Medicine in Wikipedia: Reliable Information? October 18, 2007
Posted by Bertalan Meskó in 10 tips, Medical education, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Web 2.0, Wikipedia, science.trackback
I’ve already talked a lot about the medical articles of Wikipedia and Citizendium. As an administrator, I’d like to provide some useful tips for those who, as a layman or a medical professional, would like to be involved in improving the medical articles of Wikipedia. Second, I’d like to show you how Wikipedia is improving in the aspect of credibility.
So, let’s see some tips on how you can join the medical editorial board in Wikipedia:
- The most visited medicine-related page is Medicine:Portal. Check it out and join me to help maintaining it! Selected articles, images, news, quotes and tasks.
- Work on the articles nominated to become Good Articles!
- You’ll definitely find task or project for your pleasure on the page of the Medical WikiProject.
- If you’d like to work on even more specific articles, then check out the Clinical Medicine or the Preclinical Medicine WikiProjects!
- We always focus on a specific medicine-related article in the Collaboration of the Fortnight.
- Help us how to rate the several thousand articles!
- If you don’t have enough time or the qualification to improve the articles, then wikify those or help how to categorize them. These are the pages that need attention.
- In case you’re interested in genetics, your project is the Medical Genetics WikiProject.
- If you would like to create articles, then check out what others have already requested in the field of genetics or medicine.
Why do I say bravely that Wikipedia is improving in the aspect of credibility and reliability? As I tried to be objective, I chose some of the first entries in the List of causes of death by rate article and determined the number of references and external links in each article now and a year ago. Here is the result:
For me, it proves that Wikipedia is still improving regarding the number of references which is one of the most important aims nowadays in this huge community.
Citizendium, the online encyclopaedia that only selected editors, professionals can edit, is, obviously, more reliable than Wikipedia, but Wikipedia is far more comprehensive than Citizendum. So both should serve as an additional source of information, but never as your last source…
Further reading:
- Why to work in Wikipedia: I’ve been mentioned in Nature Medicine
- Radiopaedia: a wiki for radiology
- Ask Dr Wiki vs medicine in Wikipedia
- Medical wikis: the future of medicine?
- Medicine in Wikipedia and Citizendum
- Why to use Wikipedia: answer for Eye on DNA
- Genetic Wikis
- Wikipedia and the Semantic Web?
Why would anyone use Wikipedia for anything important without verifying the sources at least?
boss,
you spelled (and linked) citizendium.org wrong. beginning of your last paragraph starts with ‘citizendum.’
but my bad, though, didn’t mean to call you out
this was a good post.
Thank you, shlok, for the correction!
[...] - Bertalan Meskó, administrateur du portail médecine de Wikipedia (version anglaise) pose une nouvelle fois la question de sa fiabilité. Sa conclusion place Wikipedia (et Citizendium) à leur juste place :"So both should serve as an additional source of information, but never as your last source…"http://scienceroll.com/2007/10/18/medicine-in-wikipedia-reliable-information/ [...]
Speaking as Editor-in-Chief of Citizendium and co-founder of Wikipedia, we would be delighted to have any and all health professionals working on Citizendium! Join here: http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Special:RequestAccount
Great to see you here, Larry!
It’s hard to convince health professionals to edit Citizendium while their edits should be approved by others. Anyway, you should contact the medical editors of Wikipedia. We have a pretty big medical community.
I wish you the best to create a comprehensive medical database in Citizendium!
Berci Meskó
You’re actually mistaken; Health Sciences is one of CZ’s biggest, most active workgroups, and getting doctors and others interested in CZ has not been difficult at all. And that’s precisely because articles can be approved. Individual edits, of course, don’t have to be approved. Once you’ve got an account, you’ll see that it’s just as much (if not more) of a robust wiki as Wikipedia.
We don’t want to compete with Wikipedia for its personnel; we have not tried to “win over” current Wikipedians. That really wouldn’t be fair play, I think. If they want to join us, though, of course, they’re more than welcome.
I’m on your side, Larry! Just as a Wikipedian, I know the good parts of Wikipedia and I’m realy convinced by the power of masses.
So are we–we are convinced of the power of the masses. That’s why most of our “Citizens” are not expert editors, but authors. But Wikipedia does not empower the masses very well; to do that, you need a rule of law in an online constitutional democracy. Instead, Wikipedia empowers cliques, and an arcane hierarchy that was already developing when I left in 2002, and which has become Kafkaesque in the intervening years. Most Wikipedians are smart, decent, well-meaning people, and good writers. It’s the others who have ruined things.
I’ve been working in Wikipedia for nearly 2 years now, but I have never experienced that hierarchy or the power of cliques. There are so many possibilities to make a complaint when you have a problem.
Anyway, my problem is that if we create newer and newer encyclopaedias, it’s getting more and more complicated to improve them. While you have only one, we could all focus on that.
If the professional editors of Citizendum and the masses of Wikipedia could work somehow together, for me, that would be a perfect solution.
Just an idea: editor-in-chief for each section while anybody can edit? What do you think?
[...] Medicine in Wikipedia: Reliable Information? [...]
[...] Medicine in Wikipedia: Reliable Information? [...]
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