Why Medical Schools Should Embrace Wikipedia:
Final-Year Medical Student Contributions to Wikipedia Articles for Academic Credit at One School
Amin Azzam, MD, MA, David Bresler, MD, MA, Armando Leon, MD, Lauren Maggio, PhD, Evans Whitaker, MD, MLIS, James Heilman, MD, Jake Orlowitz, Valerie Swisher, Lane Rasberry, Kingsley Otoide, Fred Trotter, Will Ross, and Jack D. McCue, MD
Abstract
Problem
Most medical students use Wikipedia as an information source, yet medical schools do not train students to improve Wikipedia or use it critically.
Approach
Between November 2013 and November 2015, the authors offered fourth-year medical students a credit-bearing course to edit Wikipedia. The course was designed, delivered, and evaluated by faculty, medical librarians, and personnel from WikiProject Medicine, Wikipedia Education Foundation, and Translators Without Borders. The authors assessed the effect of the students' edits on Wikipedia's content, the effect of the course on student participants, and readership of students' chosen articles.
Outcomes
Forty-three enrolled students made 1,528 edits (average 36/student), contributing 493,994 content bytes (average 11,488/student). They added higher-quality and removed lower-quality sources for a net addition of 274 references (average 6/student). As of July 2016, none of the contributions of the first 28 students (2013, 2014) have been reversed or vandalized. Students discovered a tension between comprehensiveness and readability/translatability, yet readability of most articles increased. Students felt they improved their articles, enjoyed giving back "specifically to Wikipedia," and broadened their sense of physician responsibilities in the socially networked information era. During only the "active editing months," Wikipedia traffic statistics indicate that the 43 articles were collectively viewed 1,116,065 times. Subsequent to students' efforts, these articles have been viewed nearly 22 million times.
Next Steps
If other schools replicate and improve on this initiative, future multi-institution studies could more accurately measure the effect of medical students on Wikipedia, and vice versa.
Problem
The rise and spread of Internet accessibility has created an unprecedented resource for the dissemination of medical information, as well as an invaluable tool for health care providers and the general public alike. At the same time, opportunities for the rapid spread of misinformation or the misinterpretation of medical facts have never been greater. Clinicians must sometimes gently redirect patients who are convinced that they have some rare disease they have read about on the Internet. Although medical educators typically train students to address patient misperceptions in clinical practice, they are not leveraging clinician and medical student knowledge to improve the quality of the information patients and others find online.
Wikipedia is a free, online, multilingual encyclopedia that is continually and collaboratively created. Anyone with an Internet connection can edit its articles. One of the most frequently visited Web sites worldwide, it is among the leading sources of health information for medical professionals and health care consumers alike.1 At the end of 2013, Wikipedia's medical content included over 155,000 articles written in 255 languages, supported by more than 950,000 references.2 Despite its increasingly prevalent use as a medical information resource in clinical practice, clinical instructors and faculty members often dissuade medical students from using Wikipedia, citing concern for its perceived inaccuracies and lack of traditional editorial controls.3
Please see the end of this article for information about the authors. Correspondence should be addressed to Amin Azzam, UCSF Department of Psychiatry, Box 0984MSE, 401 Parnassus Ave., San Francisco, CA 941430984; telephone: (415) 476-7836; e-mail: Amin. Azzam@ucsf.edu; Twitter: @AminMDMA. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (CCBY), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Acad Med. XXXX;XX:00–00. First published online doi: 10.1097/ACM.0000000000001381 Supplemental digital content for this article is available at http://links.lww.com/ACADMED/A386. |
Although physicians and medical students are encouraged to contribute to traditional sources of medical knowledge (e.g., textbooks and journals), the idea of benefiting from active contribution to crowd-sourced resources such as Wikipedia remains the perspective of a minority or fringe group within the academic medicine community.
We believe that not contributing to crowd-sourced resources represents a lost opportunity for enriching medical studentslearning and for disseminating more accurate, up-to-date medical information to Wikipedia's readers worldwide.
Approach
We created what is, to our knowledge, the first formal medical school course worldwide through which medical students actively work to improve Wikipedia's health-related articles. We expected enrolled students to hone their information retrieval and assessment skills,4 practice communicating medical knowledge to an exceptionally broad global audience,2 and expand their sense of health care providers' roles in the Internet age. We designed our course with
