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Revision as of 03:21, 11 January 2010

This is a WikiProject, an area for focused collaboration among Wikipedians. New participants are welcome; please feel free to participate! Guide to WikiProjects Directory of WikiProjects

Welcome to the WikiProject on Alternative Medicine.

These project pages are only suggestions, as all WikiProjects are, that are designed to stop the madness of edit wars or editing articles in a never ending spiral of circular editing on articles related to alternative medicine.

Scope and Goals

This WikiProject aims primarily to facilitate the development of professional articles on all aspects of complementary, alternative and integrative medicine. The scope of this Wikiproject will be referred to throughout our project pages simply as CAM.

Scope

The scope of a Wikiproject identifies the types of articles that participants of a project will be working on.

• Glossary of alternative medicine - A Glossary of quick and to the point definitions of important terms and concepts unique to CAM. All stub articles should be added, here. This annotated list is viewed as the primary introduction to alternative medicine, or gateway to the vast resource of articles on CAM on Misplaced Pages, that exists for the benefit of the public.
• Category:Concepts in alternative medicine - These articles are about an alternative position on health, healing, and/or illness; or are related to these topics.
  • Issues related to the promotion of health and wellness.
  • Issues related to the promotion of healing.
  • Illness
    • Issues related to the prevention of illness.
    • Alternative concepts of illness.
    • Specific forms of illness targeted by alternative treatments.
• List of branches of alternative medicine - These articles are either about fully developed systems of alternative medicine or they are about generic alternative methods of treatment or therapy.
  • The various branches are organized up to two layers deep into related sub-groupings so that the public can easily locate similarly related branches of alternative medicine.
• Famous people in alternative medicine - These articles are about historical people in CAM. Here, CAM is approached from the perspective of the actual historic figures who pioneered CAM. In other words, link articles about people in CAM here so that the public can browse this annotated list and be able to find articles about CAM.
• List of alternative medicine subjects - A master list, of all the articles currently existing on Misplaced Pages that have been identified as being related to CAM; or that are about an alternative position on health, healing, and/or illness; or are related to these topics.
• History of alternative medicine - These articles are about the history of CAM. Here, CAM is approached from the perspective of how CAM developed historically. In other words, link articles about the history of CAM here so that the public can browse this annotated list and be able to find articles about CAM.

Goals

1. To develop and promote the scope, goals, and tasks to be covered by this WikiProject.
2. To enhance the image, status and acceptance of articles related to CAM in the Wikipedian community by raising the professional quality of articles edited by our participants.
   • To develop and promote standards of quality guidelines to be followed in all CAM related articles participating in this WikiProject.
   • To collect statistics about the participating articles.
   • To help stabilize any controversial CAM articles so that the number of edit wars will be reduced.
3. To promote better public satisfaction with the coverage of CAM in Misplaced Pages through easier access to articles.
4. To encourage the development of more quality CAM related articles.
5. To develop and promote classification systems that are suitable for comparing all the various systems or schools of CAM to each other. So, that the public will easily be able to compare one branch of CAM to another on a logical and rational basis.
   • This type of information is usually disclosed in one of our infoboxes.
6. To provide a facility that supports the special interest community that will be carrying out the goals and tasks of this project.
   1. There is always strength in numbers. Divided we fall, but united we will triumph!
   2. To function as the centralized sounding board watchlist for all CAM related issues.
   3. To function as a support group for the participants of this WikiProject.
      1. A friendly place for people interested in creating Misplaced Pages articles on CAM to congregate and discuss their concerns amongst like minded people.
      2. To provide a place for discussions that will allow our special interest community to develop more and better CAM articles.

Related WikiProjects

• WikiProject Alternative education
• WikiProject Alternative Views
• WikiProject Paranormal

Participants

What does participation in this WikiProject involve? As little or as much as you'd like.

Public Participants

The sole qualification to publicly participate in this WikiProject is the ability to develop neutral and objective articles, that are in compliance with Misplaced Pages's Neutral Point of View. You may, also, optionally declare what your interest n CAM is while registering here.

Editors desiring to be a Public Participant should Register here.

Private Participants

As with all Misplaced Pages articles, anybody may edit articles related to CAM. You may, if you wish, at your own option choose to privately follow any of the guidelines of this WikiProject. In addition, a private participant is any editor who edits one of our Core Project Articles.

• Our talk pages are open to anyone who feels like commenting in a friendly manner.

Announcements for CAM

The talk page will function as the official centralized sounding board watchlist for all CAM related issues for this WikiProject and ideally for Misplaced Pages as a whole. It will, thus, separate changes to the main project page from CAM related announcements. Its respective talk page will function as a support group for the participants of this WikiProject and for private announcements, such as requests for participating in AfDs, Quickpolls, and Comments.

• Our participants routinely participating in AfDs, Quickpolls, and Comments will be one of our methods for achieving Wikipedian community consensus that will be required before a community wide resolve is built to end the edit wars currently taking place in CAM.

Classification Systems

Our classification systems are hierarchy scales of evaluation that can be use to compare one Branch of CAM to another.

Standards of Quality Guidelines

Our Standard of Quality Guidelines are simply that: guidelines. They should not be seen as part of "official" wikipedia policy, merely a useful way to approach some controversial issues. If you make an edit based on these guidelines, you should still be prepared to explain it if others disagree, and if necessary, to compromise and reach an agreement.

Templates

Infoboxes

One visible impact upon Misplaced Pages by our WikiProject are the display of infoboxes that currently exist on many articles that have been improved upon by our participants.

Infoboxes are simply tools that are designed to increase the satisfaction of the public reading CAM related articles. They are NOT goals to be promoted by our participants, in and of themselves, but rather simple tools. They are there to facilitate the public's understanding of each Branch of CAM.

Project banner

• {{WikiProject Alternative Medicine}} should be placed on talk pages rather than on the article itself. Standard assessment of article quality has also been implemented. All discussion pages should be tagged with our project banner when a participant is attempting to improve a CAM related article (i.e. articles, lists, categories, templates):

Alternative medicine Unassessed

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Alternative medicine, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Alternative medicine related articles on Misplaced Pages. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Alternative medicineWikipedia:WikiProject Alternative medicineTemplate:WikiProject Alternative medicineAlternative medicine ??? This article has not yet received a rating on Misplaced Pages's content assessment scale.

NCCAM classifications

These NCCAM classifications have been adopted by our WikiProject. They are to be used for tagging only the branches of CAM articles. The article definitely should be mostly about CAM.

1. {{Alternative medical systems}}
2. {{Mind-body interventions}}
3. {{Biologically based therapy}}
4. {{Manipulative methods}}
5. {{Energy therapy}}

Userboxes

• {{User WikiProject Alternative medicine}} may optionally be placed on user pages.

This user is a participant in WikiProject Alternative medicine.

CAM Portal

• P:CAM

"Portals are pages intended to serve as 'Main Pages' for specific topics or areas. Portals may be associated with one or more WikiProjects; unlike WikiProjects, however, they are meant for both readers and editors of Misplaced Pages, and should promote content and encourage contribution."

The exciting thing about portals is that the distinction between readers and editors is blurred. Readers are invited to both edit articles and join Wikiprojects on portals. While at one time, the disclosure of the very existence of a Wikiproject on an article was prohibited, on portals you can even promote Wikiprojects (ie, Things to do and WikiProject Boxes).

Our official WikiProject Portal is called the Portal:Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

Unlike normal articles, the content of portals are spread over dozens of different pages or files. Naturally, our portal is subject to being edited by anybody but it certainly would be easier to edit it; if you knew something about designing websites with CSS. You should not edit the main CAM portal page without working knowledge of CSS. If you don't know what you are doing with CSS coding then you could easily end up destroying our portal. This would not be good since the public would see a totally messed up portal.

Our Cam Portal is ...

• Built around 10 rows and 13 Boxes.
• There is either two boxes sharing one row, or one just one box taking up 100% of the row.
• Each box is assigned a number in ascending order.
• Most of the boxes contain static information about CAM.
  • The static information display boxes are edited by clicking on the edit hyperlink in the respective box title bar.
    • Section headers used in any display box should be Level 3 or below. Using section headers levels 1 and 2 will mess up the box number count sequence.
• But, four of the boxes will display different content each time the portal is viewed. These boxes can be maintained with introductions to various articles, biographies, pictures, and quotes.
  • The main CAM portal page contains a separate random number generator for each of these specific boxes. If, for example, the project has written 24 quote pages, then you would set the quote random number generator to 24 (ie, max=24). A smaller number would also work, but wont display the content of additions that are greater than the respective number.
  • Each new quote page/file should be created sequentially (ie, /Quotes/24) on the More Quotes... page. Adding additional introductions to selected articles, biographies, and pictures would work essentially the same way.
    • With due care, almost any editor should be able to correctly maintain these files. See our Open Tasks, below, for additional details.

Open Tasks

Participates of this project are expected to edit stuff on Misplaced Pages on their own initiative, unless someone is attempting to organize a group project on our talk pages. A few good places to start would be:

• Glossary of alternative medicine -- A major list of the terms and concepts used in alternative medicine. Always something to be fine tuned or added to this gateway to CAM articles.
• Category:Alternative medicine stubs -- You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding these articles. Then be sure to remove them from the stub category.
• The abandoned Template:Alternative medical systems series of templates / infoboxes should be adopted by this WikiProject since they have been accepted by the Wikipedian community, to date.
  • Whoever started this series of infoboxes did not complete the task.
    • Some of the sub-category infoboxes were never created.
    • Some of the tagged articles are using the wrong template/box, when a another one would be more appropriate.
    • Not all of the branches of alternative medicine articles have been tagged with this template/infobox.
• Our Wikiproject's Offical To Do List of New Topics -- List of Missing Topics that our participants would like to see covered.
• Maintain our Portal:Complementary and Alternative Medicine
  • There are some 1,000+ CAM related articles, all of which a short introduction can be written for and added to our archive of articles. The introductions should be copied directly from the respective articles, along with the read more hyperlink teaser.
    • Selected Articles box
    • Selected Biographies box
  • Copies of the pictures used to illustrated CAM related articles can be added to our Selected Pictures box.
    • Simply copy the image coding directly from the article. The coding, however, should be changed in order to center the image, before saving it.
  • CAM related quotations can be added to our Quotes box.

For this WikiProject to be active, all you have to do is to:

• Improve upon existing articles
• Write new CAM related articles, such as:
  • People in CAM from a historical perspective.
  • History related CAM topics.
• Identify and classify existing articles as belonging to an appropriate CAM related category.

Assessments

Another open task that can be worked upon is to rate the CAM articles regarding their degree of completeness. The Misplaced Pages article rating system is based upon a letter scheme which reflects principally how complete the article is. The first step in this process is to place our Wikiproject banner on the talk page of a CAM article.

Alternative medicine pages by quality
Quality
	Total
FA	2
FL	1
GA	25
B	159
C	407
Start	818
Stub	277
List	32
Category	221
Disambig	3
File	7
Project	6
Template	19
NA	162
Assessed	2,139
Unassessed	29
Total	2,168
WikiWork factors (?)		ω = 7,907			Ω = 4.68

Compliance audits of CAM articles

This part of our WikiProject has been dropped due to prior complaints, and has been replaced by the assessment scale.

Core Project Articles

The following lists/categories are considered important to our WikiProject.

Core Lists

The entire point of our Wikiproject's annotated lists is to write a short teaser that will entice the public to read the main article on the respective subject. Every CAM article in Misplaced Pages needs a teaser added to one of these master lists. Otherwise, people may not be able to find our articles.

1. Glossary of alternative medicine
2. List of branches of alternative medicine
3. List of famous people in alternative medicine
4. List of alternative medicine subjects

Core Categories

• List of all subpages of this page

Standard of being an Active WikiProject

As long as the above core project articles are being edited, this WikiProject on Alternative Medicine is active.

Standard of being an Active Participant

The true standard of being a participant of this WikiProject, whether self-declared or not, is having edited one of these core project articles.

Active participants have edited one of these lists/articles/categories within the past year.

So, what are people currently doing?

• The people who have contributed to this page, what are you currently working on? I know one has set up his own dictionary of CAM. But was wondering what the rest of you were upto and how you are keeping?Merkinsmum 12:53, 24 February 2007 (UTC)
• I'm interested in adding alt cancer therapies to the glossary using this page as a ref http://www.mnwelldir.org/docs/cancer1/altthrpy.htm. Thoughts? Chaveso 00:24, 6 November 2007 (UTC)
• I have updated the participants list, and now I will post a notice on the talk pages of the ones who are still active Wikipedians. __meco 09:29, 11 November 2007 (UTC)
  • Projects and the entire open editing concept of Misplaced Pages are mutually exclusive. Therefore, you cannot be primarily interested in promoting this Wikiproject. To be acceptable, you have to bill yourself as being primarily interested in improving Misplaced Pages in one particular area.
  • I see no need to maintain a list of active versus non-active participants. That will only turnoff new prospects, IMHO. I have moved it to talk.
    • There are many Anti-Wikiproject elements in Misplaced Pages. And, you really do not want to be wasting your time playing games with these people who will quibble over the entire concept of a Wikiproject participant.
    • Once a participant, always a participant in intent if nothing else.
  • This section should really be on the talk page. -- John Gohde 19:52, 13 November 2007 (UTC)
• I have stubbed the Dr. Hay diet article. I have tried to add some historical material and clean up the refs, but it definitely needs much more attention. Currently, several would-be articles are forwarded back to this one (such as Nutripathy). I believe that if we make this article distinct, there will be a need to actually create separate articles for each of the topics currently forwarded to Dr. Hay Diet. -- Levine2112 01:48, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Participant John Gohde

• Added free full text documentation to the Wellness Movement article.
• Freshen up this project page to make it more inviting, as well as up-to-date. -- John Gohde 19:30, 13 November 2007 (UTC)
  • Freshen up the project page some more. And, added a new list to our Core Project Articles. -- John Gohde (talk) 16:56, 17 January 2009 (UTC)
  • Scope of Project - Added back Lists previously deleted from their exact same writeup in Feb 2005, but recently recreated one way or the other by other project participants and accepted todate. The project is once again whole as it was originally intended, by popular demand. -- John Gohde (talk) 17:18, 17 January 2009 (UTC)
• Added our glossary to the Alternative medical systems infobox. -- John Gohde 12:21, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
• Created / Added our wikiproject shortcut: WP:AMED. My 1st and 2nd choices were already taken. What exactly this shortcut is good for is beyond me. John Gohde (talk) 17:20, 18 November 2007 (UTC)
• Successfully expanded complementary medicine into an independent full fledged article. Trimmed the complementary and alternative medicine article down to an article taking an umbrella prospective. Also demonstrated how you can link to integrative medicine even though there is no article on that topic, thanks to our Glossary. Now, both articles have an excellent chance of staying as distinct and different articles covering different topics. -- John Gohde (talk) 04:08, 20 November 2007 (UTC)
• Basically got our Portal:Complementary_and_Alternative_Medicine going in only one day of editing. Spent parts of a second day fine tuning it and adding more features. -- John Gohde (talk) 04:55, 22 November 2007 (UTC)
• Added Health Sciences category to the Science portal. From the Main Page if the public clicks on the Science Portal hyperlink which is listed on the very top of the page. And, then clicks on the Science Portal Tab, they will see our portal listed under health sciences. How long this might last, I don't know. But, since I added all of the health category portals, it just might take. -- John Gohde (talk) 12:52, 23 November 2007 (UTC)
• Likewise, added/created Category:Health science portals to/in Category:Science portals. If it sticks, should make our portal more visible by making it accessible both from medicine and a health portal category. -- John Gohde (talk) 13:40, 23 November 2007 (UTC)
• Complained about the browsebar template directing visitors to specific portals rather than to a masterlist of portals. Amazingly, the powers-that-be responded favorably. The browsebar was changed within one day. And, the Main page appears to be in the process of being changed. Ultimately it is hoped that the public will be able to click on a Health hyperlink that will take the visitor directly to a short list of health related topics which would include our portal. This change should make all portals more visible to the public. -- John Gohde (talk) 15:11, 27 November 2007 (UTC)
• Completed the creation of all the top level templates in the NCCAM classification series of 5 templates.
• Completed a complete list of the top-level basic CAM topics that have currently been written. -- John Gohde 18:26, 2 December 2007 (UTC)
  • Added the top-level list of articles to Category:Concepts in alternative medicine. -- John Gohde (talk) 23:54, 16 January 2009 (UTC)
• Updated the listing of categories on the CAM portal at Portal:CAM/Categories. -- John Gohde (talk) 23:58, 16 January 2009 (UTC)

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