Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Medicine-related articles

Summarize Timeline Fact Check

• Add advice on how to incorporate the psychological, emotional, and social effects of health problems into articles.
  • should be infused throughout
  • may need some subsections, e.g., reaction to a life-threatening diagnosis
  • I support this one—and not just because I'm a psychologist! ;-) ... We have had discussion about this topic before. Let's link to such archived discussions, e.g., this one from 2008. Mark D Worthen PsyD (talk) [he/his/him] 14:36, 5 May 2021 (UTC)
• Add advice on how to present costs.
  • accuracy ("the wholesale list price in Ruritania in 2017 according to Alice", not "the price")
  • WP:MEDMOS2020 results
  • any recommended metrics, such as cost effectiveness, cost per DALY averted, etc.
• Add statement about gender-neutral language.
  • Avoid unexpected neutrality for subjects very strongly associated with one biological sex (e.g., pregnancy, menstruation, and ovarian cancer affect "women"; prostate cancer and orchiditis affect "men") but encourage gender neutrality for all others (e.g., heart disease)?
  • Defer to MOS for any individual person.
• Reading levels
•  Done How to talk about suicide-related content (e.g., the "committed" RFC)
  • I've added a statement about the word "commit", and alternative phrasings. Bibeyjj (talk) 12:10, 28 October 2021 (UTC)
• Clarify how to include "evolution" in anatomy articles (suggest under "Development" subheading). Bibeyjj (talk) 18:52, 6 October 2021 (UTC)
• (Your idea here)

What to do with this to-do list?

It's not clear to me if the above "To-do list" is a WikiProject Medicine effort, i.e., something we, as a WikiProject, have decided (via consensus) to establish, or if it was one (unidentified) editor's idea, or something else. Can someone clarify? Mark D Worthen PsyD (talk) [he/his/him] 03:51, 4 May 2021 (UTC)

This is a collection of items that various conversations and disputes have indicated (a) it might be helpful for MEDMOS to address but (b) exactly what the consensus is or how to address the subject in MEDMOS will require further discussion.

Any editor is welcome to add a suggested topic to the list. It doesn't have to be a subject that you personally care about or relates to an article you were editing. Please add enough context that we can figure out what your subject is later.

If you feel ready to address one of the topics, then please start a new ==section== at the end of the page to ask a question or make a proposal. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:53, 5 May 2021 (UTC)

Please don't start discussions in this section. Please do add links to prior discussions and examples or other details that you think will be helpful (signed or not, as you choose) when we have the real discussions. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:35, 5 May 2021 (UTC)

There's another bit of drama at the old dramaboard over the phrase committed suicide. I'm finding that the selective quotation of the beginning of a sentence in MOS:SUICIDE grates on me. I'm contemplating this change:

• "The phrase committed suicide is not banned on the English Wikipedia..."
• "The phrase committed suicide is neither recommended nor banned on the English Wikipedia..."

What do you think? WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:13, 1 September 2025 (UTC)

I agree. Too many people don't understand "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should." -- Colin°^Talk 08:02, 1 September 2025 (UTC)

I like the suggestion; it's more neutral. milladrive (talk) 01:09, 2 September 2025 (UTC)

There being support for this and no objections for over a month, I've made this change. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:36, 8 October 2025 (UTC)

Hi, this is about recent edits to Effects of pornography. Correlations which have been found are rather low (below of explaining 7% of the variation). In some cases, only 0.01% or 0.04% of variation got explained. Please advise what to do in respect to WP:MEDSAY. tgeorgescu (talk) 23:59, 7 October 2025 (UTC)

If the effect is generally accepted to exist (e.g., you are finding this information in a textbook or a review article, not something that's merely "One study found..."), and the effect size is small, then just say that the effect is real but small (or very small). If the effect can only be found in a primary source, then it should probably be removed entirely. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:34, 8 October 2025 (UTC)

Summarize Timeline Top Qs Fact Check

I have already discussed this guideline's naming conventions about anatomy, but I still find these sentences very confusing:

The word human is usually omitted in titles, but it may occasionally be helpful if non-human references to the structure are common. For example, compare the articles at Leg (including insect legs, robotic legs, etc.) and Human leg. However, if the article is about humans and the reader will expect to find information about humans under that title, e.g., Arm and Pregnancy, then pre-disambiguation of the title is inappropriate.

This guideline doesn't clearly explain why is appropriate for Wikipedia's article about the human leg to be titled Human leg, but also inappropriate for its article about human pregnancy to be titled Human pregnancy.

"Non-human references" to pregnancy are not uncommon in textbooks about veterinary medicine or zoology; why wouldn't readers expect an article titled Pregnancy to describe non-human pregnancy as well as human pregnancy? Jarble (talk) 18:41, 7 June 2026 (UTC)

I doubt that you're ever going to get an answer that will really WP:SATISFY you. Consequently, my question is whether you understand the rule well enough to implement it, or do you find yourself frequently trying to start a new article and being unsure which name is supported by the guideline? WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:57, 7 June 2026 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: I think I understand these rules now. You explained them very well in this discussion:

Choosing "Brain" for an article entirely about the human brain would violate neither this guideline nor the Wikipedia:Article titles policy. Whether it's better depends largely on editors' understanding of the contents of each article. I would generally encourage editors to pick the Brain/Human brain combination if the general article has significant information about the human brain as well as non-human brains. I would generally encourage editors to pick the Brain/Brain (non-human) combination if the general article does not have much information about human brains.

But this section is much less coherent; I wish it would explain these guidelines more clearly. Jarble (talk) 01:48, 8 June 2026 (UTC)

I'm glad that you understand the rules. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:21, 8 June 2026 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: If "non-human references" refers specifically to references within Wikipedia articles, this guideline should state that more clearly. I was confused by this phrase, thinking that it referred to references to veterinary medicine in external sources (such as scientific literature). Jarble (talk) 23:28, 9 June 2026 (UTC)

I think that either interpretation will lead you to the same result. For example, using "leg":

• Search https://scholar.google.com and look for things about legs (in their anatomical sense). See: something about a book on a leg injury, leg length discrepancy, leg ulceration, leg strength and exercise, a 19th-century person with a wooden leg, legs in six-legged creatures, angiosomes in the legs, legs in proportion to the rest of the body, prosthetic legs, gait efficiency, leg kinematics and kinetics – A lot of human content, but also content about arthropods and technology.
• Search Wikipedia and look for things about legs (in their anatomical sense). Notice articles such as Human leg, Peg leg, Arthropod leg, Frog leg, Robot leg, Bow leg – Some human content, but also content about non-human animals and technology.

Therefore: Leg should contain content about human legs, non-human legs, and technological legs.

If, on the other hand, such a search turned up primarily content about humans (e.g., when I did the same type of search for 'arm', the first page of search results give me nothing about arms in non-human animals), then the article should be focused on humans. For example, Human arm redirects to Arm; human arms are the primary topic, even though non-human primates and sloths also have arms. This fact can be mentioned at Arm#Other animals, but if you want to write about non-human arms, then you should do so at Forelimb.

If you have an example that shows a divergence between what's popular in reliable sources and what's common on Wikipedia, then we might have to be clearer, but so far, AFAICT the answer to "Is this mentions within Wikipedia articles or within external sources?" appears to be "It doesn't matter, because they both produce the same answer". WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:22, 10 June 2026 (UTC)

Be glad we didn't choose the first-to-edit-picks-the-topic rule like we did for some style choices. We might have ended up with Leg (darts) at Leg and be stuck with it. I agree it is a bit arbitrary how we ended up with Leg (general) and Arm (human). Weirdly, we have less to say at Leg and Arm than we do at Human leg and Upper limb. -- Colin°^Talk 05:24, 10 June 2026 (UTC)