Welcome to the 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 Wikipedia: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 medicine 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
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.
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 Week. Everyone from subject-matter experts to normal readers is welcome!
This user subpage is currently inactive and is retained for historical reference. If you want to revive discussion regarding the subject, you might try contacting the user in question or seeking broader input via a forum such as the village pump.
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 Category:Medicine stubs and Category:Stub-Class medicine articles. Add sources and information, and remove the {{stub}} template when it's no longer a stub.
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 and copy and paste the resulting output (xxxx) into the page between <ref> xxxxx </ref> Alternatively, if you use Internet Explorer or Firefox (2.0+), then Wouterstomp's bookmarklet can automate this step from the PubMed abstract page.
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 {{WPMED|class=|importance=}}, and assess the article according to our assessment scale.
{{User WPMed}} - Userbox for members of this WikiProject.
{{subst:The WikiProject Medicine Barnstar}} - You may award the Medicine Barnstar to those you feel have done superb work in the realm of medicine-related articles.
The medicine project is organized into task forces to deal with smaller chunks of medicine as it is a huge topic. All are encouraged to participate in any task forces that interest them.
Welcome to this medicine task force over view page. If you have any questions about articles or are generally seeking advice, you're encouraged to ask at the Medicine talk page, the centralized point for discussion, thank you.
The full list of project participants is located on a separate subpage. If you would like to help, feel free to add yourself to the list.
Templates
Writing good medical articles can be hard work! Why not reward someone you've seen do some good work in the area; decorate their userpage with one of these:
The WikiProject Medicine Barnstar may be awarded to Wikipedians who exhibit exceptional effort and dedication to articles related to WikiProject Medicine. The barnstar design was created by Eustress on April 17, 2008.
