Help talk:How to edit

Article names

No instructions on article names. Wikipedia considered this carefully for globalisation and good "hit rate" on searching for a topic:

• Generally only 1st word capitalised, unless a proper noun - hence "Myocardial infarction" and not "Myocardial Infarction"
• For diseases use the most commonly used technical term - hence "Myocardial infarction" rather than "Heart attack"
• but allow for redirects to an article allowing likely synonyms to be used (in above example "Heart attack" exists as a page but would be set up as a redirect to "Cardiac arrest")
• For drugs you currently specify to use generic names, but I think should stipulate to use the WHO accepted INN's - else you'll have people in UK trying to use the now superceded British Approved names (eg Cephalexin rather than Cefalexin), and there'll be endless arguments over others - hint Americans will just have to accept Paracetamol vs Acetaminophen, and us Brits Epinephrine rather than Adrenaline (just get them to redirect across) :-) David Ruben 18:07, 17 February 2009 (PST)

Totally agree. I left a comment in the talk page of blood cancer, asking for it to be redirected to leukemia.

One way of dealing with this would be to create a large number of articles "stubs", thus claiming the title and allowing redirects. These titles could be listed in summary articles, e.g. "Kidney Diseases". I intend to do this with tumors, using the WHO classification for the titles. Emmanuel Maicas MD 11:58, 18 February 2009 (PST)

Oops, just found this in the Help:Style Guide page: Titles of articles. Use layperson’s terms for diseases or conditions. Capitalize all words. Example: Heart Attack instead of Myocardial Infarction. I still agree that Heart Attack should be redirected to Cardiac Arrest. Emmanuel Maicas MD 12:24, 18 February 2009 (PST)

Great feedback! How about these updated guidelines?--Medpedia Admins 00:09, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

• My concern is with another facet of this:

Is it clear that we want to have PE and clinical articles come in pairs that cover the same material in different language and depth, or is that just the first uncritical thought that occurs to everyone else, as it did to me?

What raised the question for me was noticing that there are two articles, Alzheimer Disease and Clinical: Alzheimer. And each, as it were, knew nothing about the other: if you click Clinical from the PE one, you were invited to write a Clinical article; if you clicked Plain English from the Clinical one, you were invited to write a PE article. But -- not being a med-professional -- I created a redirect to each of them, rather than trying to decide which title should win. The two clicks just described now take you from the PE one to the Clinical, and vice versa. The URL and the teeny "redirected" notice reflect the difference in titles, but the effect is pretty natural. Sharpening my question:

Does the sleek structure of identically named articles of exactly the same title, in the two most visible namespaces (a wiki and general computer-science term for what PE and Clinical are, or do) really reflect the character of the problems we are solving? Is a PE article effective if it is simply a translation of a Clinical article, with the same structure? Or for that matter simply a translated digest of the Clinical?

It seems to me that in fact that approach is likely to be a seriously troublesome over-simplification. Once we took the approach of distinguishing PE and Clinical articles as distinct species (a distinction I consider extremely valuable and important), the temptation to consider each article as waiting for its other-side-of-the-coin counterpart became strong; the "most simple clinical name for a disease" standard goes further and mandates that approach.

1. Where two terms map onto each other one-on-one -- perhaps Broken Bone/Fracture, Bruise/Contusion, Flu/Influenza are good examples -- why not put a PE name on the PE article and a Clinical name on a Clinical one (still, of course, using the "Clinical:" prefix). (In that case, of course the pair of redirects, as in my Alzheimer example above, would tie them together via the "Clinical" tab on Broken Bone -- it links to Clinical:Broken Bone which should redirect to the article Clinical:Fracture -- and the "Plain English" tab on Clinical:Fracture -- it links to Fracture which should redirect to the article Broken Bone.
2. Often they won't map cleanly onto each other -- presumably the reason why (outside MP) neither PE nor clinical language has displaced the other. For example, in everyday speech, IMO, "epilepsy" assumes tonic/clonic. (unless you're a Michael Crichton fan & remember Clinical:Psychomotor Epilepsy from The Terminal Man) In fact,I'm thinking that in teaching Silas Marner, my English Lit teacher described an absence seizure as "catatonia" -- but doesn't that properly refer to a schizophrenic manifestation? But I'm sure you medical professionals will come up with much better examples as soon as you give yourself a fair chance. What's more important to say is that the failure to map one on one is not a disaster. Rather, reflecting the mismatches accurately should become a tool for clarification. Pretend for the sake of argument that I'm right in claiming that Epilepsy maps best onto Clinical:Tonic/clonic Epilepsy. Then (using for illustrative purposes English-language Wikipedia "hat-note disambiguation" style, which may or may not turn out to make sense here) Epilepsy could start

Clinical:Epilepsy, on the other hand, presumably would be limited to the shared characteristics, etiology, treatment, etc. that distinguish all forms of epilepsy from other disorders, and link to detailed clinical articles on those respective subdivisions of epilepsy.

--Gary R Zempel 05:18, 10 May 2009 (UTC)

Mediawiki markup

You fail to mention simple things such as single quote, used twice for italics, hence ''italics'' gives italics, and triple for bold, hence '''bold''' giving bold.

• Also starting a line with "*" for a bullet list and

1. using"#" for a numbered list

with a ":" indenting David Ruben 18:07, 17 February 2009 (PST)

re Easy Way to Link to Abstracts

In the example of how to link to PMIDs, the example of http://pubmed.gov/12345678 is not the easiest way to so link - you seem unaware that the mediawiki software has an autodetection of "PMID number", hence just enter "PMID 12345678" and this is automatically shown as a linked item - PMID 12345678 - that's the simplest way ! David Ruben 18:07, 17 February 2009 (PST)

Here's the updated version: If you enter <ref name="pubmed-18418893">18418893</ref>

and then the References at the bottom: == References == <references />

the Pubmed reference will be automatically formatted.--Medpedia Admins 19:14, 3 March 2009 (UTC)

Clever, very clever :-) Might I ask how you did that (was it via Diberri's tool, or your own direct coding) ? David Ruben 08:39, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

Direct coding, I believe. ~Andrea --Andrea Spillmann 18:30, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

Discussion pages

There should be an instruction to sign off a thread with use of 4 tilde characters, "~~~~", to automatically show ones editorname autolinked and a time & date. David Ruben 18:07, 17 February 2009 (PST)

Good suggestion! You can also use the signature/timestamp icon in the toolbar above the edit box (looks like script letters; if you hold the cursor over each icon, an explanation will pop up of what they do. --Medpedia Admins 22:16, 23 February 2009 (UTC)

See How to Use a Discuss Page and Specifications for the Discuss Tab (both on the How to Edit page). Does that resolve the question? Thanks! --Medpedia Admins 23:15, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

Templates?

Are these to be used here ? - if so would greatly simply and standardise reference citation markup. Tools such as Diberri's template filler could then take PubMed PMID numbers to generate markup per this example:

Where: <ref name="pmid16418528">{{cite journal |author=Harrison LH |title=Prospects for vaccine prevention of meningococcal infection |journal=Clin. Microbiol. Rev. |volume=19 |issue=1 |pages=142–64 |year=2006 |month=January |pmid=16418528 |pmc=1360272 |doi=10.1128/CMR.19.1.142-164.2006 |url=http://cmr.asm.org/cgi/reprint/19/1/142.pdf |format=PDF}}</ref>

Gives: Harrison LH (January 2006). "Prospects for vaccine prevention of meningococcal infection" (PDF). Clin. Microbiol. Rev. 19 (1): 142–64. doi:10.1128/CMR.19.1.142-164.2006. PMID 16418528. PMC: 1360272.

David Ruben 18:07, 17 February 2009 (PST)

Filling reference template is painful. Why couldn't someone invent a bot to fill them for us using a simple PMID number? Emmanuel Maicas MD 12:31, 18 February 2009 (PST)

Working through this technically to see what the possibilities are. Great idea, and will keep you posted! --Medpedia Admins 23:17, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

<DONE> (partly) per Medpedia Admins added feature in previous thread. David Ruben 08:41, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

Add an image/video -- what about copyrights?

Coming from Wikipedia, I am surprised to find no guideline or restriction on uploaded media. Please clarify. Emmanuel Maicas MD 07:24, 18 February 2009 (PST)

The Terms page (Submissions to Medpedia) lays out copyright guidelines. Also working on text for the Upload pages. --Medpedia Admins 23:40, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

Also "Image:" space been slected here, yet Wikipedia moved to using "File:" to allow for sound & video media too. David Ruben 14:47, 18 February 2009 (PST)

Medpedia needs nomenclature and classification policy

A quick perusal of the article titles reveals that Medpedia needs a policy for naming article and classifying diseases. I left Wikipedia for this reason and am very disappointed to find the same mess here. Emmanuel Maicas MD 14:07, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

Again, great feedback, and see the link above to the updated Article naming guidelines. Also, is this what you're talking about for category? All categories are pre-populated using MeSH to ensure standardization. What other suggestions do you have? Thanks very much! --Medpedia Admins 00:11, 25 February 2009 (UTC)