Wikipedia:Why Medical Schools Should Embrace Wikipedia

"Why Medical Schools Should Embrace Wikipedia" is a September 2016 article in Academic Medicine. The article describes the process and outcomes for an instructor who encouraged several classes of medical students at University of California, San Francisco to participate in the Wikipedia Education Program by contributing health information to Wikipedia articles as part of the classroom learning experience. In the paper, the authors reported that the project advanced classroom learning goals, students enjoyed the practical publishing experience, Wikipedia reviewers appreciated the content donation, independent health experts found the information quality to be good, and a large audience of readers accessed the Wikipedia articles containing the content.

About the paper
See on-wiki documentation of this project at UCSF School of Medicine. While many people contributed, special thanks should go to Amin Azzam (user:AminMDMA) as the instructor who hosted the class and chief organizer of the project. Further context can be found in the Wikipedia article titled, "Health information on Wikipedia" and at WikiProject Medicine, which is the community forum for discussing health information on Wikipedia.

Here are the project coordinators, their wiki-names if applicable, and their affiliations.

Authors -
 * Amin Azzam,, University of California, San Francisco
 * David Bresler Tufts University
 * Armando Leon, University of California, San Francisco
 * Lauren Maggio Stanford University
 * Evans Whitaker University of California, San Francisco
 * James Heilman,, University of British Columbia
 * Jake Orlowitz,, Wiki Project Med and The Wikipedia Library
 * Val Swisher,, Content Rules, Inc.
 * Lane Rasberry,, Consumer Reports
 * Kingsley Otoide, Insp-i.com
 * Fred Trotter, The DocGraph, Inc.
 * Will Ross, The DocGraph, Inc.
 * Jack McCue, University of California, San Francisco

Other support -
 * the students who participated as Wikipedia contributors and otherwise
 * Academic Medicine for taking the risk to reputation and conservative norms for publishing research on Wikipedia
 * Journalists who covered this project continually over the years
 * WP:Batea, the DocGraph project funded by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to research Wikipedia editing practices (Chrome browser users please sign up)
 * WikiProject Medicine for reviewing student contributions
 * Wiki Education Foundation for program design
 * Translation Task Force for coordinating the translation of student contributions to languages outside English
 * Translators without Borders for recruiting translators
 * Wikimedia New York City for developing classroom outreach best practices
 * The Wikimedia Foundation for sponsoring open access to the research publication with a grant
 * This is a wiki. If credit was overlooked then please list additional contributors here.

Wikipedia projects which seem simple can attract significant contributors from hundreds of individuals and dozens of organizations. It can reasonably be said that several hundred people participated in this project directly and that hundreds of thousands of readers have accessed the Wikipedia articles containing the student contributions.

Open access publishing
The paper is published with a CC-By 4.0 license, which is an open access license. The publishing fee was $3900. Lane Rasberry requested $3000 through the Wikimedia Foundation's grant program to cover part of the fee. The University of California San Francisco paid the remaining $900. For more information see
 * the grant request and approval
 * the grant report and acceptance
 * guidance for anyone else who considers asking the Wikimedia Foundation for a similar grant

Presentations at conferences
The team began to present drafts of the research beginning in 2014 in anticipation of the publishing which happened in October 2016.




 * Upcoming
 * 1) Association of American Medical Colleges Annual conference 2017 in Boston

Links

 * For the paper itself
 * publisher's own website
 * Wikimedia Commons