WikiProject Medicine, formed in 2004, is a Wikipedia WikiProject dedicated to improving coverage of medicine-related topics.[1][2][3] It has over 200 active volunteers, including James Heilman. About half of the volunteers are health care professionals or students.[1][2] 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.[3]

A 2011 review of the project efforts praised it for assessing the vast majority of 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.[1] In 2012, a dedicated American NGO, Wiki Project Med Foundation (WPMEDF), was formed to support it.[2][4][5][3] A 2016 review noted that the number of high quality articles has improved to about 80, noting that one of them (on dengue fever) was even formatted and republished 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 their time on Wikipedia. Regarding the quality of articles, 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.[3][6]

WikiProject Medicine during the COVID-19 pandemic

CBS News described the role of Wikipedia's 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".[7]

  1. ^ a b c Trevena, L. (2011-06-08). "WikiProject Medicine". BMJ. 342 (jun08 3): d3387. doi:10.1136/bmj.d3387. ISSN 0959-8138. PMID 21653617. S2CID 206893220.
  2. ^ a b c James, Richard (October 2016). "WikiProject Medicine: Creating Credibility in Consumer Health". Journal of Hospital Librarianship. 16 (4): 344–351. doi:10.1080/15323269.2016.1221284. ISSN 1532-3269. S2CID 79020792.
  3. ^ a b c d Murray, Terry (2015-03-03). "WikiProject Medicine making progress". Canadian Medical Association Journal. 187 (4): 245. doi:10.1503/cmaj.109-4982. ISSN 0820-3946. PMC 4347770. PMID 25646285.
  4. ^ "Wiki Project Med - Meta". meta.wikimedia.org. Retrieved 2021-10-19.
  5. ^ Shafee, Thomas; Masukume, Gwinyai; Kipersztok, Lisa; Das, Diptanshu; Häggström, Mikael; Heilman, James (2017-11-01). "Evolution of Wikipedia's medical content: past, present and future". J Epidemiol Community Health. 71 (11): 1122–1129. doi:10.1136/jech-2016-208601. ISSN 0143-005X. PMC 5847101. PMID 28847845.
  6. ^ Heilman, James M; Wolff, Jacob De; Beards, Graham M; Basden, Brian J (2014-10-02). "Dengue fever: a Wikipedia clinical review". Open Medicine. 8 (4): e105–e115. ISSN 1911-2092. PMC 4242787. PMID 25426178.
  7. ^ Cite error: The named reference COVID-19 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
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