Nia.wil

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Welcome to Wikipedia and Wikiproject Medicine

Welcome to Wikipedia! We have compiled some guidance for new healthcare editors:

1. Please make sure you have completed the student training module for editing health content.
2. Please keep the mission of Wikipedia in mind. We provide the public with accepted knowledge, working in a community.
3. 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. (for the difference between primary and secondary sources, see WP:MEDDEF)
4. Please use high-quality, recent, secondary sources for medical content (see WP:MEDRS). 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 be aware that predatory publishers exist - check the publishers of articles (especially open source articles) at Beall's list.
5. 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.
6. More generally see WP:MEDHOW
7. Reference tags generally go after punctuation, not before; there is no preceding space.
8. We use very few capital letters and very little bolding. Only the first word of a heading is usually capitalized.
9. Common terms are not usually wikilinked; nor are years, dates, or names of countries and major cities.
10. Do not use URLs from your university library's internal net: the rest of the world cannot see them.
11. Please include page numbers when referencing a book or long journal article.
12. Please format citations consistently within an article and be sure to cite the PMID for journal articles and ISBN for books; see WP:MEDHOW for how to format citations.
13. Never copy and paste from sources; we run detection software on new edits.
14. 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) 00:01, 11 December 2017 (UTC)

• Thanks Jytdog - I was just about to come here and tell her a lot of the same content. Medical topics are things that should be very, very carefully addressed as there are a lot of guidelines for this area. This is covered in the editing medical topics module. One of the main things that I can stress is that you should avoid using studies as a source unless the study has been covered in an independent reliable source. One reason for this is that studies are primary sources for the research they create. For example, let's say that I conducted a study and said that the results proved that apples improved health and decreased doctor visits. We can't use this to back up the claim that "an apple a day keeps the doctors away" because there would be no proof that my study was actually reliable or verified. It could be that I was performing the study on behalf of an apple company and as such, were swayed by their support. It could also be that my research is not able to be reproduced, meaning that my research can't be verified. Now if my study was covered in academic journals where they discussed my research as well as other studies that replicated the content, we could use the study as a source - however the study would still need to be accompanied by a secondary source. There are some other issues with this, but that's one of the biggest reasons. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 20:50, 11 December 2017 (UTC)

User:Shalor (Wiki Ed) your advice about how to write about biomedical information is not correct. Nia.wil please disregard that advice. Please simply find sources that comply with MEDRS and summarize them. Jytdog (talk) 20:58, 11 December 2017 (UTC)

• Sorry about that - my intent was basically to show Nia why studies are seen as primary sources and to show that the amount of sourcing needed to verify and justify the addition of a primary source study is fairly large. I'll be more careful about this in the future. Basically Nia, you should avoid using studies while sourcing articles. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 21:11, 11 December 2017 (UTC)

Welcome!

Hello, Nia.wil, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Shalor and I work with the Wiki Education Foundation; I help support students who are editing as part of a class assignment.

I hope you enjoy editing here. If you haven't already done so, please check out the student training library, which introduces you to editing and Wikipedia's core principles. You may also want to check out the Teahouse, a community of Wikipedia editors dedicated to helping new users. Below are some resources to help you get started editing.

Handouts
Choosing an article to edit Editing an article • Add images to articles Citing sources on Wikipedia
Additional Resources
You can find answers to many student questions on our Q&A site, ask.wikiedu.org

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 19:31, 11 December 2017 (UTC)