WikiProject Medicine
 We discuss, collaborate, and debate anything and everything relating to medicine and health | |
| Purpose | Medical editing |
|---|---|
WikiProject Medicine, formed in 2004, is a WikiProject on Wikipedia dedicated to improving coverage of medicine-related topics. As of 2020, Wikipedia is among the world's most accessed resources for health information by the public, patients, students, and practitioners.
Wikiproject Medicine has over 200 active volunteers.[citation needed] About half of the volunteers are health care professionals or students. The project has established contacts with organizations such as World Health Organization, National Institutes of Health, United States National Library of Medicine, and Cancer Research UK, and succeeded in creating several Wikipedian in residence programs at medical institutions.
History
A 2011 review of the project's efforts praised it for assessing most medical articles on Wikipedia (at that time about 25,000), at the same time remarking that only around 70 have been assessed as high quality. The reviewer also suggested improvements to the Wikipedia system, such as making article assessment more prominent to the readers, and requesting that reviewers leave notes on how to improve low quality articles. In 2012, a dedicated American NGO, Wiki Project Med Foundation (WPMEDF), was formed to support it. A 2016 review noted that the number of high quality articles had improved to about 80, noting that one of them (on dengue fever) was published in a peer reviewed journal. The review praised the efforts of the volunteers, but noted that participation levels are too low to promise any significant improvements in the thousands of lower-quality articles, calling for more medical practitioners to volunteer. The review also pointed that readability (complexity) of Wikipedia articles may be too high for its intended audience, and encouraged the Wikipedia volunteers to review this aspect.
The first use of Wikipedia medical content in formal medical education was in 2011. A 2014 study found that the frequency of Wikipedia medical topics referenced in medical publications has increased over time since 2010, with the majority provided as definitions or descriptions.
COVID-19 pandemic
CBS News described the role of WikiProject Medicine in making Wikipedia a source of medical information relating to the COVID-19 pandemic, noting that a project member "edits and reviews all the medical content on Wikipedia", but also providing the caveat that "even though medical pages are strictly monitored by the WikiProject team, and hot topics that get a lot of page views are carefully edited, inaccurate information persists on some of Wikipedia's less-read pages".
