Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Editor outreach/Summer student

An overview of Wikipedia Medicine

This program you will be working on includes a partnership between Wikimedia Canada, Translators Without Borders, and the University of British Columbia to improve the free global access to high quality health information. Wikipedia, as many are aware, is one of the foremost health care information resources. It is freely usable by all people globally and can be re-purposed or changed for other uses as long as Wikipedia is acknowledged and the resulting product is released under a license that allows the same. Wikipedia's 26,000 medical articles receive approximately 150-200 million page views a month in English alone with some content available in over 280 other languages. The top 300 medical articles receive more than 100,000 page views a month and it is used extensively by both health care providers and the lay public with between 50-70% of physicians using it in clinical practice.

Availability of high quality content is however limited in many languages. Even in English less than 1% of articles have passed a semi formal peer review process. Our efforts are attempting to improve the English medical content, than translation these articles into simple English, followed by translation into as many other languages as possible. We are currently concentrating on humankind's 80 most important health care conditions such as malaria, cancer, and AIDs. This will be for many people the first time high quality health information becomes available in their own language.

Project outline

One potentially project I am looking at is having them review all the edits made to Wikiproject Medicine articles.[1] The student will go through each edit and

1. determine if the edit is okay and revert it/fix it if it is not
2. determine which edits are made from IP/new users verses long term edits
3. calculate the percentage of positive/negative edits from each group
4. they will be going over edits more than one day old and thus we will be able to determine how good Wikipedia is at repairing itself.

I am thinking of collecting a weeks worth of edits. If I am able to get approval and funding from UBC I am hoping to run a second round collecting the same data but with "pending changes" turned on for a week on all medical articles. This students would be handling all pending changes to all medical articles and will be collecting the same data as before. This will allow us to determine if:

1. pending changes affects the numbers of IPs editing
2. to what degree pending changes reduces the visibility of poor quality content.

The proposed student will be either between first and second year or second and third year medicine and will be working 40 hours per week for 6-8 weeks during the summer. This is still a rough draft thus appreciate comments? Would also need someone who can create a bot to apply PC to the articles in question if we get to that point.

Reimbursement

Between $1400 to 1600 per month

Supervisors

1. James Heilmam an ER physician in Cranbrook BC, a Clinical Instructor at the UBC Department of Emergency Medicine, and on Wikimedia Canada's Board of Directors. He is an active editor and administrator on the English Wikipedia involved primarily with Wikiproject Medicine. He is one of the top 500th most prolific editors of the English site by edit count and has contributed hundreds of medical images over the previous 5 years. In 2011 in collaboration with 18 other medical editors he published a peer reviewed article in the Journal of Medical Internet Research calling upon his peers to join in as editors.
2. Todd Raine an ER physicians at St.Pauls Hospital in Vancouver and manager of wikemerg.ca