Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Alternative medicine/Archive 1

Previous discussions are archived here:
 * Wikipedia talk:Wikiproject:Alternative Medicine/Archive of Addressed Criticisms 1

The rules are very simple here.
The rules are very simple here. -- John Gohde, aka Mr-Natural-Health 13:19, 16 Apr 2004 (UTC)
 * 1) If you want to edit this WikiProject, then we are asking for the simple courtesy of registering yourself as a Public Participant in this WikiProject in the main project page. Most WikiProjects follow this same practice.
 * 2) All comments made on our talk pages must be friendly.
 * 3) * Hostile comments and / or personal attacks are subject to being refactored out by any of our public participants.
 * 4) This talk page should be reserved for discussions about this wikiproject in general or its scope, goals, tasks, participating in it, and the management thereof.
 * 5) * Any off-topic comments and criticisms that have been addressed in the project page will be archived for historical purposes.

==The Core Project Lists and Articles Define the Scope of this Project ==

Terms and concepts was not my original idea, but was adapted straight from the Buddhism project. This article will in effect be one huge glossary of CAM terms. We would differ from the Buddhism project by restricting it just to the English language. The beauty of this glossary concept is that CAM developers will now be able to define hundreds of CAM terms in one paragraph without actually creating a new stub article. And, all the stub articles now in CAM could be physically deleted and moved to Terms and concepts.

The first thing that I will define in Terms and concepts will be all the terms used in the CAM Classifications section of our project's infobox. So, when operational the CAM Classifications section would all be hyperlinked to Terms and concepts. Concepts that can be developed into full blown CAM articles would also be in the Philosophy of series.

Thus, the CAM development process would be first to define the concept in Terms and concepts with a short paragraph or bulleted list. Next, a full blown article could be developed privately in the editors sandbox. Once the official article is created the link would be added to the Philosophy of series simple list article. And, a link to the actual CAM article would also be added to Terms and concepts definition. Finally, a link would be also added to the Index of Topics simple list article. The Index of Topics simple list article might become overwhelming and appear to duplicate other lists, but that is how the Buddhism project has implemented their List of Topics as far as I can figured out. It contains no text and looks like a book index. It is functioning as a master index of topics in Buddhism. -- John Gohde, aka Mr-Natural-Health 12:08, 25 Apr 2004 (UTC)
 * Votes for deletion/Index of topics in alternative medicine
 * See also: Votes for deletion/List of Buddhist topics
 * Votes for deletion/Philosophy of alternative medicine
 * Votes for deletion/List of miscellaneous topics related to alternative medicine

Future Proposed Goals & Tasks
Phase I of the WikiProject on alternative medicine would be to add both our custom message to the talk page and our customized infobox to the article side for all the branches of alternative medicine articles that are exclusively about CAM.

From what I have seen, there are quite a few of these articles to be classified.


 * Phase I has essentially been completed. The CAM classification systems have been debugged.  The major branches have been classified and organized by sub-groupings. Clicking on the NCCAM classification hyperlink will now take you to a list of articles belonging to that classification.  Traditional Chinese medicine has been set up as an independent series of articles.  And, all the major branches that have been developed beyond a stub have their first draft of our infobox.  It is expected that a number of pseudoscience classifications will be upgraded later on to protoscience once evidence of effectiveness has been added to the article. -- John Gohde 20:04, 12 May 2004 (UTC)

Phase II, would be conducting compliance audits of the major branches of alternative medicine articles and other specific CAM articles that have a history of controversy in regards to their degree of compliance to our standards of quality guidelines as they presently are written. This would include maintaining a database of our reviews. And, I am thinking about disclosing on the talk pages of the article what we found wrong / right with the article.



Phase III, will be covering the articles tangentially related to CAM.


 * In Phase III, we would be covering the philosophy, famous people, and history articles, plus branches like astrology and cognitive behavior therapy.


 * It is important that we mark the existence of category:alternative medicine, or our project, on these articles. Ideally, once a person finds one article in our series of articles they should be able to see a link to the other articles in our series. That is the objective of phase III.
 * We need to add at least one sentence to these articles that talks about or draws an association to alternative medicine.
 * Ideally we need to add an alternative medicine section and perhaps a few research studies.
 * We need to mark these articles in one way or another as being a part of category:alternative medicine.  The bigger the box the better, but we have a number of alternatives that we can use to deal with hostile resistance to our attempts to label these articles.
 * We may have to create a large number of duplicate articles, such as Body work (alternative medicine) which is a duplicate copy of Massage. Perhaps, for example,  Wellness (alternative medicine) might be a better way to go than trying to clean up Wellness?


 * At this point, we would have attracted the attention of quite a few editors who would have linked to our announcement page. We will be building community support in essence.  Other people have already been editing our new articles.  Let us give them time to build up the momentum of interest in working on  CAM articles.

Phase IV would be aggressively correcting the major Branches of CAM articles in teams that have not already been cleaned up by other editors following the results of our previous compliance audits. And, we will be aggressively dealing in teams with the people who want to start edit wars by moving community support against them on an as needed basis.


 * I firmly believe that we will be in the middle of Phase IV by the end of summer 2004.

Phase V would be cleaning up miscellaneous CAM related articles that should be mostly about CAM, but currently are not for whatever reason. Examples of these types of articles in need of being cleaned up, are as follows.
 * Wellness
 * Healers
 * Multiple chemical sensitivity
 * Physical therapy - A Professional Identity Crisis exists in physical therapy by a modern trend to call it a form of alternative medicine. This trend exists and is extensively documented on Google and in published research studies. So, we have every right to put an alternative view section in this co-called conventional medicine article.
 * Osteopathy - Even though Osteopathy is virtually conventional medicine it is still being attacked as quackery by the critics of alternative medicine. This speaks to the credibility of the attackers.  And, we need to stress this point in the article.

This phase is where we will, also, be adding proof of effectiveness to all the major branches of CAM. We would also deal with the stub articles and messes like Manipulative therapy with VfD, or whatever.

-- John Gohde 21:25, 12 May 2004 (UTC)

Project on Alternative Medicine Template Deletion History
I am interested in finding the deletion history for these Wikiproject on Alternative Medicine templates. Notes on their respective talk pages indicate TfD noitces were posted Aug - Sept 2004, yet the Deletion Log for Sept has no record of anybody voting on these templates. What happened?


 * CamMenu -- TfD notice was posted in Sept 2004.
 * CamBottom -- TfD notice was posted in Aug 2004.
 * Alternative Medicine ( Terms, Philosophy, Branches, People, History, Index )
 * CamFailed
 * CamPassed
 * -- John Gohde 08:07, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)

The Project on Alternative Medicine was started long after projects were an accepted part of Wikipedia. Our Infobox was modeled after the long accepted infobox for the Project on Buddhism. This fact has been stated in a number of different places, such on our main project page. And on the original edit summaries and talk pages of each of the articles used in our project's infobox. This fact is undeniable. Our infobox is actually better than the Buddha box because it is smaller and more compact. So, any of the vile comments directed against our infobox goes double for the Buddha box. I will ask this question. When will you guys get around to deleting the Buddha box and all the other project infoboxes? John Gohde 04:38, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)

February 4, 2005 -- The Next Phase of our WikiProject has officially begun.
The Project on Alternative Medicine is active. Our project's infobox designs have been updated. The new designs place greater emphasis on Category:Alternative medicine. The current phase of our project is to update our infoboxes in their respective articles, as well as Category: Alternative medicine and categories.

In some cases, the original infobox must be restored first before the update can be made. Do not feel bad about adding back our informative and beautiful infoboxes. Projects are an accepted part of Wikipedia.

The implementation of categories, at least in the area of alternative medicine, is a total mess. Category: Alternative medicine is woefully incomplete. Major articles are missing. Subcategories of alternative medicine like Category:Manipulative therapy and TCM have not been added to category: alternative medicine. In short, categories require a major effort at making them complete in both directions. John Gohde 08:11, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Case of Snowspinner Deliberately Destroying An Article
User:Snowspinner on 13 Feb and on 14 Feb 2005 voluntarily decided for no good reason to destroy the Philosophy of alternative medicine article, one of the Core Project Articles of the Wikipedia:Wikiproject:Alternative_Medicine that was created by this project in April 2004. Snowspinner moved this article to List of topics in alternative medicine in a manner that did not maintained the original links to it. In other words, nothing links to this new article. That makes it a case of vandalism committed by User:Snowspinner, an adminstrator, because the work of dozens of editors in Wikipedia have been deliberately orphaned. I have previously attempted to moved the article back both on 13 Feb and on 14 Feb 2005, but Snowspinner has reversed it back to List of topics in alternative medicine sans cross-links. Further, the Philosophy of alternative medicine article is now showing up as a completely different stub article. In other words, there are two articles physically in existence. There is no rational explanation other than vandalism that explains the actions of Snowspinner. John Gohde 23:55, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)


 * I have responded to this at Talk:Alternative medicine. Snowspinner 00:05, Feb 15, 2005 (UTC)

Another case of Snowspinner vandalism?
I don't care to get into this debate, but I thought I'd write a note here alongside this other note above.

Template:CamNotice may have been vandalized. I don't really care about the arguments.. I reverted things. See Template talk:CamNotice for what I noted.

-- Sy / (talk) 23:36, 26 Feb 2005 (UTC)


 * Everything appears cool.. the deletion conversation was restored, and the template is hardly used so I'm supporting its removal. -- Sy / (talk) 03:20, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Alternative medicine stub template: -->   CAM-stub
I created a stub template for the alternative medicine topic,  , to be used instead of    or   . This is to separate conventional medicine articles from alternative medicine articles.

--CDN99 19:52, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Improvement drive
A related article, Obesity, is currently nominated to be improved on This week's improvement drive. Please vote for this article there.--Fenice 08:38, 9 August 2005 (UTC)