Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Newsletter/August 2020


 * Issue 3&mdash;August 2020


 * WikiProject Medicine Newsletter

Despite continued tumult in the real world, the show–and the newsletter–must go on at WP:MED. As always your comments, concerns, and ideas are welcome at the newsletter talk page (and at WT:MED). Here is what's happening this month:

News from around the site
 * If you've got the time, please review a GA nomination (criteria/instructions). Nominations currently sit two months before review. Let's aim for a month or less.
 * Starting July 3rd, the WMF's "Wikipedia" social media accounts will highlight an "article of the week". If you've got the bandwidth, you can watchlist Social media/Article of the week (on meta) where they'll post the article around a day ahead of time for us to clean up. You can also suggest articles to highlight.
 * A new sister project has been approved by the WMF Board: Abstract Wikipedia.

Discussions of interest
 * Several medicine-related FAs promoted 5+ years ago could use a review and update. An effort to organize our efforts is at WT:MED.
 * A large university class is working on medicine-related articles this month. They're largely focused on articles with maintenance tags. The students are working in small groups and posting their goals at each talk page. Consider watchlisting some of the assigned articles and helping the students (and us regulars) have a positive experience.
 * is spearheading an effort to clean up and organize medicine-related templates, resulting in many active TfD discussions. See a list of active TfDs at WP:MED/Article alerts.

For a list of ongoing discussions in WP:MED-tagged articles, see WikiProject Medicine/Discussions Also, a reminder to see Article Alerts for a list of medicine-related AfDs, CfDs, merge discussions, and more!

Under the Wikimedia Research Spotlight

This month's Wikimedia Research Showcase was on the topic "Medical knowledge on Wikipedia". It featured two presentations from invited academics (link).

First, Denise Smith at McMaster and Western Universities received a WMF grant to review the academic literature on "Wikipedia as a health resource". She found 89 papers on the topic, most of which aim to assess our health content's accuracy, comprehensiveness, or readability. Findings vary, but are complicated by poor comparators (e.g. Wikipedia vs. a surgery textbook), the fluidity of content (research becomes dated quickly), and attempts to generalize to "health content" with no discussion of how our content is a patchwork of articles in vastly different states. The remaining papers fall into one of three categories: the use of Wikipedia as (1) a general medical resource, (2) a tool for health education, or (3) a tool for research. Interesting papers in each group, but I'll leave further exploration to the reader. There's a general trend of more papers on this topic over time; Smith is hopeful the stigma towards Wikipedia in academia and healthcare could be eroding. With any luck, her review will help orient academics as they consider studying our content. For more, see her paper in PLoS ONE.

Second, Giovanni Colavizza at the University of Amsterdam sought to assess the reliability and comprehensiveness of our covid-19 coverage by studying our citations. He collected the ~3k citations in our covid articles and compared them to the ~160k total papers on covid/coronaviruses. He found we disproportionately cite articles in more reputable journals, as well as articles that are highly cited, mentioned on Twitter, downloaded on Mendeley, etc. We disfavor citing preprints. To investigate the comprehensiveness of our citations across topics, he used the titles and abstracts of all covid papers to cluster them into five broad topical groups. He finds our citations to each group largely match its proportion in the total literature, with some exceptions (we overcite molecular biology and epidemics papers relative to their proportion in the literature, and undercite clinical medicine and public health papers). One might assume this means our coverage of covid-19 is fairly balanced to the broad topics of the literature. For more, see Colavizza's slide deck and biorxiv preprint.

For the time/interest constrained, see summaries from the authors and from WhatamIdoing.

Discuss this issue

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