Scope

Due to the open-source movement in science, we created a project to deliver high-quality health related information so that the public can access for free in the language of their preference.

What we did

Beginning in 2013, UCSF School of Medicine offered an elective for fourth-year medical students to improve Wikipedia’s health-related content.

Results

During 3 cycles of the month-long elective, 28 students in aggregate edited 28 different Wikipedia pages, contributing a collective 1,084 edits. They adding 369,994 bytes and removed 82,559 bytes of data, for net changes of 287,385 (average of 10,264/student). The total number of edits made was 1,084. Students added an average of 12 citations/article. Two physician evaluators rated the articles pre- and post-student contributions and deemed 14 of the 28 “very improved”, 12 “improved,” and 2 “unimproved.” During only the months that students were actively editing, the 28 articles were collectively viewed 974,065 times. Between the end date of each course and March 31, 2015 (an arbitrary end date), these articles were viewed in aggregate 8,809,499 times on desktop devices. Adding a best-available estimate of mobile use, the overall viewership of these 28 articles since students finished editing until March 31, 2015 was 13,513,771.

Implications

Because of the collaborations with Translators Without Borders, Wikipedia Zero, and the open-source movement in science, this project is part of a collective working to improve global access to high-quality health-related information to people in the language of their preference, in the ways they access the internet (desktop and mobile devices) and for free.

More information

For more information about Dr. Amin Azzam's project, please visit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/UCSF