CMILNEditor
Welcome
editWelcome to Wikipedia! We have compiled some guidance for new healthcare editors:
- Please keep the mission of Wikipedia in mind. We provide the public with accepted knowledge, working in a community.
- We do that by finding high quality secondary sources and summarizing what they say, giving WP:WEIGHT as they do. Please do not try to build content by synthesizing content based on primary sources.
- Please use high-quality, recent, secondary sources for medical content (see WP:MEDRS; for the difference between primary and secondary sources, see the WP:MEDDEF section.) High-quality sources include review articles (which are not the same as peer-reviewed), position statements from nationally and internationally recognized bodies (like CDC, WHO, FDA), and major medical textbooks. Lower-quality sources are typically removed. Please beware of predatory publishers – check the publishers of articles (especially open source articles) at Beall's list.
- The ordering of sections typically follows the instructions at WP:MEDMOS. The section above the table of contents is called the WP:LEAD. It summarizes the body. Do not add anything to the lead that is not in the body. Style is covered in MEDMOS as well; we avoid the word "patient" for example.
- We don't use terms like "currently", "recently," "now", or "today". See WP:RELTIME.
- More generally see WP:MEDHOW, which gives great tips for editing about health -- for example, it provides a way to format citations quickly and easily
- Citation details are important:
- We use very few capital letters (see WP:MOSCAPS) and very little bolding. Only the first word of a heading is usually capitalized.
- Common terms are not usually wikilinked; nor are years, dates, or names of countries and major cities. Avoid overlinking!\
- Never copy and paste from sources; we run detection software on new edits.
- Talk to us! Wikipedia works by collaboration at articles and user talkpages.
Once again, welcome, and thank you for joining us! Please share these guidelines with other new editors.
– the WikiProject Medicine team Jytdog (talk) 16:13, 6 June 2018 (UTC)
Indenting and signing on talk pages
editQuick note on the logistics of discussing things on Talk pages, which are essential for everything that happens here. In Talk page discussions, we "thread" comments by indenting (see WP:THREAD) - when you reply to someone, you put a colon in front of your comment, which the Wikipedia software will render into an indent when you save your edit; if the other person has indented once, then you indent twice by putting two colons in front of your comment, which the WP software converts into two indents, and when that gets ridiculous you reset back to the margin (or "outdent") by putting this {{od}} in front of your comment. This also allows you to make it clear if you are also responding to something that someone else responded to if there are more than two people in the discussion; in that case you would indent the same amount as the person just above you in the thread. I hope that all makes sense.
And at the end of the comment, please "sign" by typing exactly four (not 3 or 5) tildas "~~~~" which the WP software converts into a date stamp and links to your talk and user pages when you save your edit. That is how we know who said what to whom and when.
Please be aware that threading and signing are fundamental etiquette here, as basic as "please" and "thank you", and continually failing to thread and sign communicates rudeness, and eventually people may start to ignore you (see here).
I know this is insanely archaic and unwieldy, but this is the software environment we have to work on. Sorry about that. 16:14, 6 June 2018 (UTC)