Wikipedia:Editing scientific articles

When editing or creating an article of any type, editors are expected to abide by Wikipedia's core content policies. In scientific articles, the most relevant policies are that original research is not allowed and that everything that is written is properly sourced. While sticking to these rules is absolutely necessary, this is not sufficient to guarantee that an article won't contain serious mistakes. In case of articles of a scientific nature, errors or misleading statements can easily slip in, even if the editor is an expert in the subject of the article. Since Wikipedia is often consulted by students and scientists, such errors can have a negative impact on society, as well as be highly damaging to Wikipedia's reputation as a reliable source.

To prevent errors, the following guidelines are recommended.

1. Check non-trivial statements you intend to insert into an article. Determine whether your statement could be invalid under some circumstances. To find out, you may need to study the entire source in which the statement is made, or look in other sources. The validity of a statement made on some particular page of a technical book may well rely upon necessary conditions mentioned many pages earlier, or even in another source. If you find that the statement is valid only within a specific context, you need explicitly to include that context in the article.
2. If you make edits to an existing article, which you have checked as described in the previous point, and you find that a statement you want to insert disagrees with other statements made in the same article, then you need to get to the bottom of this conflict. It may be that the conflicting statements are true under some conditions not explicitly mentioned in the article. That is, the conflicting statements are sometimes true; that is, despite apparent conflict, they simply apply differently. Before deciding to delete material, you need to convince yourself that the conflicting statements really are wrong in any context consistent with the way the Wikipedia article is written. In case of doubts, you need to discuss this on the talk page of the article and/or contact members of a relevant WikiProject.
3. If you find yourself in a dispute with other editors about a technical point, then discuss the issues as much as possible from first principles using the underlying theory and/or from the empirical evidence. That approach often brings out the needed context, which often is the source of the dispute. Do not simply appeal to direct quotes from textbooks or scientific articles, as then the proper context may be missing.
4. Keep in mind that two discussions are involved:
   1. Reaching an understanding of what is going on, and providing arguments for the article. Discussions from first principles are not a violation of the ban on original research if they are conducted on the talk pages.
   2. How best to present the material in the article. Here one has to make sure that whatever is edited in the article reflects the current scientific understanding of the topic.
5. Assume from the outset that multiple meanings of technical terms are likely to occur, whether or not you are aware of them, so search for meanings proposed by other editors, rather than searching only to back up your own understanding.
6. Realise that different approaches or explanatory models are often all correct, and different readers will find different explanations useful. Don't delete existing explanations just because they use a different model; add your explanation to the article.

Context and usage varies greatly from one field to another: keep an open mind.

Also see

• Exceptional claims require exceptional sources
• Wikipedia:Scientific standards
• What is NOT OR