Hi NimbleNavigator! Thanks for contributing to Wikipedia. Be our guest at the Teahouse! The Teahouse is a friendly space where new editors can ask questions about contributing to Wikipedia and get help from experienced editors like Cordless Larry (talk).
We're a group of editors who strive to improve the quality of content about health here on Wikipedia, as part of the larger mission of Wikipedia to provide the public with articles that present accepted knowledge, created and maintained by a community of editors.
One of our members has noticed that you are interested in editing medical articles; it's great to have a new interested editor on board!
First, some basics about editing Wikipedia, which is a strange place behind the scenes; you may find some of the ways we operate to be surprising. Please take your time and understand how this place works. Here are some useful links, which have information to help editors get the most out of Wikipedia:
Everything starts with the mission - the mission of Wikipedia is to provide the public with articles that summarize accepted knowledge, working in a community of editors. (see WP:NOT)
We find "accepted knowledge" for biomedical information in sources defined by WP:MEDRS -- we generally use literature reviews published in good journals or statements by major medical or scientific bodies and we generally avoid using research papers, editorials, and popular media as sources for such content. We read MEDRS sources and summarize them, giving the most space and emphasis (what we call WP:WEIGHT) to the most prevalent views found in MEDRS sources.
Please see WPMED's "how to" guide for editing content about health
More generally please see The five pillars of Wikipedia and please be aware of the "policies and guidelines" that govern what we do here; these have been generated by the community itself over the last fifteen years, and you will need to learn them (which is not too hard, it just takes some time). Documents about Wikipedia - the "back office" - reside in "Wikipedia space" where document titles are preceded by "Wikipedia:" (often abbreviated "WP:"). WP space is separate from "article space" (also called "mainspace") - the document at WP:CONSENSUS is different from, and serves as a different purpose than, the document at Consensus.
Every article and page in Wikipedia has an associated talk page, and these pages are essential because we editors use them to collaborate and work out disagreements. (This is your Talk page, associated with your user page.) When you use a Talk page, you should sign your name by typing four tildes (~~~~) at the end of your comment; the Wikipedia software will automatically convert that into links to your Userpage and this page and will add a datestamp. This is how we know who said what. We also "thread" comments in a way that you will learn with time. Please see the Talk Page Guidelines to learn how to use talk pages.
Thanks for coming aboard! We always appreciate a new editor. Feel free to leave us a message at any time on our talk page. If you are interested in joining the project yourself, there is a participant list where you can sign up. You can also just add our talk page to your watchlist and join in discussions that interest you. Please leave a message on the WPMED talk page 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!
The Wikipedia community includes a wide variety of editors with different interests, skills, and knowledge. We all manage to get along through a lot of discussion that happens under the scenes and through the bold, edit, discuss editing cycle. If you encounter any problems, you can discuss it on an article's talk page or post a message on the WPMED talk page.
Please never update the lead; please add well-sourced content to the body of an article, and only if rises to the importance of the lead, add it again there. Nothing (no content, and no source) that is not already in the body of the article -- the LEAD just summarizes the body. (this is described in WP:LEAD)
Remember that when adding content about health, please only use high-quality reliable sources as references. We typically use recently published (in the last five years or so) review articles, major textbooks and position statements of national or international organizations (There are several kinds of sources that discuss health: here is how the community classifies them and uses them).
Please take time to fully format references, and please never use bare URLs (see WP:BAREURL as to why this is a bad practice). There is a very easy and fast way to do citations, which often also provides a link that allows readers to more easily find the source being cited.
You will notice that when you are in an edit window, that up at the top there is a toolbar. On the right, it says "Cite" and there is a little triangle next to it. If you click the triangle, another menu appears below. On the left side of the new menu bar, you will see "Templates". If you select (for example) "Cite journal", you can fill in the "doi" or the "PMID" field, and then if you click the little magnifying glass next to the field, the whole thing will auto-fill. Then you click the "insert" button at the bottom, and it will insert a ref like this (I changed the ref tags so it shows):
(ref) Huhtaniemi, I (2014). "Late-onset hypogonadism: current concepts and controversies of pathogenesis, diagnosis and treatment". Asian journal of andrology. 16 (2): 192–202. PMID24407185. (/ref)
That takes about 10 seconds. As you can see there are templates for books, news, and websites, as well as journal articles, and each template has at least one field that you can use to autofill the rest. The autofill isn't perfect and I usually have to manually fix some things before I click "insert" but it generally works great and saves a bunch of time.
The PMID parameter is the one we care about the most - this allows us to swiftly go to pubmed and determine if a reference is a primary source or a secondary source.
One thing the autofill doesn't do, is add the PMC field if it is there (PMC is a link to a free fulltext version of the article). you can add that after you insert the citation, or -- while you have the "cite journal" template open -- you can click the "show/hide extra fields" button at the bottom, and you will see the PMC field on the right, near the bottom. If you add the PMC number there that will be included, like this (again I have changed the ref tags):
