Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Google Project

This project page is for organizing the work of the WikiProject Medicine editors and Google reviewers on working together on medicine-related articles.

Initiated at Google.org and then announced at the doctors' mess, this collaboration is intended as an exploration of active cooperation between professional medical editors (hired by the Google Foundation) and any interested Wikipedians to further improve the quality of articles selected by the Google Foundation. Work began with the identification of a short list of articles for review, selected as a cross-section of medicine-related topics. Each article on the list now has an assessed "Class" and "Importance", harvested from its talk-page banner, reflecting Wikipedians' initial assessment of their state.

Google reviewers review the articles, identify problems, and make suggestions for improving the articles. Ultimately, the Google Foundation wants to hire professional translators to translate the best and most relevant medicine-related articles from the English Wikipedia to several Wikipedias in languages other than English. The Spanish, Arabic, and Kiswahili Wikipedias are the first targets.

Next up

 * Watchlist this page!
 * Build a task list
 * Identify collaborators
 * Choose a name for the collaboration
 * Determine the review process: should we ask that professional editors follow the WP review process, should we adapt WP review process to their conventions, or a hybrid?
 * The plan is to assess according to the GA criteria and post the review on the talkpage. The reviewers will have very little time to edit the articles. Tim Vickers (talk) 19:17, 28 April 2010 (UTC)


 * Start with a review on one article - which one?
 * Identify a timeline: Is there a deadline?  Should we hand off articles in small groups, or do we need to have them all finished at the same time?

Do you need help?
Wikipedia sometimes seems very complicated, but lots of people are willing to help you figure it out:
 * Any of the listed below can help you with wiki formatting codes, identifying and explaining typical Wikipedia policies and guidelines, and figuring out what happened if something isn't behaving.  You can reach a specific participant by clicking on the link to his or her user talk page, and clicking the "new section" message to leave a note for the editor.
 * You can reach multiple participants at once by clicking on this page's talk page to leave a message.
 * If you need more help, or want to join the fun, feel free to leave a note at the doctors' mess (non-physicians welcome, too!). There are also many smaller groups organized around specific medical specialties; you can find a list at WikiProject Medicine/Task forces.
 * Finally, if you want to talk to someone outside of WikiProject Medicine, then you can type  on your own user talk page, followed by your question.  The helpme template sends a note out to the IRC channel when you save your user talk page.

You may also want to know a bit about Wikipedia's most relevant guidelines:


 * Reliable sources (medicine-related articles)
 * Manual of Style (medicine-related articles)
 * Good article criteria

Participants from WikiProject Medicine

 * Tim Vickers (talk)
 * Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 18:02, 22 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Fvasconcellos (t·c) 01:28, 23 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Arcadian (talk) 20:18, 23 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Maralia (talk • contribs • email)
 * Matto paedia  Have a yarn  20:51, 27 December 2009 (UTC)
 * M aen K. A. Talk  21:32, 18 April 2010 (UTC)
 * MastCell Talk 23:38, 18 April 2010 (UTC)
 * Garrondo (talk) 07:22, 21 April 2010 (UTC)
 * Casliber (talk · contribs) 12:30, 23 April 2010 (UTC)
 * User:Remember
 * Axl ¤  [Talk]  17:49, 20 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Kallimachus (talk) 20:35, 17 June 2010 (UTC)
 * NCurse work 16:57, 7 August 2010 (UTC)
 * NCurse work 16:57, 7 August 2010 (UTC)

List of review editors

 * Bioc06
 * MICROED8
 * AMFEditor
 * Pdb factcheck
 * Ggschwei
 * Factcheckalm
 * TJS001
 * Fact Check AMEF
 * Medchecker
 * Factcheck101
 * Skmcmena
 * Facthead82
 * BSW_BV
 * BSW-JMH
 * BSW-RMH
 * BSWSJR
 * Kcandando
 * MotherShabubu
 * SarMarTay
 * AMFEditor
 * SLeonard
 * Jason.somarelli
 * FactCheck_EH
 * Tarheeltoxin

List of articles
You can edit this list here, WikiProject Medicine/Editorial review article list‎

Message from Google.org
Follow up announcement to Wikipedia community

Thank you to all Wikipedians who contributed to our trial editorial review! It was wonderful to see such enthusiastic participation, and we are extremely grateful for your support.

We have now had some time to evaluate the initial series of external reviews, and have been able to refine our approach based on our observations and your feedback on the discussion pages.

One of the most important findings of the trial was that in general, both sets of external reviewers tended to agree with the existing Wikipedia article rankings, adding an additional measure of credibility to the Wikipedia process of grading articles. We’re comfortable to say that when an article has been internally graded as good quality, this assessment can be accepted with confidence.

In addition, the dynamic nature of Wikipedia editing makes it difficult to say when a reviewed article should be considered 'complete'.

Given these two findings, we have decided to tweak our approach. Instead of working from an initial set of articles for translation based predominantly on popular search queries, we have selected a new set combining both popularity and quality, by mapping only articles that are already graded ‘B’, ‘GA’, or ‘FA’ to our query lists. Using this approach, we have a set of approximately 700 English articles that satisfy our requirements for both quality and user interest. This set can be added to over time as new articles improve to meet the quality threshold.

A handful of articles were high priority from a user perspective, but ranked 'C' or below (including 4 articles on topics in traditional Indian medicine, which were very popular among our Hindi users). For these articles, we are working to re-engage editors who received particularly high praise from the taskforce.

Thank you again for working with us during this initial trial. We learned a great deal and it was an important step towards our goal of translating high quality health content into many languages!

Best, Joanne Stevens, Google.org Program Manager
 * There is still substantial work to be done on the articles that have been reviewed. We need more editors to work on them.


 * A few comments:


 * What I would prefer more would be a review once the article has reached a certain point. I have gout at WP:GAN and would currently appreciated further opinions.


 * Also if the reviewers could use the highest quality paper per WP:MEDRS that would be preferred. I do not consider the Mayo clinic a sufficient ref for Wikipedia or medline plus for that matter.  They are often not exactly correct.


 * Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 06:18, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

Message from BioScience Writers
We are pleased to be reviewing 12 additional Wikipedia articles that have been ranked as high priority for the WikiProject Medicine/Google.org Project: Constipation, Asthma, Vitiligo, Depression (mood), Dizziness, Tonsillitis, Vitamin E, Boil, Triphala, Ashwagandha (Withania Somnifera), Asana (yoga), and Ayurveda. These articles are currently graded ‘C’ or lower, and our goal is to provide an external review of each that will help the Wikipedia community raise these articles to ‘B’ status. We appreciate all discussion about the reviews and how a ‘B’ grade can be achieved for each. BioScience Writers (talk) 19:18, 21 July 2010 (UTC)