Wikipedia and healthcare:effective uses, future directions

Phoebe AyersUC Davis

Wikimedia Foundation

Outline

• Introductions• How Wikipedia works • Wikipedia and health• Discussion/Questions?

Taipei, Wikimania 2007

How Wikipedia Works

Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all

knowledge.

- Wikimedia’s vision statement

inter-language links

Wikimedia is global

Wikimedia chapters, 2013 (dark blue = founded)

What is Wikimedia?12 projects

280 languages25 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

Wikimania 2005

[[user:Walkerma]]

Bangalore, 2010

Wikimania, Buenos Aires 2009

Wikimania, Haifa 2011

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

Overview

• Neutrality (NPOV)• Verifiability (references!)• Notability• Encyclopedic treatment• … and many, many style guidelines

Core editorial policies

Wikipedia editors

Becoming an editor

…saving an edit

History of an article

compareDate of edit

usernameTheir other contributions

Edit summary

Revision of an article – one “edit”

Evaluating an article

Wikipedia and health

From Wikimedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:RedCrossNursen.jpg

• The 28,000 Wikipedia articles covered by WikiProject Medicine get over 2 million hits a month.– This includes topics like:

• Asthma• Diabetes mellitus• Gout• Malaria• Vaccination • Pharmaceutical drug• Palliative care

Some statistics

• “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.)

Not just patients

Still lots to do

Red link = no article

Still lots to do

Improving existing articles

Finding articles with categories

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

Wikipedia and education

Sample assignments

• Referencing and expanding articles• Copyediting articles• Creating technical illustrations or

videos• Translating articles• Analyzing articles, reflecting on

Wikipedia usage

Planning for the next 10 years

Thoughts?

Thank you

psayers@ucdavis.edu