[Foundation-l] NIH and Wikimedia Foundation collaborate to improve online health information

Hi all, Every day millions of people access health information online. We have recently seen some new hard evidence of Wikipedia's growing prominence as a health information resource. The rapid development and traffic on the English Wikipedia of an article on Influenza related articles demonstrates this trend: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hourly_page_requests_influenza_%28Ap… Today, I'm very happy to announce that the first Wikipedia Academy event in the United States will take place this Thursday, July 16th at the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland. The NIH includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It is the primary federal agency for conducting and supporting basic, clinical and translational medical research, and it investigates the causes, treatments and cures for both common and rare diseases. On Thursday, a team of experienced volunteer Wikipedia editors will talk about Wikimedia's mission and orient the audience to Wikipedia's structures and community policies. Medical researchers and other staff members of the NIH will learn how to contribute to Wikipedia's content and engage with other Wikipedians to further increase Wikipedia's quality and credibility. We're incredibly excited about this opportunity for increasing the quality of health-related information on Wikipedia. I believe this partnership has a huge potential and we all are very excited about the upcoming event. See also our press release: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/NIH_and_WMF_announce_fir… Thanks, Frank