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Poster from the 20th Cochrane Colloquium

Wikipedia has been accepted worldwide as a source of information by both lay people and experts. Its community driven approach has ensured that the information presented caters to a wide variety of people. An article from 2011 in the Journal of Medical Internet Research found that a significant number of experts and doctors consult Wikipedia’s medicine related topics.[1]

Medical information is very dynamic and conclusions and recommendations are turned on their heads based on new findings. Taking this into account it is important to ensure that Evidence Based content is a part of any medicine related Wikipedia article. Such content should be authentic and reliable as people may use the same to make decisions that may end up having life changing consequences.

As minimum standard, a good article on Wikipedia has all or most of its content sourced from review articles. However conventional reviews are subject to a wide variety of biases and errors. Systematic reviews of research information are considered the highest level of evidence. Hence we should ensure that as far as possible all sources of information are from systematic reviews.

With respect to systematic reviews of medical interventions, The Cochrane Library has the largest collection and indexes them from other sources as well. Cochrane Systematic reviews are known for their reliability and strength of methods followed. We are working on developing a partnership between Wikipedia, The Cochrane Collaboration and Wiley and sons (Publishers of The Cochrane Library). Read more about the partnership here (Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library/Cochrane)

Aim of this project

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  • Improve the evidence related content in Wikipedia articles
  • Identify resources or provide assistance to interested editors in interpreting scientific data
  • Identify resources or provide assistance to academicians and scientists to add Evidence in Wikipedia articles.

What you are expected to do in this project

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Step 1- Identifying the article and the review: In this step you have to identify the Wikipedia article where evidence is missing and the corresponding Systematic Review that provides the evidence. You would need to use different sources(e.g. PubMed / EMBASE) to search for evidence depending on your need. Generally for health related topics, evidence needs to be sourced from systematic reviews and for Systematic Reviews of medical interventions and diagnostic tests the best place would be The Cochrane Library.

Step 2 - Identify the content to be added: Read the review or its abstract and try to frame the corresponding message to fit the article. The message should accurately reflect the strength of evidence and the recommendation.

Stage3- Make the edit: Make the modification in the real article.

Challenges:

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  • Man power and time required to accomplish this on a regular basis has to be identified.
  • Huge learning curve on both sides in terms of Systematic review and Wikipedia methods and standards.

Keeping content up to date

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A new bot is running as of January, 2018 that will tag all old Cochrane reviews indicating when a new one has come out. Details will go here Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Cochrane_update.

  • Link to all articles that contain reviews needing updating[1]

A new tool called WPM2Cochrane could be used to find a list of Cochrane reviews for about 4500 disease-related articles in Wikipedia.Results are grouped based on WPMed taskforces.

WPM2Cochrane mapping results for myopia










Users interested

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Interested users can sign up below. We have classified some users based on their field of expertise. Depending on your need you can consult either of these types of users to help you make an edit to an article.

  • Wiki-experts: those who are well versed with editing articles on Wikipedia, the standard guidelines and norms.
  • Evidence-experts: Those who are content experts with respect to the medical subject in question and interpretation of scientific evidence in relation to it.

Edit-a-thons / Workshops

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  1. 05 Feb 2014 - IOE
  2. 20 Feb 2014 - LSTM

Discussion of adding Cochrane content to Wikipedia

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Adding journal content which is under an open license will help the more than half a billion with free cell phone access without data charges get involve in improving Wikipedia

Projects/pages of interest

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References

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  1. ^ Heilman JM, Kemmann E, Bonert M, et al. (2011). "Wikipedia: a key tool for global public health promotion". J. Med. Internet Res. 13 (1): e14. doi:10.2196/jmir.1589. PMC 3221335. PMID 21282098.
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