Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Wikipedia at McMaster

Wikimedia Canada and McMaster University are hosting a half day workshop on the afternoon of October 4th 2011 at McMaster University Student Centre Room 319 to discuss the whys and hows of editing Wikipedia content. The goal of the event is to improve the McMaster community's ability to contribute to medical and health pages on Wikipedia; however, all students, faculty and staff are welcome, as is the general public.

This event is jointly sponsored by the McMaster University Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, the National Collaborating Centre for Methods and Tools, and the City of Hamilton Public Health Services.

Rationale for the Workshop
Ensuring that high-quality health information is available to help people make informed decisions related to their health can be an important strategy to achieve the social objective of a healthy community. Wikipedia is a major source of health information for the general public and also for professionals in the health field.

Knowledge translation is a mandate shared by many organizations and granting bodies. Wikipedia can be part of a knowledge translation strategy.

The volume of student work on health and related subjects each term is enormous. In many cases, rather than being publicly available and widely disseminated, high quality work sits on professors shelves or worse. Providing students with the tools to contribute to Wikipedia may make assignments more meaningful.

Agenda Elements
The agenda for the afternoon will include both presentations and breakout workshops. Please contribute in the section "McMaster Wants to Know" below regarding what you would like to see included in workshops.


 * James Heilman, MD, CCFP(EM), President of Wikimedia Canada and contributor to Wiki Project Medicine will be giving an overview of how and why we should get involved.
 * Jonathan Obar, PhD, Wikipedia Education Programs Advisor - Canada, Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies and Media, Michigan State University, will speak about the Wikimedia Foundation's Global University Initiative and how one goes about combining Wikipedia projects into ones classes.
 * Chris Mackie, MD, MHSc, FRCPC from the City of Hamilton Public Health Services will introduce guest speakers and describe the potential role of Wikipedia in achieving public health objectives
 * Breakout workshops will respond to the expressed interests and needs of the McMaster community

Location
Location of event will be the McMaster University Student Center Room 319.

McMaster Wants to Know (Your contributions to this section would be much appreciated)
Members of the McMaster community have expressed an interest in the following topics for potential discussion at this event:
 * How do I facilitate students in taking the excellent reports that they develop for class assignments and incorporating them into Wikipedia articles?
 * How hard is it to make Wikipedia a part of a class assignment? Can I just tweak it or do I need to redesign the assignment?
 * If I take my own research and make an original contribution to Wikipedia, how do I cite this given that it might be changed by someone else?
 * How do I know if my contributions to Wikipedia make a differnce to others? (JH will address)

Please add your name if you are planning on attending
Please indicated whether you are a prof. or student. You can also email cindy dot purnomo at hamilton dot ca