Wiki Project Med

WikiProject Med (WPMEDF) is a nonprofit corporation whose purpose is to promote the development and distribution of medical content on Wikimedia projects by, among other things, forming collaborations with other like-minded organizations, giving talks at universities and other organizations, and working to develop greater access to the medical literature for Wikipedians. While we are incorporated in New York State and tax exempt in the United States we are a global group. Its members seek to provide the sum of all medical knowledge to all people in their own language.

To make clear, reliable, comprehensive, up-to-date educational resources and information in the biomedical and related social sciences freely available to all people in the language of their choice.

This organization has no direct editorial control over the health-related content of the Wikimedia projects themselves. We believe the goals of the Wikimedia movement are best achieved in collaboration with other organizations who share those goals, and we see WikiProject Med's role primarily as an educational one, where we will provide advice and instruction to other like-minded individuals and organizations regarding how to contribute to Wikimedia projects.

WikiProject Med will fulfill its mission by, among other things:

1. Persuading individual experts and professional and scholarly organizations to review or contribute to Wikimedia medical content, and provide them with necessary support and training
2. Create, collect, process, and present the sorts of metrics which describe usage statistics and quality of health content on Wikimedia projects

While WikiProject Med members may contribute health content themselves, they will do so not as members or representatives of WikiProject Med but as members of the projects that host that content (Wikipedia, Wikiversity, Wiktionary, Commons, etc.).

• The territory of activity is everywhere in the world where there are people interested in achieving our mission.
• The organization is legally registered in the United States but people from around the world can join.

Membership is free for active contributors of medical content to a Wikimedia project (such as Wikipedia) or participants in an organisation whose mission aligns with WikiProject Med's. Please also add your name to the public list .

This organization promotes participation in Wikipedia Medicine projects across different languages (of which the English-language Wikiproject Medicine is one of several).

The standard kind of partnership which WikiProject Med offers to any health organization is assistance in getting information and content from that organization's field of expertise into Wikipedia, then assisting the organization in getting feedback on how their information has been received and processed. In this model, organizations come to Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects in the same manner as any other volunteers. The two kinds of help most frequently offered are as follows:

1. If an organization has people who are willing to contribute information, WikiProject Med will help arrange for training of those people.
2. If an organization has information or media to donate so that Wikipedia's own volunteers can integrate it into the encyclopedia and elsewhere, then WikiProject Med will help advertise and promote this content.

Collaborations are currently being developed with the World Health Organization, Cancer Research UK, United States National Library of Medicine / National Institutes of Health, and the Cochrane Collaboration. Efforts include issues surrounding copyright and the support of the creation of Wikipedians in Residence.

A number of presentations have been given globally regarding the significance of Wikipedia in Medicine including in Canada, the UK, India, Switzerland and Nepal. A model presentation is available here under a CC BY SA license for others to use and adapt. See there.

We are an official supporter of Health Information For All 2015 per their website

Some of our 2014 Ebola article translations into African languages:

• [画像:Igbo]
  Igbo
• [画像:Kinyarwanda]
  Kinyarwanda
• [画像:Swahili]
  Swahili
• [画像:Yoruba]
  Yoruba

The Translation Task Force is a project that began on the English Wikipedia in collaboration with Translators Without Borders to improve key medical articles via translation. A summary of the project is as follows:

1. Identify the most globally important health articles on Wikipedia (a list is here)
2. Improve them to "Good Article" or "Featured Article" status in English according to English Wikipedia criteria
3. Once an article reaches at least good status, have it professionally reviewed
4. Put the article in queue for translation into every other language in the world at Translators Without Borders, with emphasis on languages which do not have equivalent articles of good quality
5. Present the most comprehensive multilingual source of health information ever compiled to the world, for free, continually as it is being created

• UCSF medical school partnership: Weeklong lecture series and editathon hosted at and by UCSF and cosponsored by Wikimedia Canada and WikiProject Med.

• We are partnered with UCSF on running 4 week elective for medical students each semester in which the students edit Wikipedia, with a class twice per year since 2013.

There is an existing Wikipedia outreach program which sends Wikipedia ambassadors - "campus ambassadors" - to schools to encourage students and professors to incorporate contributions to Wikipedia projects into the learning curricula. This organization facilitates participation in the campus ambassador program for those participating in health-related education projects at universities.

• Taiwanese university

• One reason some academics express for not contributing to Wikipedia is that they are unable to get the recognition they require for their current professional position. A number of medical journals have agreed in principle to publishing high quality Wikipedia articles under authors' real names following formal peer review. These journals include PLoS medicine and Open BMJ. Further details here. Journal of Medical Internet Research is about to publish a new online peer-reviewed journal, JMIR:Wiki Medical Reviews. See here.

• The Wikiversity Journal of Medicine, started in 2014, is another effort to get academic credit for contributing to Wikipedia. This in house journal is set up to provide formal peer review for Wikipedia articles and images. It has the added benefit of being broader in scope, accepting many types of articles such as case reports. While many traditional Open Access publishers chart fees of one or two thousand dollars per article this journal is free. Efforts are ongoing to get it PubMed indexed which will allow another way for Wikipedia articles after formal peer review to end up on PubMed commons and be an appropriate reference in other academic work. Wikiversity Journal of Medicine can also accept any medical work that is scientifically significant in its own right.

• There are certain articles which, although published in scholarly journals, could either be readily adapted into Wikipedia articles or preferably published verbatim as Wikipedia articles if they were appropriately licensed during publication. Some work has already gone into this concept; this project supports further efforts into reforming publishing standards so as to incorporate sharable media into Wikipedia as efficiently as possible.
• General discussion on potential collaborations are taking place with the Cochrane Collaboration as described here.
• Parallel to broader efforts to create a Wikipedia Library, efforts are underway to build relationships with scientific/medical publishing houses resulting in the donation of free and full access to their content for active Wikipedians. Partnerships with Credo Reference, HighBeam Research, and Questia Online Library have set a precedent for such relationships to be mutually beneficial: they provide visibility to the research databases and they give select Wikipedia editors direct access to the best available academic, scholarly, and professional reliable sources. Talks are ongoing with JSTOR and Cochrane Collaboration which have both expressed interest in joining The Wikipedia Library. Future targets include UpToDate, Elsevier, and Springer.
• Possibly improving/creating medical {Find sources} templates, or creating a live feed of recent high-quality clinical guidelines or meta analyses to article talk pages.

As might be expected, this organization participates more generally in outreach and development programs of the broader Wikimedia community. Among other things, some members of this organization also participate in the following:

• regional Wikimedia chapters
• regional Wikimedia meetups in any country and language
• the annual international Wikimedia conference, Wikimania

This organization takes positions on issues, makes specific recommendations on best practices for sharing health information, sometimes asks organizations to do certain things, and may ask governments to adopt certain stances. Here are some general types of advocacy which WikiProject Med does:

• Promotes the idea that all health information of general interest should be made available for free online, especially through Wikimedia projects, and particularly in Wikipedias of all languages
• Advocates that barriers to sharing health educational material should be removed whenever there are not reasons to sustain them
• Recommends that organizations sharing health information publish using free licenses, such as those developed by Creative Commons, in order to increase public access, open access, and sharing in general
• Invites all perspectives to contribute to the global collection of health information which everyone uses
• Offers to facilitate access to Wikimedia data for researchers examining the workings of Wikimedia projects, its community, and its impact

Bots and scripts can help us improve medical content. This is a place to collaborate on proposals to develop these.

We have put together a "copy and paste detection bot" which is running on all medical articles. Results can be seen here en:User:EranBot/Copyright

Members of the organization have planned and developed a range of special projects. Some of these are major and ongoing and some are minor and were never well documented, as they could have been started and organized by volunteers who came and left. Miscellaneous projects are documented here.

As of Feb 2016 there are Wikiproject Medicine in 38 languages Messaging list is here

• The board has frequent, ongoing internal communications via email.
• We have a mailing list here, but it is expected that most discussion will take place on meta.

• Twitter: http://twitter.com/WikiProjectMed (Follow us!)
• Facebook: http://facebook.com/WikiProjectMed (Like us and share our page!)
• Wordpress: http://wikiprojectmed.wordpress.com
• Gmail: wikiprojectmed(_AT_)gmail.com

Press

• Wiki Project Med/Press

• The 2013 Humanitarian Communicator Award by Translators without Borders [1]

Public membership list is here

1. Jacob de Wolff (president)
2. Biosthmors (secretary)
3. Peter.C (talk) (taxes)
4. Vinicius Siqueira (talk)
5. Daniel Mietchen (talk)
6. RexxS (talk) (treasurer)
7. Jake Orlowitz Ocaasi (talk) (outreach)
8. Keilana
9. CFCF Carl Fredrik Sjoland
10. Sydney Poore

• Wiki Project Med Recognition - November 2014
• Renewals from 2015 WMCon Eligibility Renewal Sprint - December 2015

• Wiki Med minutes
• Wiki Med
• Wikimedia User Groups
• Wikimedia User Groups - Thematic