 | This help page is a how-to guide. It explains concepts or processes used by the Wikipedia community. It is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, and may reflect varying levels of consensus. |
 | This page in a nutshell: Proceed with due diligence and caution when editing medicine-related articles |
For those who are familiar with editing other Wikipedia content, editing medical articles is a little different. This difference is primarily the need for greater diligence in the use of secondary sources.
For contributors with a biomedical background who have not edited Wikipedia before, the ground rules here are slightly different from writing peer-reviewed literature or textbooks; you may find our essay for experts who are new to Wikipedia helpful; there was also an article published in PLoS Computational Biology about working in Wikipedia that you might find helpful.[1] Wikipedia is an encyclopedia of notable topics written for a general audience. It is neither a research paper nor a how-to manual; we summarize accepted knowledge here, and we find "accepted knowledge" in literature reviews published in good journals or in clinical guidelines or statements by major medical/scientific bodies. On Wikipedia, edits are considered valuable when they reflect a neutral point of view (NPOV) and can be verified by references to reliable medical sources.
Wikipedia's conflict of interest advice for medical articles is slightly different from that offered elsewhere. It's worth noting that medical articles can be particularly susceptible to certain common pitfalls such as advocacy, advertising, plagiarism, and copyright violation.
- ^ Logan, D. W.; Sandal, M.; Gardner, P. P.; Manske, M.; Bateman, A. (2010). "Ten Simple Rules for Editing Wikipedia". PLOS Computational Biology. 6 (9): e1000941. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000941. PMC 2947980. PMID 20941386.