Project community guidelines

From Mad Gender Science!

Our mission in establishing a community around the project is to crowdsource a focused effort on expanding and refining the wiki in a coordinated collaboration, by creating a space that is entirely devoted to this goal and thus relatively free of distractions.

The driving goals behind the wiki in particular are to:

  • Educate ourselves about the biology underlying transition and developmental sex differentiation.
  • Postulate and collect a compendium of hypothetical treatments that warrant further research.
  • Reduce harm by bringing together official standards of care for gender identities and intersex conditions.
  • Enable access to needed information freely to those who require help navigating the systems.
  • Provide a forum for people whom these conditions affect the most to become more educated and involved in the processes of their treatments, advancing healthcare ourselves!


Rules

  • If you believe the rules to have been broken or have concerns about the behaviour/welfare of another user, please message a channel op with a short summary, the channel/page, and the time of the incident (preferably in UTC). Please bear in mind that the ops may need to discuss the best course of action. You can ask to remain anonymous (eg., because the user is also one of the ops).
  • Disciplinary actions and escalation are up to the discretion of the ops and strict measures may be taken as the situation warrants.
  • All topics should move in a direction towards their inclusion into the wiki rather than just casual interest.
  • There should be no persistent insistence on a known pseudoscientific subject.
  • You should never offer recommendation or sourcing of DIY medicine, only hypothetical methodology.
  • Please do not hijack a topic in the IRC, if there is a discussion going on please wait for a lull.
  • Please Try not to assume the gender or pronouns of other users.
  • Technical/medical/scientific discussion of trans sexuality should be marked with content warnings.
  • Be considerate and add content warnings for topics like statistics of trans suicide or transphobic/intersectional oppression.


Instructions on participating

  1. Create an account on the wiki
  2. Register a matching nick on the Freenode IRC network e.g. using their Kiwi Webchat
  3. Join #madgenderscience, #mgs-ideas and #mgs-papers channels on Freenode
  4. Once on the server your wiki account will be granted edit permissions
  5. Your irc and wiki usernames must be the same- only one username per account for the project purposes
  6. Keep all conversation on topic


  • The only on-topic conversation is either:
    • wiki content creation/management
    • discussing related research
    • furthering the ambitions of the project
  • If any off topic conversation is necessary either:
    • ask if anyone wants to talk about it in DM's
    • refer to our suggestions of off topic chat rooms

Accessing IRC

  • Our chatroom used for coordinating efforts on the wiki is hosted located on the freenode IRC network, if you are unfamiliar with IRC freenode’s webchat may be the most accessible option. If you wish to move beyond a browser based option and install a local client we recommend hexchat.
  • If you are new to IRC but wish to use a local client then you may need to read freenode’s guide on how to manually connect to their network.
  • To encourage accountability and communication we will be requiring all users in our chat rooms to use a registered nick(name) on the service. If you need to learn how to register, freenode has a guide on the topic.
  • If you are using freenode’s webchat service then connecting to a channel is as simple as entering the channel name from the splash page, e.g. “#madgenderscience” - or typing “/join #channelname” when already connected.
  • If you are using a client then there are a plethora of options such as creating a list of servers and channels to autojoin, automatically identifying (logging in) as your registered nick, and more. A good place to start if using hexchat is their Getting Started guide, but be sure to explore the thorough FAQ to learn about all the fancy options.

Wiki Guidelines

  • We strive to keep the style uniform and standard throughout the site, although we don't yet have specifics wikipedia's style guidecan be used as a rough example.

Research Tips

Here's some ways to assess the quality of evidence of a research paper, these aspects can drastically limit it's safe applicability. Please remember that no results are gospel and new evidence may alter the status quo.

  • papers published in reputed journals are better
  • more recent papers are better
  • higher sample sizes are better
  • systematic reviews are better
  • human studies are better
  • papers focused on trans patients are better
  • outlying results are less trustworthy

Here's some pointers to help searching for new papers to cite:

  • search through Pubmed
  • access with sci-hub
  • using the search filter to sieve for better qualities of evidence
  • searching through MeSH terms
  • checking which papers another references
  • checking which papers reference another
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