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Becoming a Wikipedian in Medical School
11.25.19
Amin Azzam, MD, MA
UCSF Adjunct Professor
My multiple hats
I am a consultant on Hewlett Foundation grants to Osmosis.org
These grants fund my Wikipedia work and associated travel expenses.
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“I will make 6 key points today.”
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Wikipedia’s medical content (at the end of 2013) was >155,000 articles and 1 billion bytes of text. The content was supported by >950,000 references.
Content was viewed > 4.88 billion times in 2013. This makes it one of if not the most viewed medical resource(s) globally.
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Wikipedia’s total content has grown rapidly since its inception in 2001, with 44 million articles across 295 languages, including >5.4 million in English as of May 2017.
As of March 2017 there are 30,000 articles on medical topics in English Wikipedia, and another 164,000 in other languages. They are collectively read >10 million times per day.
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Let’s look at one example...
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Hepatitis is generally diagnosed on weekdays not weekends.
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Same thing with the flu,
but notice the seasonal pattern too.
#1
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“The world uses Wikipedia for health information.”
“I will make 6 key points today.”
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Have you heard of Wikiprojects?
A group of contributors who want to work together as a team to improve Wikipedia.
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Example Wikiprojects
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Example Wikiprojects
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Wikiproject Medicine
A group of volunteers committed to improving health-related content on Wikipedia.
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Wikiproject Medicine
They have rank-ordered the ~45,000 English Wikipedia articles by importance.
A group of volunteers committed to improving health-related content on Wikipedia.
The importance scale includes number of eyeballs clicking as well as global burden of disease.
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Wikiproject Medicine
Label | Top priority | High priority | Mid priority | Low priority |
Criteria | Subject is extremely important, even crucial, to medicine. Strong interest from non-professionals around the world. Usually a large subject with many associated sub-articles. Less than 1% of medicine-related articles achieve this rating. | Subject is clearly notable. Subject is interesting to, or directly affects, many average readers. This category includes the most common diseases and treatments as well as major areas of specialization. Fewer than 10% of medicine-related articles achieve this rating. | Normal priority for article improvement. A good article would be interesting or useful to many readers. Subject is notable within its particular specialty. This category includes most medical conditions, tests, approved drugs, medical subspecialties, well-known anatomy, and common signs and symptoms. | Article may only be included to cover a specific part of a more important article, or may be only loosely connected to medicine. Subject may be specific to one country or part of one country, such as licensing requirements or organizations. This category includes most of the following: very rare diseases, lesser-known medical signs, equipment, hospitals, individuals, historical information, publications, laws, investigational drugs, detailed genetic and physiological information, and obscure anatomical features. |
Examples | Tuberculosis or Cancer | Coeliac disease or Mastectomy | Cholangiocarcinoma or Cramp | Leopard syndrome or Flynn effect |
These are still very important to patients and their loved ones.
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Wikiproject Pharmacology
They have rank-ordered the ~12,000 English Wikipedia articles by importance.
A group of volunteers committed to improving pharmacology & medicines-related content on Wikipedia.
Label | Top priority | High priority | Mid priority | Low priority |
Criteria | This is the highest importance. Articles rated as top-importance are generally major classes of drugs, or a major concept of pharmacology. Interestingly enough, there are no actual individual drug articles assessed at this level. | Articles assessed as high-importance generally include major drugs, like a prototype drug for a class, the first drug discovered in a class, or a drug that has received major media coverage. | Drugs which are commonly prescribed and/or used but not the major drug in its class, are assessed at mid-importance. Examples include Daunorubicin (similar to Doxorubicin, which is assessed high, but with over 2,000 known DOX analogs, we're not putting all of them at high-importance ;-). | Drugs assessed at low-importance is pretty much everything else. Not very well known, primarily research compounds that are not on the market but might be used in the laboratory for studies, etc,... |
Examples |
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“The world uses Wikipedia for health information.”
“Volunteers aggregate around Wikiprojects.”
“I will make 6 key points today.”
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Wikipedia grading rubric
Yeah but what about quality?
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Put them together...
A roadmap of Wikipedia’s quality!
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Same thing for Wikiproject Pharmacology
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Our call to action for the most impactful work!
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Where are the grades?
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“The world uses Wikipedia for health information.”
“Volunteers aggregate around Wikiprojects.”
“Wikipedia is graded for quality-- use that scale in your personal & professional lives!”
“I will make 6 key points today.”
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Drilling down deeper...
These haven’t gotten any less important since they were ranked.
These grades are likely below the current quality of the pages.
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Wikiproject Medicine
Translate to other language Wikipedias
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Translation Task Force
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Wikiproject Medicine
A mobile app providing offline access to Wikipedia’s health content.
An effort to provide Wikipedia and other content via physical media. It is primarily for distribution in places where access to the Internet is limited or controlled.
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“The world uses Wikipedia for health information.”
“Volunteers aggregate around Wikiprojects.”
“Wikipedia is graded for quality-- use that scale in your personal & professional lives!”
“There’s a great ‘collaboration chain’ waiting for us to participate.”
“I will make 6 key points today.”
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Wiki Education Foundation
50,000+
Students have done Wikipedia assignments since 2010.
68,000+
The number of articles they’ve worked on.
2,400+
The number of courses taught since 2010.
47 Million
The number of words students have donated to the world.
438,000,000
The number of times student’s work on Wikipedia from the Spring 2018 term as been seen.
20%
The fraction of volunteer Wikipedians who are women.
68%
The fraction of student editors who are women.
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The March 2016 cycle of my course...
Reflections of UCSF MS-4’s
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“I learned that Wikipedia has become a much more reliable source over the years and could really be a useful source for many of our patients.”
-- Carolyne
“I think our job is...to be the person in this global community who can share very complicated things in very simplistic terms and I think Wikipedia is a great resource for that because it is free and a lot of people do use it.”
-- Frederick
“Beyond the confidence to make these changes, I feel the necessity to do so as well.”
-- Phoebe
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You may have heard a little bit about vaccines in the news recently...
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Derek Smith
UCSF MS-4
The March 2019 cycle of my course...
“I did not experience any push back from anyone on either side of the debate.”
“I decided to edit the Wikipedia ‘Vaccination’ page. The bulk of my effort was creating and building out a ‘Safety’ section on the article since there previously had been no dedicated conversation about safety.”
The ‘Vaccination’ page was viewed 33,152 times during the month Derek was actively working to improve it.
“I had already been doing some personal research into the anti-vaccine movement by joining an anti-vaccine Facebook group...My goal was to better understand the common pieces of misinformation.”
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Medical school efforts since 2013
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Students | Pages edited | Words added | Images added | Edits | Total Views during courses |
160 | 149 | 248,860 | 46 | 5,967 | 2,912,057 |
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“The world uses Wikipedia for health information.”
“Volunteers aggregate around Wikiprojects.”
“Wikipedia is graded for quality-- use that scale in your personal & professional lives!”
“There’s a great ‘collaboration chain’ waiting for us to participate.”
“The Wiki Education Foundation has all the resources you need to dive in.”
“I will make 6 key points today.”
Other health professional schools have embraced the movement
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Medical
Dental
Pharmacy
Physical Therapy
Public Health
#6
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“The world uses Wikipedia for health information.”
“Volunteers aggregate around Wikiprojects.”
“Wikipedia is graded for quality-- use that scale in your personal & professional lives!”
“There’s a great ‘collaboration chain’ waiting for us to participate.”
“There’s already a movement of health professional schools...and you’re next!”
“The Wiki Education Foundation has all the resources you need to dive in.”
“I will make 6 key points today.”