Welcome to WikiProject Medicine! We discuss, collaborate, and debate anything and everything relating to medicine and health on Wikipedia on our discussion page. Everyone is welcome to join!
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and has a distinct style that may take some time getting used to.
It is important that articles use the best sources and content is given due weight. Different from scientific papers, Wikipedia medical and health content is preferably sourced to secondary sources over primary sources. Citing a review article is preferred over an original trial.
To get you started and to explain why this is important here are a number of guides and guidelines:
Each month we select a Medical Collaboration of the Month to focus our efforts on. Topics may either relate to medical basic sciences (such as anatomy or biochemistry), or clinical medicine (such as illnesses and surgical procedures). The project aims to improve medicine articles, and to give editors an opportunity to collaborate. Anyone can nominate an article, or vote on nominees at our project page. The collaboration of the month for July 2024 is Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease! Visit its talk page to help coordinate our efforts.
WikiProject Medicine was started in 2004 by Dr. Jacob de Wolff as WikiProject Clinical Medicine with the later branch WikiProject Preclinical Medicine. These merged and WikiProject Medicine has since been one of Wikipedia's most active WikiProjects. WP:MED as it is known aims to manage and help in curation of Wikipedia's medical articles. We write articles and discuss all manner of issues on our talk page: WT:MED.
Through the years we've built up a catalogue of sub-projects and task-forces which vary in their activity, you can find some of them at the task force page.
Wikipedia can be a great resource for getting to know a field — and it can give you an encyclopaedic overview of a subject, acting as a spring-board letting you dive deeper. It should however not be used as your only source when performing research, and you should never blindly trust Wikipedia. Over the years a lot of research has been amassed surrounding the reliability and biases of Wikipedia.To see some of the studies that have been produced on the quality and scope of medical information on Wikipedia take a look at some of the research:
Academic studies of health information on Wikipedia
Keegan BC, Tan C (2020-06-15). "A Quantitative Portrait of Wikipedia's High-Tempo Collaborations during the 2020 Coronavirus Pandemic". arXiv:2006.08899 [cs.SI].
Marquez-Romero JM, Lee Á, Soto-Cabrera E, Hernández-Curiel BC, Prado-Aguilar CA (February 2022). "Content and Quality of Information about Stroke in Wikipedia across Multiple Languages". European Neurology. 85 (4): 308–312. doi:10.1159/000521938. PMID35134804. S2CID246677682.
2020
Ju B, Jung Y, Bourgeois JP (2021). "Seeking Health Information in Wikipedia and Readers' Satisfaction". Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology. 58 (1): 744–746. doi:10.1002/pra2.548. ISSN2373-9231. S2CID238748548.
Tan L, Lai SM, Geres N, Innes NP, Radford JR, Revie G, et al. (July 2021). "Effectiveness of The Wikipedia Collaboration of Dental Schools' Training Programme: a new Paradigm for Teaching and Learning of Evidence-Based Dentistry". Community Dental Health. 39 (1): 22–26. doi:10.1922/CDH_00091Tan05. PMID34351712. S2CID236926978.
Couto L, Lopes CT (2021-04-19). "Assessing the quality of health-related Wikipedia articles with generic and specific metrics". In Leskovec J, Grobelnik M, Najork M, Tang J, Zia L (eds.). Companion Proceedings of the Web Conference 2021. Ljubljana Slovenia: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 640–647. doi:10.1145/3442442.3452355. ISBN978-1-4503-8313-4. S2CID233228008.
Couto L, Teixera Lopes C (2021-09-15). "Equal opportunities in the access to quality online health information? A multi-lingual study on Wikipedia". 17th International Symposium on Open Collaboration. Online Spain: ACM. pp. 1–13. doi:10.1145/3479986.3480000. ISBN978-1-4503-8500-8. S2CID238992827.
Banasik-Jemielniak N, Jemielniak D, Wilamowski M (2021-02-16). "Psychology and Wikipedia: Measuring Psychology Journals' Impact by Wikipedia Citations". Social Science Computer Review. 40 (3): 756–774. doi:10.1177/0894439321993836. ISSN0894-4393. S2CID233968639.
Byron MJ, Hughes JR (October 2021). "Wikipedia and Nicotine and Tobacco: Meeting People Where They Are". Nicotine & Tobacco Research. 23 (11): 1977–1979. doi:10.1093/ntr/ntab087. PMID33955471.
Handler SJ, Eckhardt SE, Takashima Y, Jackson AM, Truong C, Yazdany T (December 2021). "Readability and quality of Wikipedia articles on pelvic floor disorders". International Urogynecology Journal. 32 (12): 3249–3258. doi:10.1007/s00192-021-04776-0. PMID33797592. S2CID232763492.
Rubin JE (September 2021). "Writing for Wikipedia: An Exercise in Microbiology, Writing, Research, Communication, and Public Service". Journal of Veterinary Medical Education. 49 (6): 705–708. doi:10.3138/jvme-2021-0099. PMID34570683. S2CID238203119.
Provenzano S, Gianfredi V, Santangelo OE (March 2021). "Insight the data: Wikipedia's researches and real cases of arboviruses in Italy". Public Health. 192: 21–29. doi:10.1016/j.puhe.2020.12.010. PMID33607517. S2CID231969704.
Froldi G (2021). "Wikipedia in teaching "Pharmacology and Pharmacotherapy" to Pharmacy students". In Gallo V (ed.). Wikipedia in Academia(PDF). Padova University Press. pp. 89–94. ISBN9788869381980.