Talk:Cancer

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Cancer was one of the Natural sciences good articles, but it has been removed from the list. There are suggestions below for improving the article to meet the good article criteria. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.

Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
December 22, 2005	Good article nominee	Listed
February 1, 2006	Peer review	Reviewed
April 28, 2007	Featured article candidate	Not promoted
June 21, 2009	Good article reassessment	Delisted
December 18, 2010	Peer review	Reviewed
Current status: Delisted good article

Molecular Biology: Genetics / MCB Top‑importance

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Medicine: Hematology-oncology / Translation / Pathology Top‑importance

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Ideal sources for Wikipedia's health content are defined in the guideline Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources (medicine) and are typically review articles. Here are links to possibly useful sources of information about Cancer.

PubMed provides review articles from the past five years (limit to free review articles)
The TRIP database provides clinical publications about evidence-based medicine.
Other potential sources include: Centre for Reviews and Dissemination and CDC

"External Link" tag on 'Palliative care'... incorrect?

I noticed that the section 'Palliative care' has a tag for excessive external links, though I was unable to find even one external link in that section. So I'm going to remove that tag for now. Kami was here! ^{(¿Problemo mi amigo? Call me up on my talk page!)} 𝔻𝕠𝕟'𝕥 𝕔𝕙𝕒𝕟𝕘𝕖 𝕗𝕠𝕣 𝕠𝕥𝕙𝕖𝕣𝕤, 𝕛𝕦𝕤𝕥 𝕓𝕖 𝕪𝕠𝕦𝕣𝕤𝕖𝕝𝕗 10:06, 9 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Improving top-importance medicine articles: Join the Vital Signs campaign 2026

The goal of the Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Vital Signs 2026 campaign is to bring all 101 top-importance articles—including this one—up to at least B-class quality. Many of these articles are widely read but overdue for review, so even small improvements can have a big impact.

If you watch or edit this article, your help would be very welcome. You can:

Add yourself as a participant
Note the state of the article in the Progress table (is the current class still correct?)
Update the article based on recent clinical guidelines and review papers
Help address gaps, improve clarity for a broad audience, or improve image selection

To reach B class, articles should have: suitable referencing, reasonable coverage, a clear structure, good prose, helpful illustrations, and be understandable to a broad audience. Contributions of any size are appreciated. Femke (talk) 16:00, 20 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Video

Why is a video with a terrible computer voice narrator even on this page? It doesn’t seem to really add any actual value ~2026-52916-0 (talk) 08:47, 25 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

"Peripheral cancer" listed at Redirects for discussion

The redirect Peripheral cancer has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2026 February 4 § Peripheral cancer until a consensus is reached. –Deacon Vorbis (carbon • videos) 18:01, 4 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

How to clarify Mechanism section?

@Femke added clarification tags due to that part being overly technical. What is the best way to handle this in a way that retains accuracy but also solves the technicality problem? VidanaliK (talk to me) (contributions) 17:05, 17 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

First: decide if the highly technical material follows WP:Summary style. Do we need these details in this article, or are they better placed in a subarticle with a more technical audience? For instance, we might not need more than two paragraphs in the epigenetics section (not a cancer expert, so I'm not sure what share of space should be devoted to it, but almost definitely less than currently).

If you have decided to keep the material, the hierarchy of explaining/avoiding jargon goes something like:

Use plain English for technical terms. You might need to wikilink 5 words or so to the technical term, but that's fine
Explain it explicitly in the text
Give enough contextual hints that people can learn the term without explaining explicitly
Wikilink only if you think 90% of readers already understand it, but you want a way for the remaining 10% to also understand it.

One should never introduce technical terms just to teach the audience the technical term for something. They should be introduced for a reason.

One of the ways these articles sometimes become too difficult is the use of academic sources written for a completely different audience. The type of sources you want to use in addition to academic sources are those that are patient-facing (for the basics and for learning how to express difficult concepts in simple terms), and undergraduate sources (which are slightly too difficult, but not as difficult as academic sources). —Femke 🐦 (talk) 17:21, 17 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Does this edit help? VidanaliK (talk to me) (contributions) 17:30, 17 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

It does, but it's still quite difficult. The table on The Hallmarks of Cancer is much easier to understand. Not clear if that table is cited, and the analogy column is misnamed, as some of these are simple explanations rather than analogies. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 18:15, 17 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Would "uncontrollably replicating without command to do so" be a good explanation for "self-sufficiency in growth signals"? I think apoptosis could just be replaced with "programmed cell death" as well, or just left as is with a wikilink per WP:ONEDOWN. VidanaliK (talk to me) (contributions) 18:19, 17 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

That would be an analogy (as I'm not sure we use the word command for things cells do). It might work but not as an explanation between brackets. In general, brackets make sentences harder to understand, as sentences become longer than ~15-18 words people are comfortable reading. Presenting the information in table form is probably the best way forward, as this information is too dense for a paragraph. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 18:41, 17 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]