CZ:Proposals/Standardizing the naming of biomedical articles.

This proposal has been assigned on an ad hoc basis to the person or persons named just below, and is now in the Ad hoc proposals queue

This proposal is assigned to be decided, if necessary by vote, by the editors of the Health Sciences and Biology Workgroups (i.e., whichever of the editors who reply). When the driver feels the proposal is ready to be submitted, he should e-mail cz-health-sci as well as cz-biology and ask for feedback. If there is uniform editor support after a week, he can consider the proposal adopted. If a sizeable minority of respondents object, he should either revise the proposal and resubmit, or else conduct a vote. Preferably, someone other than the driver should conduct this vote, but if no one is interested, he may do so itself. But, again, a vote may not be necessary at all.

Complete explanation

This proposal concerns helping authors pick the best names for new pages.

Reasoning

The benefits of this are:

1. Reduce the chance of two authors independently writing two articles in parallel on the same content but with different titles (lots of examples of this at WP).
2. Offer standardized definitions of terms that can be used at the beginning of articles (this is facilitated by using template:MeSH)
3. Anticipate common alternative terms that can be set up as redirects when the article is written. This will improve our searchability and intra-cz linking.
4. Facilitate the linking to CZ from other biomedical databases when Web 2 arrives.

Implementation

The first step is getting these instructions in front of authors at the time they are making new pages.

Can we do the following? Currently if you try to start a new page you will see the following text:

There is no page titled "concussion of brain". You can create this page.

Could we append this text with a link labeled:

Are you giving this page the best name?

This link would go to a page where all work groups could put their advice for naming. For example:

Health Sciences Workgroup

(CZ:Health Sciences Workgroup)

• Please check your proposed title at the National Library of Medicine. This can be facilitated by installing a browser search plugins on your computer.
  • Search your term at MeSH. Here is a sample search for concussion of the brain at the National Library of Medicine (NLM) MeSH vocabulary.
  • Note that according to the National Library of Medicine, 'Brain concussion' is a better term and title. An alternative is 'cerebral concussion' which could be used as a redirect page to brain concussion in order to make your article easy to find.
• Consider starting your article by quoting the definition of your term at MeSH. You can use the MeSH template to cite the MeSH definition. For example:

<ref>{{MeSH|Brain concussion}}</ref>

Eventually, this could be expanded other vocabularies (biomedical and otherwise). Other workgroups could put instructions on using their vocabularies here. For example, Botany could link instruct on using names from http://plants.usda.gov/ and Geography could encourage use of http://geonames.usgs.gov/domestic/ (sorry that I only know American examples).

Discussion

Does anyone have suggestions for this proposal?

I think this will be needed - it's a minor problem now (but vasopressin and antidiuretic hormone started as duplicates). I think the process would be, when starting a new article, to suggest reading the policy advice (if any) given by the relevant workgroup. That advice would cover not only naming conventions but other conventions as well - like citation styles - in fact all the important things that it would be better if authors were aware of these earlier rather than later. That page might also give useful links to resources for new authors. We don't want to make starting articles too burdensome, but we do want to offer authors useful support. I would suggest that this proposal be worked up by first working up a page of advice to new authors in the Health Sciences Workgroup. Let that be a model for other workgroups.

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I think that the proposal in its summary form on CZ:Proposals/Ad hoc is rather vague, and needs to be spelled out more carefully here on this page. --Larry Sanger 09:08, 14 February 2008 (CST)

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