Wikipedia in Health Professional Schools: from an Opponent to an Ally

As an online encyclopedia, Wikipedia is the world's largest reference Web site, with 1.7 billion visits per month. Given how easy it is to access and read, students use Wikipedia globally, despite most faculty members' admonitions. Since 2013, health professional schools worldwide have incorporated Wiki-editing into their formal curricula. These courses impact students by (1) strengthening their ability to evaluate evidence-based content and (2) multiplying their contributions to society through improvements to Wikipedia articles accessed by millions. We showcase several models of incorporating Wikipedia-editing assignments into health professions education worldwide. These successful initiatives can be replicated everywhere.

Expanding Reach of Occupational Health Knowledge: Contributing Subject-Matter Expertise to Wikipedia as a Class Assignment

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) and several university programs have collaborated on a large effort to expand and improve occupational safety and health content in Wikipedia using a platform developed by Wiki Education. This article describes the initiative, student contributions, and evaluations of this effort by instructors from two universities between 2016 and 2020. The Wiki Education platform allowed instructors to set timelines and track students’ progress throughout the semester while students accessed training to best expand health content in Wikipedia. Students chose topics in occupational health based on their interests and by a set of topics deemed as a priority by the “WikiProject Occupational Safety and Health.” Students’ contributions were peer-reviewed by instructors, NIOSH Wikipedians-in-Residence, and traditional Wikipedians. Students presented their projects in class at the end of the semester. Students from both schools expanded 55 articles, created 8 new articles, and translated 2 articles to Spanish, adding 1270 references; these articles were viewed over 8 million times by May 2020. Feedback received from the implementation suggested that students learned about science communication and digital literacy—providing valuable content on occupational health while reducing misinformation in the public domain. The process of identifying and addressing gaps in occupational health in Wikipedia requires participation and engagement toward improving access to information that otherwise would be restricted to the scientific literature, often behind a paywall. The Wikipedia assignment proved to be an engaging approach for instruction and information literacy. It helped students improve their science communication skills and digital literacy, tools that are likely to be critical for successful communication of science in their future careers.

Integrating Wikipedia editing into health professions education: a curricular inventory and review of the literature

INTRODUCTION

Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia read by millions seeking medical information. To provide health professions students with skills to critically assess, edit, and improve Wikipedia's medical content, a skillset aligned with evidence-based medicine (EBM), Wikipedia courses have been integrated into health professions schools' curriculum. This literature review and curricular inventory of Wikipedia educational initiatives provides an overview of current approaches and identifies directions for future initiatives and research.

METHODS

Five databases were searched for articles describing educational interventions to train health professional students to edit Wikipedia. Course dashboards, maintained by Wiki Education (Wiki Edu), were searched for curricular materials. From these sources, key details were extracted and synthesized, including student and instructor type, course content, educational methods, and student outcomes.

RESULTS

Six articles and 27 dashboards reported courses offered between 2015 and 2019. Courses were predominantly offered to medical and nursing students. Instructors delivered content via videos, live lectures, and online interactive modules. Course content included logistics of Wikipedia editing, EBM skills, and health literacy. All courses included assignments requiring students to edit Wikipedia independently or in groups. Limited details on assessment of student learning were available.

DISCUSSION

A small but growing number of schools are training health professions education students to improve Wikipedia's medical content. Course details are available on Wiki Edu dashboards and, to a lesser extent, in peer-reviewed publications. While more needs to be done in conducting and sharing assessment of student learning, integrating Wikipedia into health professions education has potential to facilitate learning of EBM and communication skills, improve Wikipedia's online content, and engage students with an autonomous environment while learning. Future considerations should include a thorough assessment of student learning and practices, a final review of student edits to ensure they follow Wikipedia's guidelines and are written in clear language, and improved sharing of teaching resources by instructors.

Reader engagement with medical content on Wikipedia

Articles on Wikipedia about health and medicine are maintained by WikiProject Medicine (WPM), and are widely used by health professionals, students and others. We have compared these articles, and reader engagement with them, to other articles on Wikipedia. We found that WPM articles are longer, possess a greater density of external links, and are visited more often than other articles on Wikipedia. Readers of WPM articles are more likely to hover over and view footnotes than other readers, but are less likely to visit the hyperlinked sources in these footnotes. Our findings suggest that WPM readers appear to use links to external sources to verify and authorize Wikipedia content, rather than to examine the sources themselves.