Wikipedia:ILAE Wikipedia Project/Author guide

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Instructions for Authors

Thanks for your interest in joining the ILAE Wikipedia Project. Writing a Wikipedia article is slightly different from writing an academic article.

• Please review the ILAE Wikipedia project pages including the training module.
• Review the manual of style for health-related articles as well as other guidelines on Wikiproject Medicine.
• If you are writing your first article on Wikipedia, it would be good to go through Help:Your first article which explains what is expected of articles on Wikipedia.
• Unlike academic manuscripts or textbook chapters, I encourage you to be saving your work-in-progress to Wikipedia as you go (rather than perfecting the entire work) before submitting it. This is different from traditional approaches, but then, so too Wikipedia's "continuously published" model is different from academic publishing.
• Chunk your contributions into much smaller edits and saves so that each piece is smaller. That way if anything is rejected by other Wikipedians it will be a smaller segment that gets reverted. You'll then understand what piece needs to change while allowing the appropriate content to "stick" faster.
• As you know, all original research studies in healthcare need to be replicated. So it's completely inappropriate to cite primary data sources on an encyclopedia like Wikipedia. Instead, be sure to use secondary data sources as the inline citations. Systematic reviews, meta-analyses, and textbooks are all appropriate.
• While we tend to value most recently published sources in medicine, remember that "old" texts are still accurate. For example, there is nothing "new" about the underlying physiology of seizures, so there's nothing wrong with citing an old (but accurate and reliable) medical text as the source of your newly authored non-plagiarized sentences on Wikipedia!
• Use a citation for each and every sentence it is serving as a reference for. Unlike scholarly manuscripts where we can write several sentences without citations, with Wikipedia there's every reason why every single sentence can be referenced! If you find an extremely reliable source that "covers" a lot of material for the Wikipedia page you're writing for, then be sure to use that reference a LOT (of course being sure to not plagiarize by too closely paraphrasing).
• While it's ideal if every sentence is referenced, there's no reason every sentence need have multiple references supporting it. I have found that 1 - 2 references per sentence is generally enough. Depending on the "baseline" quality of the page(s) you're editing, you may find that more of your work is actually inserting references for sentences that don't have sources (rather than actually mostly writing new sentences).
• Don't engage in any kind of "edit-wars" by reverting pages back and forth with other well-intended Wikipedians. Just like physicians must engage in healthy discourse with their patients who disagree with medically-accurate recommended treatments, so too we must engage with any Wikipedians who disagree with our recommended scientifically-accurate improvements. Stand on the foundation of science by engaging in the debate respectfully using the talk page of the page you are trying to improve. This "semi-public" process will allow you to demonstrate you are dutifully trying to be a part of the Wikipedian community. After all, we all are on the same side of providing high quality health information on Wikipedia!
• Think about the talk pages associated with every Wikipedia page as a form of continuous open peer review. For those of you who have had manuscript submissions that have been peer-reviewed by anonymous reviewers: how often have you wished you could engage in healthy dialogue/debate with that mystery reviewer? Well with Wikipedia talk pages you can!