New project will support students’ coursework across healthcare professions to improve content
When searching for information on health-related topics, people turn to Wikipedia more than any other source. While it may come as no surprise that the general public visits Wikipedia for answers to questions and to inform their decisions as healthcare patients or caregivers, healthcare experts including providers, researchers, and instructors also often utilize the online encyclopedia within the context of their professional work.
Given the impact and reach of Wikipedia’s healthcare content, it’s imperative that the information is accurate, up-to-date, high-quality, and trustworthy. Thanks to a new project supported by the Eugene Washington PCORI Engagement Award Program, an initiative of the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), Wiki Education will collaborate with higher education faculty across healthcare professions to support their students in the impactful work to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of healthcare topics.
The two-year project aims to significantly enhance the quality of openly accessible information on critical topics including stroke prevention, postpartum care, and radiation therapy.
Drawing on the rigorous evaluation of medical research available in PCORI-funded Systematic Reviews, the postsecondary students will improve Wikipedia articles by developing and adding new content, as well as adding missing citations to existing content as needed. The faculty and students will join Wiki Education’s Wikipedia Student Program and receive our staff guidance, curriculum, subject-specific resources, and digital tracking tools to support their coursework on Wikipedia.
In addition to supporting the student editors’ contributions to Wikipedia, we’ll also explore their perspectives on their Wikipedia experiences to better understand how to improve future student engagement with this work.
To aid our engagement with key stakeholders, Wiki Education will form a Medical Community Advisory Committee composed of health professions faculty and students. The group will provide strategic guidance throughout the project, including ideas for outreach initiatives to reach medical educators, reflections on the results of surveys and focus groups, and suggestions for ensuring sustainability of the project.
PCORI is an independent, nonprofit organization with a mission to fund patient-centered comparative clinical effectiveness research (CER) that equips patients, their caregivers and clinicians with the evidence-based information they need to make better informed health and health care decisions. The Wiki Education Engagement Award project is part of a portfolio of projects that PCORI has funded to help disseminate PCORI-funded research findings.
This new project builds upon previous work through which we trained medical professionals and health professions students how to add the high-quality information from the systematic reviews to Wikipedia, working to ensure articles include research on patient-centered outcomes. Their collective contributions to improve more than 40 medical articles across Wikipedia have been viewed more than 11 million times.
We express our gratitude to PCORI for their support of this new project, and encourage any interested instructor to visit teach.wikiedu.org to learn more about incorporating a Wikipedia assignment into their courses. This project is funded through a Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) Eugene Washington PCORI Engagement Award (EADI #38991).
