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Welcome from WikiProject:Medicine!

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A short video explaining some of the content in this welcome message in a audio-visual format.

Welcome to Wikipedia! An editor from the WikiProject Medicine (also known as WP:MED) noticed your interest in improving medical content on Wikipedia, and we'd like to thank you for offering to help.

We're a group of editors who strive to improve the quality of medical articles on Wikipedia, and it's always great to have a new interested editor on board – Wikipedia will likely never be "finished" and there's always something you can improve. We're reaching out to assist you in applying your knowledge, skills, and enthusiasm to improving the encyclopedia in any way we can – starting with these short guides on some of the policies and procedures related to medical content on Wikipedia. You can also always leave us a message at any time on our talk page – a centralized page where editors can discuss medical content on Wikipedia. Please leave a message there if you have any problems, suggestions, would like review of an article, need suggestions for articles to edit, or would like some collaboration when editing – typing WT:MED into Wikipedia's search bar will take you straight to the page, where you can add a new section at the bottom of the page.

While Wikipedia is the encyclopedia anyone can edit, we do have some guidelines that are very important for editing medical articles, and failure to follow them may result in your hard work being undone by another editor. As a short list, our medical reliable source policy is important, as well as our style guide for medical articles. Notably, Wikipedia does _not_ like to use primary sources such as single studies/trials – even when those trials are "good" science. Wikipedia prefers to wait for secondary sources such as systematic reviews, or meta-analyses, to be released which analyze data from many studies and form a conclusion as to the facts from that analysis. We also avoid giving advice to "patients" – instead writing in a neutral, agnostic tone simply stating facts about something, and not giving advice or talking to the reader directly.

You may also run into times where you and another editor disagree with each other, which makes discussion important – you can be bold and edit, but if someone else disagrees, make sure to discuss with them instead of repeating your edit over and over. You should use the "talk page" associated with the article to discuss any changes you make that someone else disagrees with, or that is "reverted" (or undone) by another editor – you can access the "talk page" for an article by clicking "Talk" or "Discussion" at the top of the page, or by adding Talk: in front of the article name in the URL/search box.

We look forward to seeing your contributions to the encyclopedia, and THANK YOU for your help in editing Wikipedia.