WP:Anatomy quarterly update (#1)

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Released: Fourth quarter, 2013
Editor: LT910001

Hello WP:ANATOMY user! This is the first of what I hope will be ongoing quarterlies, documenting the current state of WP:ANATOMY, current projects and items of interest, and any relevant news. I'd greatly value feedback on this, and if you think I've missed something, or don't wish to receive this again, please leave a note on my talkpage

What's new
What's going on
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Quarterly focus - GA nominations

I would like to take some time on this first quarterly to evaluate the state of the project. We have the benefit of having a relatively-small group of articles that are, for the most part, relatively non-controversial. Additionally, for the majority of our articles, it may indeed be possible to create an article that reflects a significant proportion of the published literature. This is quite distinct from other projects.

However, it appears we only have 5 GAs (Anatomy, Brain, Clitoris, Human tooth, and Leonardo da Vinci) and 4 FAs (Immune system, Hippocampus, Cerebellum, and Resurrectionists in the United Kingdom), none of which relate to purely anatomical items, which constitute most of our mass. By 'anatomical items' I mean muscles, nerves, bones, blood vessels, veins, foramina, and so on, that constitute the vast majority of our articles. In fact, we only have one 'system' (Immune system) at FA class, and none at GA class. We indeed only have 70 articles out over 4,000 at B-class. This scarcity is, I believe, for the following reasons: (1) lack of model articles (2) lack of appropriate guidelines, and (3) general sparsity of sourcing on many articles. How may these be addressed?

  1. Nominating good articles. In addition to suspensory muscle of the duodenum I will be working on Mylohyoid muscle, Genioglossus, Foramen spinosum and an as-yet undecided article.
  2. Revamping the MEDMOS guidelines for Anatomical articles to make them more appropriate. That discussion is here.
  3. Using books as sources. Books are readily available in libraries and have the superb quality of being able to aggregate information, which can be used to source thousands of anatomical articles.
  4. Collateralising sourcing. Anatomical sources often refer to several structures in a single source. Therefore an editor on one article could quickly add a source to another two articles in a related topic. This incremental approach will hopefully accrue for future editors
  5. Tagging articles for cleanup, to let future editors know to use sources
  6. Templates, which will soon be available, to post on the wall of new editors thanking them for their edits and encouraging the use of sources.

I hope that we are able to revitalise this project. Wikipedia has the capacity to become an excellent resource for anatomical information. I again welcome feedback on this quarterly or any aspects therein on the talk page for the quarterly, on my talkpage, or on the WP Anatomy talk page here. Kind regards, LT910001 (talk)

  • This has been transcluded to the talk pages of all active WP:ANATOMY users.