Wikipedia talk:Health Article Review Project

Support
If you need help with this project then please contact user:Bluerasberry.  Blue Rasberry   (talk)   13:40, 29 May 2012 (UTC)

Project proposal
My name is Lane Rasberry and I was recently hired by Consumer Reports as their outreach:Wikipedian in Residence. I am proposing this Health Article Review Project. If anyone wants to share comments on this then I would appreciate receiving them.

There is a large United States medical society which creates educational materials for medical residents. This organization partners with Consumer Reports, and they wanted advice about how they can encourage medical residents to get involved in Wikipedia. I asked them what they thought medical residents might be willing to do, and one of the proposals was that if there were a class of perhaps 20 medical residents, then perhaps at some point in that class the students could break into small groups and groups of four students could each do something for perhaps 20 minutes.

I have participated in the United States Education Program as a campus ambassador and I have seen a huge number of problems happen as a result of Wikipedians wildly encouraging groups of students to make edits to Wikipedia without supervision. While I want to take advantage of student volunteer time and interest, I want to encourage a project which is unlikely to fail, can produce something good, and because of the constraint I describe above, which can be done by a complete Wikipedia newcomer in 20 minutes. I had never heard of any such project before so this may be the first time to attempt such a thing.

But I think that medical residents are generally smart, and perhaps if they cannot actually edit articles in 20 minutes with no training, then perhaps they are able to review articles. I am proposing a Health Article Review Project (WP:HARP). This is a tutorial intended for medical students who have never edited Wikipedia but who want to volunteer to do something for Wikipedia, perhaps at the encouragement of a professor or instructor who also knows nothing about Wikipedia culture or editing. The tutorial teaches students to make an account, copy an article review template, go to a health article talk page, paste the template, then review the article according to the template prompts. I am hoping that medical students can manage a 10-minute article review on their own based on information at WP:HARP. The medical society with which I am working is considering sending out information about this review project with course curricula, so that at medical schools in the United States any professor using that curricula will see this Wikipedia project as an optional group exercise to be incorporated into any class.

What do you think of this project? What can go wrong? To what extent is this viable? Who feels strongly that this cannot work, and why? Who feels strongly that this project ought not be done and why?

If this project is to proceed, there is one particular kind of support which I would like from WikiProject Medicine or the Wikipedia community. I posted a WikiProject Medicine "to-do" template on the HARP page. If WikiProject Medicine members have any interest in advertising articles to be reviewed by residents, then it would be helpful for me and this project if members here could occasionally make requests for article review and feedback.

Thoughts? Thanks for your attention.  Blue Rasberry   (talk)   15:47, 7 June 2012 (UTC)
 * I think this is a really good idea. If they could provide a review of one section of an article with high quality references to support their recommendations this would both teach them about and be positive for Wikipedia. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 22:00, 8 June 2012 (UTC)

Discussion at WikiProject Medicine
See here - Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Medicine  Blue Rasberry    (talk)   19:23, 7 June 2012 (UTC)

Google Health Project
Google organized something comparable to this between January and August 2010. See here - WikiProject Medicine/Google Project

One way to describe Google's project was that they hired health professionals to review articles and provide improvement suggestions, and they wanted the Wikipedia community to act upon those suggestions. There was also hope that after articles were improved then they would be translated. The project did not get community support and was not successful in its initial push. It is paused now.

It would be worth considering what problems existed in this project and how they might also reappear in this project.  Blue Rasberry   (talk)   19:23, 7 June 2012 (UTC)
 * One of the issues with the Google project was that their suggested references did not meet WP:MEDRS requirements. And even if there where people interested in following their advice it would not have resulted in significant improvement to our content.-- Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 21:59, 8 June 2012 (UTC)
 * I thought that Google hired experienced researchers to suggest references. How did it come to be that their researchers did not suggest sources which met MEDRS?  Blue Rasberry    (talk)   16:22, 11 June 2012 (UTC)
 * The refs they recommended where frequently the mayo clinic and the march of dimes. And the issue was that each reviewer would only review a single or a couple of pages. You would explain the issue and the reviewer would never make another change. A waste of both our and their time really. They did not appear to have any understanding of WP:MEDRS.  Doc James  (talk · contribs · email) 07:56, 12 June 2012 (UTC)