Wikipedia:Choosing Wisely

Choosing Wisely is an educational campaign that involves contributing health information to Wikipedia. It is part of the Consumer Reports WikiProject, and organized by the ABIM Foundation.

Choosing Wisely seeks to provide consumers and providers of healthcare services with information about health diagnostic procedures. There are certain procedures which physicians frequently recommend despite a lack of evidence-based research demonstrating usefulness of those procedures. The Wikipedian in Residence position at Consumer Reports is an exploration to determine the circumstances under which the Wikipedia community would be interested in integrating information from this campaign into Wikipedia articles.

Background
ABIM Foundation is collaborating with various health organizations and medical societies to develop a community education plan with the intent to empower people with information which they can use to make better decisions about the healthcare choices they make. Each health organization coordinates the creation of health information through the staff of that organization, expert researchers in their field of expertise, and with the endorsement of the members of their organization. After each organization has created their educational information, ABIM Foundation collects it and then arranges for its free distribution to as many people as want it. Consumer Reports is one of the organizations which distributes this information.

The campaign seeks to increase public access to certain healthcare information, and since Wikipedia is the world's most accessed source of health information, it would be nice if this information were on Wikipedia. Since there is so much information in this campaign, it will be difficult to get the information to everyone who wants it unless community members who find the information valuable actually volunteer to help distribute it themselves. Consumer Reports has proposed that one of the strategies to get the information to the interested public would be to support efforts for community members to put information onto Wikipedia.

Information format
Various medical societies compiled lists of five procedures about which they wanted greater public awareness, and the campaign promotes these lists. The information in the lists includes understandable information in layman terms and citations to third-party scholarly research which provide supporting evidence of the claims.

Organizations also created layman explanations of the recommendations which medical societies give about medical procedures.

Wikipedia articles under consideration
The campaign could potentially target the health articles in the above list as focus points for development. The articles in this list were inserted because the campaign talks about these subjects.

Citation format
Participants in the project discussed best practices for creating citations.
 * A discussion at MEDMOS on best practices for citation