Wikipedia and Healthcare: effective uses, future directions. Introduction to Wikipedia and Wikimedia Foundation projects, focusing on medical articles and projects.

1. Wikipedia and healthcare:
effective uses, future directions
Phoebe Ayers
UC Davis
Wikimedia Foundation

2. Outline
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Introductions
How Wikipedia works
Wikipedia and health
Discussion/Questions?

3. How Wikipedia Works
Taipei, Wikimania 2007

4. Imagine a world in which every
single human being can freely
share in the sum of all
knowledge.
- Wikimedia’s vision statement

6. inter-language
links

9. Wikimedia is global
Wikimedia chapters, 2013 (dark blue = founded)

10. What is Wikimedia?
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12 projects
280 languages
25 million Wikipedia articles
18 million media files
100,000 active editors
100s of local meetup groups
39 local/national level chapters
180 employees at the Wikimedia Foundation, San
Francisco
1,130,000 individual financial donors (in 2011-12)
500,000,000 readers/month

11. Wikimania 2005

13. [[user:Walkerma]]

14. Bangalore, 2010

15. Wikimania, Buenos Aires 2009

16. Wikimania, Haifa 2011

17. Overview
• Free [to use and reuse]
• Volunteer-written
• Supported by readers
• Everyone can participate
• No top down editorial control:
• Community curated work

18. Core editorial policies
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Neutrality (NPOV)
Verifiability (references!)
Notability
Encyclopedic treatment
… and many, many style guidelines

19. Wikipedia editors

20. Becoming an editor

21. …saving an edit

22. History of an article

23. compare
Date of edit
username
Edit summary
Their other contributions
Revision of an article – one “edit”

24. Evaluating an article

25. Wikipedia and health
From Wikimedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:RedCrossNursen.jpg

26. Some statistics
• The 28,000 Wikipedia articles covered by
WikiProject Medicine get over 2 million
hits a month.
– This includes topics like:
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Asthma
Diabetes mellitus
Gout
Malaria
Vaccination
Pharmaceutical drug
Palliative care

29. Not just patients
• “Studies have found that 70% of junior
physicians use Wikipedia in a given week,
while nearly 50% to 70% of practicing
physicians use it as an information source in
providing medical care.”
(from James Heilman et al, “Wikipedia: A Key Tool for Global Public Health Promotion”, Journal of
Medical Internet Research, 2011. http://www.jmir.org/2011/1/e14, Ref 34-36.)

30. Still lots to do
Red link = no article

31. Improving existing articles

32. Finding articles with categories

33. Mission: To make clear, reliable, comprehensive, up-to-date educational
resources and information in the biomedical and related social sciences
freely available to all people in the language of their choice.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/WPMED

35. Wikipedia and education

36. Sample assignments
• Referencing and expanding articles
• Copyediting articles
• Creating technical illustrations or
videos
• Translating articles
• Analyzing articles, reflecting on
Wikipedia usage

37. Planning for the next 10 years

38. Thoughts?

39. Thank you
psayers@ucdavis.edu