Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Newsletter/June 2014

The Pulse

A newsletter for WikiProject Medicine: June 2014

What's new · What's happening · Focus: the newsletter · Contribute a story

This is the first issue of The Pulse, a newsletter intended to document the goings-on at WP:MED. A notification has been provided to all the talk pages of WP:MED members bearing the User WPMed template here, listed in this category. To opt-out, please leave a message here or simply remove your name from the mailing list. Because this is the first issue, we are still finding out feet. Things like the layout and content may change in the subsequent edition. Please let us know what you think, and if you have any ideas for the future, by leaving a message here.

What's new
There are no new "good" or "featured" articles, images, lists or other media for May. There are however nine articles awaiting review. Any editor can review a nomination, and instructions are provided here.
 * Articles

Our sister project WP:PHYSIOLOGY, focusing on all things physiological, lays its founding Wiki-stones.
 * WikiProject Physiology

Researchers compare Wikipedia's health content to the academic literature of their choice. The methods were such that few conclusions can be drawn, with a number of editors disputing the methodology of the paper. This paper was discussed on WikiProject Medicine in "Poor Paper on Wikipedia" and both the paper and the discussion on Wikipedia were reviewed in The Atlantic in "Can Wikipedia Ever Be a Definitive Medical Text?" and numerous other venues. A second ongoing lively thread ensues when a user reports on BBC and Daily Mail coverage of this research, which conclude that WP is not an effective venue for "self-diagnosis". An editor writes a blog post in response at Cancer Research UK and the story continues to develop as this newsletter is released.
 * How accurate is WPMED?


 * Other


 * "I actually hate it here and I'm leaving" - WikiProject Medicine loses a prolific editor who complained of a hostile community environment. Issues faced by editors can be discussed at the wiki-wide editor retention board and our own 'editor outreach' page.
 * Ian Furst, a Wikipedian video director and voice actor who is a dentist in his free time, releases a polished version of a 3-minute video (right) to welcome new editors after collecting feedback from the WikiProject Medicine community
 * "Interesting thread on Reddit right now about WP's accuracy" - People outside of Wikipedia's editing community on Reddit have all sorts of odd ideas about Wikipedia
 * ""Nomination" of steroidogenesis article in Wikiversity to be used as reference" - discussion about thoughtfully publishing original research in Wikiversity at the "Wikiversity Journal of Medicine", a Wikimedia project

What's happening
What is the Wiki Project Med Foundation? The Wiki Project Med Foundation is an affilitated "thematic organisation" designed to engage the many communities of medical wiki editors, with the lofty aim of providing medical content in all languages, to everyone. Interested users can sign up. In the future, this newsletter will be reporting on activities and collaborations of the WPMF that affect the English-language WPMED. A concurrent newsletter, the stethoscope, will be released documenting the activities at WPMF.
 * Wiki Project Med Foundation

Two additional Wikipedians in Residence have been hired! A Wikipedian in Residence is a person hired to act as a liaison between an organization and the Wikipedia community for the purpose of establishing collaboration. FloNight was hired by the Cochrane Collaboration as a deepening of their engagement after making subscriptions to the Cochrane Library free to Wikipedians, and User:Johnbod was hired by Cancer Research UK after at least two years of that organization hosting Wikipedia events and training.
 * New Wikipedians in Residence

In the United States Wikimedia New York City and Wikimedia DC hosted WikiConference USA Friday 30 May - Sunday 1 June. The conference included two scheduled talks on medicine, "Wikipedia, Medicine, and Language" and the "Medicine Panel".
 * WikiConference USA


 * Research & publications
 * In places where there is a disease outbreak, people visit Wikipedia articles for information about that medical condition. Because Wikipedia's traffic data is public it was theorized that traffic to Wikipedia can be a signal about the state of a community's health problems.
 * The University of Washington debuts a project to help Wikipedians evaluate each other. Now closed to new participants, the project used members from WikiProject Medicine in one of their test groups. Their results are available as a visualisation online.


 * Other
 * Sharing health media - a health organization donates copyrighted media to Wikipedia; not much but it sets a precedent

Focus: arranging the newsletter
Every edition of this newsletter will have a focus: an issue or topic covered in depth by an editor. The first will be discussing this newsletter. Some changes have been made since the last newsletter, as a result of lessons learned during that process. We will try to make newsletters shorter. We will send newsletters more often (monthly), at least during our infancy, so we do not have to cram everything in each quarter. We will focus more on the local WP:MED. We will also provide a 'monthly focus'. Through this, we will create a piece on a topic that is relevant to editors or this project. There are numerous topics that we have planned, including What is WP:MED? History of WP:MED, Use of reliable sources and many others -- we have our work cut out!

This newsletter is an important and useful tool for communicating set topics. Through this newsletter, we aim to:
 * Increase editor engagement
 * Disseminate relevant information
 * Involve editors in whats going on
 * 'Crystallize' information that can be referred to and read by other editors
 * Act as a historical milestone to track our progress

Please let us know what you think here. We'd like to know what you think about this newsletter, and if you have any ideas for topics or items that should or should not be covered; whether you think the newsletter is too frequent; whether you like or don't like the formatting or name; and whether you'd like to be involved in its creation. We would love to hear and collaborate with any interested editors, as we intend for this newsletter to be one of the pillars of WP:MED.