Course Aims to Teach Students to Increase Reliability of Medical Information
UCSF, 26 September 2013 link
Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/UCSF Elective 2013 linkUC San Francisco soon will be the first U.S. medical school at which medical students can earn academic credit for editing medical content on Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is one of the most widely used medical references in the world and the most consulted source for many health topics. But medical entries can lack reliable sources and have gaps in content.
“Wikipedia generates more than 53 million page views just for articles about medications each month, and is second to Google as the most frequently used source by junior physicians,” said Amin Azzam, MD, MA, an associate clinical professor at the UCSF School of Medicine and an instructor for the new class. “We’re recognizing the impact Wikipedia can have to educate patients and health care providers across the globe, and want users to receive the most accurate publicly available, sound medical information possible.”
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“We know that nearly all medical students use Wikipedia. However, we want nearly all medical students to contribute to Wikipedia,” said James Heilman, MD, president of the not-for-profit Wiki Project Med Foundation, an organization dedicated to trying to improve Wikipedia's medical content by forming collaborations with like-minded institutions. “I see this collaboration as a very important first step in this direction, a step which will not only be beneficial for Wikipedia but will be exceedingly useful for the students themselves.”
The new class is available to fourth-year medical students and will focus on editing 80 key articles that are the most frequented but have lower quality levels on Wikipedia.
All articles on Wikipedia are given a grade ranging from Featured Article, which reflects a professional level of encyclopedic information based mostly on the factual completeness of the article, to “C” which is defined as a substantial article that would be useful to a casual reader, but lacks important content. Featured articles are displayed on the main page and frequently are written by experts
Currently, medicine-related articles make up 58 Featured Articles on Wikipedia, and 145 Good Articles, which is less than 1 percent of the total articles in those categories, according to Azzam. “So there is a clear need to bring medicine articles up to par,” he said.
The class, which begins in December, is part of an ongoing collaboration between the UCSF School of Medicine and the Wiki Project Med Foundation. For the launch of this partnership earlier this year, UCSF invited two “Wikipedians” to visit San Francisco to give lectures and run editing sessions on the significance of Wikipedia to medicine. The class has its own evolving Wikipedia page.
My questions are:
If fewer than 1% of medicine-related Wikipedia articles are Good or Featured, why on earth would it be used as a reference by physicians?
Even if this project succeeds in bringing a few more articles up to Good Article standard, would they not then be obliged to stand eternally guard over these little puddles of excellence, against the "anyone can edit the free encyclopedia" mob?
Why not move WP's medicine-related articles to a separate medical wiki, editable only by licensed health care professionals, researchers, and medical students-- all using their own names and displaying their credentials?