Template:Infobox drug for medications
 * Template:Infobox drug class for classes of medication

User-related

 * Welcome messages (all of these should be substituted onto a user's talk page):
 * {{subst:WPMED welcome}} ~ – Welcome message for new Wikipedians (with invitation to join us) – newish, with video
 * {{subst:MedWelcome}} ~ – Welcome template to greet new Wikipedians and invite them to join WikiProject Medicine. – includes general intro links
 * {{subst:Welcome medical student}} ~ – For welcoming new editors who appear to be students associated with a course
 * New medical editor.ogv A video that can be transcluded onto the pages of new users.
 * – Userbox for members of this WikiProject.
 * – Userbox for those who understand Medical Latin (Babel-compatible; just add  to your Babel template)
 * {{subst:RSPlease}} ~ – User Talk page request to use MEDRS sources

Links

 * List of
 * Conflicts of interest (medicine), an essay
 * Alternative medicine, basic terminology such as conventional and alternative

Related WikiMedia projects


 * Wiki_Project_Med_Foundation_logo.svg Wiki Project Med Foundation: a nonprofit corporation promoting development of medical content on Wikimedia projects


 * Star of life Wikidata.svg WikiProject Medicine: the partner project on Wikidata


 * Wiktionary-logo-en.png WikiProject Medicine: the sister project on Wiktionary


 * Wikiversity-logo-en.svg Wikiversity School of Medicine: medical education resources

Related WikiProjects


 * Abortion (inactive)
 * AIDS (inactive)
 * Alternative medicine
 * Anatomy
 * Autism
 * Biology
 * Biophysics
 * Clinical Trials (inactive)
 * Deaf
 * Death
 * Dietary Supplements (inactive)
 * Disability
 * Dentistry (inactive)
 * Dyslexia (inactive)
 * Environment
 * First aid (semi-active)
 * Genetics


 * Health and fitness
 * Hospitals
 * Medicinal botany
 * Microbiology
 * Molecular and Cellular Biology
 * National Health Service (inactive)
 * National Institutes of Health
 * Neuroscience
 * Nursing (inactive)
 * Pharmacology
 * Psychoactive and Recreational Drugs (mostly inactive)
 * Psychology
 * Sanitation
 * Science
 * Tree of life
 * Veterinary medicine (inactive)
 * Viruses

Tools
 * Cleanup listing for Wikiproject Medicine articles
 * HotCat

External resources


 * PMID cite tool, formerly Diberri
 * CDC Public Health Image library
 * CDC Parasite Image Library
 * NCI Visualsonline