WikimediaAnnounce-l February 2011

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Wikimedia Hungary Report January 2011

by Bence Damokos

Hi all, Please find Wikimedia Hungary's January 2011 report online at: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters/Reports/Wikim%C3%A9dia_Ma… For your convenience it is reproduced here. *Wikimedia Hungary Report* *Vol 4 Issue 1* *January 2011* *Prepared by: Bence Damokos* This is an update on Wikimédia Magyarország's activities covering January 2011. Fundraising Wikimedia Hungary has finished its most successful fundraiser ever. We have raised HUF 5,7 million (~$28 600 at todays exchange rates) from around 1300 donors, which is a four-fold increase from last year. For the fundraiser we have used the standard WMF landing pages, but also introduced a special banner and appeal from our former Vice President. (Interestingly, the appeal performed worse than the Jimbo appeal on the Hungarian Wikipedia, but better on the English Wikipedia.) In order to have better statistics and to provide some more contextual data on our operations to the donors, we have moved the landing pages mid-fundraiser to our own servers. One of the lessons we gathered was that donors had a high abandon rate with Paypal, possibly due to it not being in Hungarian. As the direct bank transfer method of donations were quite popular, we will be investing in the development of CiviCRM to allow us to connect it with our bank's online banking solution, offering donors this choice of donation method. Later in the year, in February and especially in May we will be working on convincing potential donors to choose Wikimedia Hungary as the recipient of one percent of their income tax. Wikipedia 10 We held two events to celebrate the English Wikipedia's tenth birthday: a conference and a wiki meetup. In July, we plan to hold a celebration of the Hungarian Wikipedia's 8th birthday. Conference We held a conference in the Hungarian National Széchényi Library's Asssembly Hall to about 150 guests from the public. The conference was opened by Szilveszter E. Vizi<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Fcup7cdICc>, the former president of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, where he called Wikipedia the "Common memory of mankind." His opening was followed by a special video message<http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=8kBUPvJ0G8M> from Jimmy Wales. Frank Schulenburg spoke about the roots of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation's Public Policy Initiative. (Videos available through Wikimedia Hungary's new YouTube channel: http://youtube.com/WikimediaHU). Frank's keynote was followed by three presentations on the history of Wikipedia, about the French encyclopedists and about networks on the Internet and in Wikipedia. Finally, there was a panel discussion about Wikipedia use in education and in general, involving university professors and the Director of the Library. (The conference was funded through a grant<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:WM_HU/Wikiconference> from the Wikimedia Foundation.) Wiki meetup The conference was followed by a wikimeetup with about 40 particpants. We distributed some Wiki 10 and general Wikipedia T-shirts and celebrated with a cake <http://ten.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tali11_003.jpg>. Wikimedia Hungary publications The conference was the first time we publicly distributed our two publications that were produced at the end of last November: the Hungarian edition<http://wikimedia.hu/w/images/7/7e/%C3%9Cdv%C3%B6zl%C3%BCnk_a_Wikip%C3%A9di%…> of the Welcome to Wikipedia brochure and our 2008-2010 Report<http://wikimedia.hu/w/images/5/58/Besz%C3%A1mol%C3%B3_kiadv%C3%A1ny_2008%E2…> . The brochures were based on the Wikimedia Bookshelf<http://bookshelf.wikimedia.org/> designs adapted to our needs and printed through a grant of the Wikimedia Foundation.<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:WM_HU/Chapter_Starter_Kit> Chapter Development Pilot Project On 16 January our Board members met with Anna Royon-Wiegelt to discuss a Chapter Development Pilot Project. The meeting was quite useful in going over the history, timeline, successes and challenges of the chapter. We are currently considering participation in the project. Media attention The anniversary and the conference has garnered considerable media attention. The national news agency<http://www.mti.hu/cikk/2011/01/15/tizeves_a_wikipedia-_az_emberiseg_kozos_m…> and all the major internet news portals[1]<http://index.hu/tech/2011/01/16/tizedik_szuletesnapjat_unnepelte_a_wikipedi…> [2]<http://www.origo.hu/techbazis/20110115-az-alapitokat-is-meglepte-a-wikipedi…> published reports about the conference. We've given interviews to three newspapers[3]<http://hvg.hu/hvgfriss/2010.50/201050_gervai_peter_a_magyar_wikipedia_alapi…> [4]<http://itcafe.hu/cikk/magyar_wikipedia_gervai_peter/homokozobol_enciklopedi…> [5] <http://www.metropol.hu/mellekletek/infopalya/cikk/674949> and four radio stations.[6]<http://hangtar.radio.hu/share-1-20110119_153000#%21#2011-01-19> An other issue that has resulted in some original reporting in the Hungarian online media was a copyright violation case<http://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:VILCOPY> where one user has uploaded 5000+ articles from copyrighted encyclopedias over 5 years and where it took considerable amount of time for a small group of editors to go through all of his edits and to compare them to the numerous sources that the user had used to find the copyright violations (the user had used a number of Public Domain sources, purging all of his edits would not have been the ideal solution). The media mentions[7]<http://itcafe.hu/hir/magyar_wikipedia_szocikkmasolas_torles.html> [8]<http://www.origo.hu/techbazis/20110106-tobb-mint-otezer-szocikket-kellett-t…> [9] <http://hvg.hu/hvgfriss/2011.02/201102_botrany_a_magyar_wikipedian> were based mostly on the report written <http://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:VILCOPY> up by one of the most active editor in the clean up effort and were generally positive about the fact that the offending pages have been filtered out. The issue got a few mentions in passing in the coverage of the anniversary as well, but overall the episode hasn't tarnished Wikipedia's reputation in Hungary. Ongoing projects Toolserver We have purchased a server in December 2010 to provide various tools to the editing and researcher community, to allow us to test MediaWiki extensions and software updates and to keep backups of the database dumps. The server was in transit during the month of January. Delivery and set up is planned for February. Photo competion We are planning a photo competition with a major Hungarian photo upload site to collect high quality, freely licensed images. The competition is planned to run from April through May. -- Bence Damokos Wikimedia Hungary http://wikimedia.hu

13 years, 2 months

(press release) Wikimedia Foundation selects Watchmouse monitoring service

by Jay Walsh

Wikimedia Foundation selects Watchmouse monitoring service “Live Health” of Wikipedia and additional websites now posted and updated in real time SAN FRANCISCO, CA – February 9, 2011 – WatchMouse, a globally recognized self-service website and application performance monitoring company, today announced that the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation will utilize the WatchMouse Public Status Pages to display the uptime and availability of their array of user-built projects. The Foundation operates Wikipedia and its sister projects, which are accessed by more than 395 million UVs (comScore Dec 2010) from around the world, and in over 250 languages. The Wikipedia Public Status Page can be found at http://status.wikimedia.org “The Wikimedia Foundation is proud to be one of the most transparent non-profit organizations in the world,” said Danese Cooper, Chief Technical Officer of the Wikimedia Foundation. “The Foundation is deeply concerned with growing our global user and editor base, which makes it critical for us to monitor and maintain the live status of all of our websites — and providing a public portal for our tens of thousands of volunteers to track uptime as well. WatchMouse understands and supports our global mission to spread free knowledge around the world, and with their help we're able to push our mission even further.” The WatchMouse Public Status Page technology (http://www.watchmouse.com/en/feature/public-status-page.html) monitors performance and gathers availability data across a network of over 50 stations in more than 30 countries. The Public Status Pages are free to subscribers and trialists, and inform website visitors of the status of a specified selection of a company’s online services. This results in reduced customer service contacts and fosters goodwill with users by publishing the live health of a website. The actual Public Status Pages are hosted in the cloud using Amazon's S3 and EC2 products ensuring they are up even when a company’s website may not be. Additional WatchMouse customers utilizing Public Status Pages include Twitter, WordPress and Zappos. “Non-profit organizations are transparent by nature and have a willingness to provide information about their business activities,” stated Mark Pors, CTO and co-founder of WatchMouse. “We’re pleased to partner with the Wikimedia Foundation and to support all non-profit organizations by offering a deep discount on our monitoring services.” For more information about discounted monitoring services for non-profit organizations, please visit http://www.watchmouse.com/non_profit_offering.php. About WatchMouse http://www.watchmouse.com WatchMouse is a global industry leader in self-service website and application performance monitoring. WatchMouse products test the behavior and availability of websites, services and applications utilizing an infrastructure that includes over 50 worldwide monitoring stations, in 30+ countries. WatchMouse provides many of the world's leading companies including Twitter, WordPress, Wikimedia Foundation, Philips, ING and VeriSign with independent confirmation of both in-house and supplier performance. Subscribers and trialists also have the ability to publish the live health of their websites utilizing the WatchMouse Public Status Page technology. Supporting a broad, rapidly growing international customer base, Founded in 2002, WatchMouse is a privately held company headquartered in The Netherlands. Follow @watchmouse on Twitter or learn more at http://www.watchmouse.com. About the Wikimedia Foundation http://wikimediafoundation.org http://blog.wikimedia.org The Wikimedia Foundation is the non-profit organization which operates Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. According to comScore Media Metrix, Wikipedia and the other projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation receive more than 390 million unique visitors per month, making them the 5th most popular web property world-wide (Dec, 2010). Available in more than 270 languages, Wikipedia contains more than 17 million articles contributed by a global volunteer community of more than 100,000 people. Based in San Francisco, California, the Wikimedia Foundation is an audited, 501(c)(3) charity that is funded primarily through donations and grants. Media Contacts: Mindy M. Hull Mercury Global Partners for WatchMouse Tel. +1 415 889 9977 (US) Tel. +31 62 504 7680 (NL) mindy(a)mercuryglobalpartners.com Ginny Cain Mercury Global Partners for WatchMouse Tel. +1 925 426 0646 (US) ginny(a)mercuryglobalpartners.com Jay Walsh Head of Communications Wikimedia Foundation Tel. +1 415 839 6885 x 6609 jwalsh(a)wikimedia.org (To UNSUBSCRIBE from this mailing list, please reply to this note with 'UNSUBSCRIBE' in the subject line)

13 years, 2 months

Wikimedia Foundation selects Watchmouse monitoring service

by Jay Walsh

13 years, 2 months

The Signpost – Volume 7, Issue 6 – 7 February 2011

by Wikipedia Signpost

13 years, 2 months

Announcement: Hiring of Asaf Bartov and Moushira Elamrawy contract extension

by Barry Newstead

I am very pleased to announce that Asaf Bartov has agreed to join the Wikimedia Foundation as Head of Global South Relationships (pending the completion of the U.S. visa application process) and Moushira Elamrawy has agreed to a contract extension to serve as Chapter Relations Manager. These positions are both part of the Global Development team and seek to enhance WMF's relationships with and support of chapters and other groups/individuals in the movement. We expect Asaf to join WMF in March 2011 and the position will be based in San Francisco. Asaf is a long-time Wikipedian and Wikimedian. He began editing Wikipedia in 2001, his home project is the Hebrew Wikipedia. His first contribution to Hebrew Wikipedia was to initiate the article on Homer (not the four-fingered guy from Springfield) in 2003. He has been a member of Wikimedia Israel since 2008, and served as board member and international liaison. Asaf has been making his living in software, but has always cultivated a wide range of interests in the humanities -- studying literature and classics, and then teaching ancient Greek and Latin at Tel Aviv University -- as well as voluntary activities in the open source and open content worlds. He is the founding editor of Project Ben-Yehuda, a free 100% volunteer-run repository of public-domain Hebrew texts. He is also active in transforming library technology to 21st-century open standards, having served as consultant at the National Library of Israel, and an invited expert at the W3C's Library Linked Data Incubator Group (LLD XG). Asaf's primary role will be to support the growth of the Wikimedia movement in the Global South with a specific focus on working with chapters, groups who seek to become chapters and mission-aligned groups/individuals. He will play an advisory role to support these groups to advance their work in support of the movement. He will manage WMF's grants program (globally) with the aim of providing funding for strategy-aligned initiatives with a strong focus on innovation. Asaf will work with groups to design effective grants and help create model grants that groups can readily adapt to their local needs. Finally, Asaf will help improve our knowledge repository of program and grant experiences with a priority to create systematic means for evaluating and learning from each program. I would also like to announce that WMF has extended the contract of Moushira Elamrawy, who was serving as Global Campaigns Manager during the 2010/11 fundraiser, to serve in a Chapter Relations capacity. She will continue to be based in Alexandria, Egypt. Moushira was introduced to Wikimedia in April 2007 during filming the footage of "Truth in Numbers" in Alexandria, Egypt: a few weeks later she was appointed from Bibliotheca Alexandrina to become the main organizer from the library's side for Wikimania 2008. Her responsibilities started along with the bidding process and extended until after the conference was over to include co-organizing Wikipedia editing sessions, Arabic Wikipedia Day, and an "Introduction to Free Open Source OS" sessions series. She continues to help with new initiatives and offline activities concerning Arabic Wikipedia, including ongoing efforts for creating an Arabic Wikipedia signpost, organizing events that help attract new users such as editing and licensee sessions. She recently initiated a cross collaboration among Arabic users across north Africa, in order to create a base of user groups across this region. Last fall, Moushira was engaged by WMF's community department to focus on liaising between the chapters and WMF during the 2010 fundraising campaign. Moushira has previously worked for sustainable development projects in desert areas of Egypt and Morocco focusing on ecological building approaches. She is a Greenpeace volunteer and retired vegan. Moushira's role will be to support WMF and chapters in living up to our responsibilities to each other and to the movement, particularly with regard to smoothing and systematizing communications mechanisms with the goal of increased transparency and openness. She will help establish processes that enable us to meet our commitments to each other and the movement. She will facilitate the completion of requirements under our fundraising and chapter agreements relating to revenue sharing, reporting and accountability. She will support us monitoring progress against these commitments, designing systems for tracking and creating simple ways to work together in a manner that achieves mutual accountability, while keeping the burden on volunteer board members and other chapter members to a minimum. Moushira will also serve as WMF's process manager over the next year for key activities such as the signing of chapter agreements and fundraising agreements, compliance with agreement requirements and more systematic capture of reports to/from chapters. Please note that WMF doesn’t intend this role to be an oversight function nor do we expect that it’s our role to remind chapters of their responsibilities: the role is to both help WMF fulfill our responsibilities and to help us all improve our processes. This is a big challenge and she will work collaboratively with chapters to achieve it. I am thrilled to add Asaf and Moushira to the WMF Global Development team. We will jointly host an IRC at the following times to address any questions or comments that you might have about these roles. 1. Friday, February 11 at 1500 UTC 2. Friday, February 11 at 2200 UTC ________________ FAQ How did we source candidates for these roles? The Chapter Development Director position was publicly posted in August 2010, and we interviewed a number of candidates. We had some strong and interesting candidates, but we did not find anyone who could fulfill the role as we had initially designed it. Asaf Bartov applied for the Chapter Development Director and was interviewed by a panel of interviewers. Moushira Elamrawy did not apply for the position, however she was fulfilling some functions in the Global Campaigns role that we saw as needed in our Chapter Development work (items that were listed in the original job description). As such, we decided that the best course of action was to split the initial role into two that would meet our needs and not require a reset of the entire process. We did a review of the prior candidates to see if any would be a good alternative to Asaf and Moushira and concluded that we were comfortable with them as our selection. Please note that Moushira’s role is temporary: that’s because the relationship between the Wikimedia Foundation and the chapters is actively evolving, and so we think this role may change significantly over time. How does the appointment of these two roles change the relationship between WMF and chapters? Our hope is that these engagements will improve our relationship by providing dedicated resources to our chapter interactions. This will allow WMF to be more responsive and will provide resources to invest time in creating new solutions to problems that we have dealt with in the past, but haven't solved effectively. We also hope that Moushira and Asaf will help to enhance the effectiveness of chapters by serving as advisors on program work, helping to make connections between program work in different places and by creating systems that ease the administrative burden on volunteers, freeing you to focus more time on program activities. These engagements do not change the formal relationships between WMF and chapters. We both will continue to be independently responsible for meeting our commitments and for solving problems that arise in a timely and collaborative manner. Why is Asaf's position focused on the Global South vs. all chapters? We do not have sufficient resources available to expend our resources equally in all areas and still achieve impact and so we need to prioritize. The movement priorities set out during the strategy process set clear targets for our growth in the Global South and we are aligning our resources to this priority. We will continue to support grants across the globe and will engage with all chapters, but Asaf's first responsibility will be to the work focused on the Global South. What does WMF plan to do with other groups/individuals in the movement? We continue to believe in the principle of a decentralized movement and the importance of supporting good efforts by volunteers regardless of organizational affiliation. While we expect chapters to play a strong role in designing and running programs as well as funding groups/individuals within their geographies to do such work, we also want to keep the door open for groups or individuals who want to conduct program work that supports the movement priorities outside of a chapter structure. In recent months, this has included, for example, funding for the Wikipedia in Schools program in Kenya and support for GLAM work by a US-based volunteer, Aude. Does the appointment of Asaf change WMF's view of grant-making? We see grant-making as an important process for supporting chapters and other groups/individuals to achieve movement priorities. The appointment of Asaf provides us with an opportunity to expand grant-making and make it more systematic. We believe that many chapters will not be in a position to generate sustainable funding locally to fund the full array of programs that may be needed to achieve our goals. Grant-making is an effective way to fill that gap. We would like to see our grant-making work evolve to include much more community participation in helping chapters and other groups/individuals design good programs, in helping WMF make good decisions and in evaluating and capturing the learning from grants after they are implemented. This will be a core initiative for Asaf in his first year. I’ve got other questions that aren’t answered here. Barry, Asaf and Moushira will host an IRC at the following times to talk through the roles in more detail. 1. Friday, February 11 at 1500 UTC 2. Friday, February 11 at 2200 UTC -- Barry Newstead Chief Global Development Officer Wikimedia Foundation Tel: +1-415-839-6885 x. 6634 Skype: barry.wikimedia Twitter: @bazanews

13 years, 2 months

New General Counsel!: Geoffrey Brigham

by Sue Gardner

Hey folks, I'm delighted to tell you that the Wikimedia Foundation has a new General Counsel. Geoff Brigham, formerly of eBay, will start with us March 7 once he's relocated from Paris to San Francisco. He'll report to me. To recap: In late October, I hired m|Oppenheim to find us a new General Counsel. I expected it to be a tough search, because appropriate GCs for the Wikimedia Foundation don't exactly grow on trees. As a growing U.S.-based non-profit that operates one of the world's most popular websites in partnership with a global network of volunteers, we need a GC who can handle a broad range of legal issues including the legal defense of our projects in an international context, an array of matters related to policy and regulatory compliance, issues such as privacy, and helping us with the challenges of opening a new office in India. Very few people have that kind of breadth. And for our GC as with all our jobs, we are also looking for someone who is passionate about the mission, has a collaborative and inclusive personal style, is inclined towards transparency, and ideally is a bit of an iconoclast. It's a lot to ask of one person :-) So we braced ourselves for a long and difficult search. But in fact it turned out to be highly enjoyable. Over a period of several months, m|Oppenheim talked with hundreds of connectors and candidates, and in the end we interviewed about a dozen finalists. They were terrific, inspiring lawyers: I was glad to meet them all. And I am delighted that we discovered Geoff. Geoff spent eight years at eBay during its main growth years, which gives him important experience managing the legal challenges and risks inherent in operating a popular site. His work at eBay encompassed North America, Europe, Asia and Australia where he handled legal issues throughout the world. He's worked alone and led large teams. He is hands-on, collaborative, open-minded and inclusive. And he is extremely excited about working with us. A little more about Geoff's background: Most recently, Geoff was Vice-President and Deputy General Counsel at eBay in San Jose, California. There, he directed legal affairs in more than 15 countries throughout North America, Europe, Asia and Australia, encompassing litigation, copyright and trademarks, privacy, ethics, product and site content review, policy and regulatory compliance, new market advice, contracts, governance and site security. Previously he worked for eBay in Bern, Switzerland for four years as Vice-President & Senior Director, and in Paris, France for two years as Senior Compliance and Litigation Counsel. Prior to joining eBay, Geoff was Assistant United States Attorney in Miami, Florida. Before that he worked for the U.S. Department of Justice in Paris and Washington, was an Associate with Finley, Kumble, Wagner et al. in Washington, and was a law clerk for the Honorable Howard F. Corcoran, U.S. Judge for the District of Columbia. Geoff received his law degree from Georgetown University Law Center in Washington DC. He also holds a B.A. in Political Science and French, from Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. He speaks English and French. He's a passionate music fan and an accomplished flute player: he used to busk many years ago, playing jazz and classical music on the Parisian streets, and he was well known at eBay for playing his flute in the office in the early mornings. Maybe that will happen at the Wikimedia Foundation too :-) Many thanks to Lisa Grossman of m|Oppenheim for leading this important search for us. My thanks also to everyone who helped Lisa and me define the General Counsel role and surface and interview candidates, including (roughly in order of their involvement) Erik Moeller, Cyn Skyberg, Kat Walsh, Arne Klempert, Stu West, SJ Klein, Barry Newstead, Veronique Kessler, Danese Cooper, Zack Exley, Jimmy Wales, Bishakha Datta, Matt Halprin, Gautam John, Pavel Richter and Shari Steele. My thanks also to Derrick Coetzee, who happened to be in the office one day and got pulled into an impromptu conversation helping brief Geoff about some of the issues facing us. I also want to thank Wikimedia France for staging its GLAM conference in Paris recently: Geoff attended it and says that meeting Wikimedians there, and watching them work, significantly contributed to his desire to join us. If I remember correctly how this list works, replies to this mail should go directly to foundation-l. (That's how it's intended to work: I hope it's actually true.) Geoff is subscribed to foundation-l, so if you do reply there, he'll see it. He doesn't yet have a Wikimedia e-mail address, but once he does, you will likely see it turn up on this and other lists. Please note he's not on the job until March 7: until then, he's only really available to us socially, not for work. Please join me in welcoming Geoff to the Wikimedia movement :-) Thanks, Sue -- Sue Gardner Executive Director Wikimedia Foundation 415 839 6885 office 415 816 9967 cell Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality! http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

13 years, 2 months

Press release: "Wikipedia can promote health worldwide, say doctors"

by Michaël Laurent

PRESS RELEASE *Wikipedia can promote health worldwide, say doctors* *CITATION* Heilman JM, Kemmann E, Bonert M, Chatterjee A, Ragar B, Beards GM, Iberri DJ, Harvey M, Thomas B, Stomp W, Martone MF, Lodge DJ, Vondracek A, de Wolff JF, Liber C, Grover SC, Vickers TJ, Meskó B, Laurent MR. "Wikipedia as a key tool for global public health promotion". *Journal of Medical Internet Research*. http://www.jmir.org/2011/1/e14/ *CONTENT* *Sept, 2010 *- A group of doctors, scientists and medical students who write Wikipedia's medical articles call on their peers to join them in their efforts to provide the sum of all medical knowledge free to the world at large. In a viewpoint paper published in the peer-reviewed *Journal of Medical Internet Research *(JMIR, the leading journal on medical informatics), they argue that the possibilities to use Wikipedia as a tool for worldwide health promotion are underestimated, citing its unique global reach and examples of how the Internet encyclopedia is used in humanitarian projects. The authors are all members of Wikipedia's project that manages the health-related content. They note that both doctors and patients commonly seek health information online. Patients usually turn to search engines like Google for health-related queries, and previous research by these authors has shown that Wikipedia appears among those results in around 75% of cases [1]. *Wikipedia's medical content broad and fairly accurate* Based on a review of existing studies of Wikipedia's medical content, the paper concludes that Wikipedia has articles on an incredibly wide range of medical topics with few factual errors, although most of Wikipedia's articles are only in the earliest stages of development and the readability needs to be improved. "*With more than 20,000 articles on health and more than 6,000 drug-related articles, there has never been more freely accessible health information on the Internet thanks to Wikipedia. But now we need more experts to expand these articles and to make them more accessible to the general public at the same time,*" says Dr. Michaël Laurent, the article's corresponding author. Although critics have questioned Wikipedia's open editorial policy and examples of errors have been widely published, the authors point out that the encyclopedia has developed multiple strategies to prevent damage to its articles (including the use of vandalism fighting software, automated correction scripts, page protection, edit filters, blocking and banning). *Calling all doctors to contribute* Since WikiProject Medicine was founded by one of the authors (Dr. Jacob F. de Wolff) in April 2004, more than 200 editors (ranging from laypeople and students to doctors, nurses and professors) have registered at the virtual 'doctor's mess', where Wikipedia's medical content is discussed and coordinated. Over the years, the project has developed guidelines about writing good medical articles and finding reliable medical references. "Wikipedia lends itself very well to evidence-based medicine," the article notes. The group proposes that physicians may contribute to Wikipedia for several reasons, including the intellectual challenge to summarize a medical topic for the general public and the satisfaction that comes from editing an important source of medical information, watching the articles grow and rise among Google results, often outperforming review articles in leading medical journals. "*Wikipedia has an incredible audience. While one may not get accolades for what they contribute here, what one writes matters,*" comments lead author James Heilman, MD. "*I've written several articles which became the number one Google result for that topic after only a few days, surpassing reviews in core journals or information from universities and professional societies. Writing for Wikipedia means that you get to write what people will be reading,*" Dr. Laurent explains. Direct financial or scholarly incentives to promote editing of Wikipedia are still lacking, but the authors suggest several options, like giving doctors CME credits for editing Wikipedia. Some areas of Wikipedia's medical content are controversial, and the authors sometimes have had to deal with fringe theories and quackery. But they say this should not deter interested medical contributors because plenty of non-controversial work needs to be done. Furthermore, Wikipedia has strict policies against personal threats to editors, and examples of real-life consequences are rare (Dr. Heilman has in the past been investigated -and acquitted- for adding all inkblots to the Wikipedia article on the Rorschach test; see New York Times, Aug 23, 2009<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/business/24inkblot.html?_r=1> ). *Wikipedia as a global platform for health knowledge* The paper explains how the encyclopedia could be used as a global platform for disseminating medical knowledge. Wikipedia's format has proven to foster mass collaboration, the encyclopedia exists in over 250 languages and its content is available under a copyleft license. The article also cautions against the waste of human resources caused by the spread of experts across medical wikis (over 70 of which exist), none of which have attracted a similar 'long tail' of editors or a similar global audience (for a previous discussion on this topic, see the News feature in Nature Medicine, 2007<http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v13/n3/full/nm0307-231.html> ). The authors point to recent collaborations with the National Institutes of Health, Google.org (the philanthropic arm of Google) and the Rfam RNA database, which they believe shows the enthusiasm for Wikipedia as a key source for online biomedical information. *References* [1] Laurent MR, Vickers TJ. Seeking health information online: does Wikipedia matter? <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19390105> J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2009 Jul-Aug;16(4):471-9. *ABOUT THE AUTHORS* - James M. Heilman, MD, CCFP(EM) is an emergency physician at the Department of Emergency Medicine at Moose Jaw Union Hospital, Moose Jaw, Canada. He is also associated with the University of Saskatchewan College of Medicine in Saskatoon, Canada. - Eckhard Kemmann, MD, FACOG is a retired faculty member at the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences, UMDNJ-Robert Wood, Johnson Medical School, New Brunswick, New Jersey, United States. - Michael Bonert, MD, MASc is an anatomical pathology resident at the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada. - Anwesh Chatterjee, MRCP is a respiratory medicine specialty registrar at the Department of Respiratory Medicine, Poole General Hospital, Poole, United Kingdom. - Brent Ragar, MD is an attending physician at the Departments of Internal Medicine and Pediatrics, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, United States. - Graham M. Beards, DSc is a specialist biomedical and clinical scientist in microbiology at Walsall Manor Hospital, Walsall, United Kingdom. - David J. Iberri is a medical student at the University of Vermont College of Medicine, Burlington, Vermont, United States. - Matthew Harvey, BMed is an anatomical pathology registrar at the Anatomical Pathology Department, Pathology Queensland, Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital, Brisbane, Australia. He is also an associate lecturer at the Division of Cellular and Molecular Pathology, School of Medicine, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. - Brendan Thomas, MD is a dermatology resident at the department of Dermatology, University of Illinois, Chicago, Illinois, United States. - Wouter Stomp, MD is a PhD candidate at the Department of Radiology, Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden, the Netherlands. - Michael F. Martone is a medical student at Rush University Medical College, Chicago, Illinois, United States. - Daniel J. Lodge, MD is a resident at the Department of Cardiac Surgery, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada. - Andrea Vondracek, PhD is a post-doctoral researcher at the department of Immunology, University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine and National Jewish Health, Denver, Colorado, United States. - Jacob F. de Wolff, MRCP is an emergency physician at the Department of Acute Medicine, West Middlesex University Hospital, London, United Kingdom. - Casimir Liber, MBBS, FRANZCP is a psychiatrist at the Department of Psychiatry, Bankstown Health Service, Sydney, Australia, and a conjoint lecturer at the School of Psychiatry, College of Medicine, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. - Samir C. Grover, MD, FRCPC is an assistant professor of medicine at the Division of Gastroenterology, St. Michael's Hospital, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada. - Tim J. Vickers, MSc, PhD is a staff scientist at the Department of Molecular Microbiology, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri, United States. - Bertalan Meskó, MD is a PhD candidate at the Medical School and Health Science Center, University of Debrecen, Debrecen, Hungary. - Dr. Michaël R. Laurent is a specialty registrar in internal medicine at the Department of Internal Medicine, University Hospitals Leuven, Leuven, Belgium. *Contact information* Interested members of the press may contact the authors via e-mail: michael.laurent(a)gmail.com or jmh649(a)gmail.com <michael.laurent(a)gmail.com>. *About the Journal* The *Journal of Medical Internet Research *is the leading peer-reviewed scientific journal in the field of medical Informatics, with an impact factor of 3.9 in 2009. *About Wikipedia* Wikipedia ( http://www.wikipedia.org ) is a multilingual, free-content online encyclopedia to which anyone can contribute. Wikipedia and its sister projects are operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, a registered charity. Since its creation in 2001, Wikipedia has grown rapidly into one of the largest reference web sites, attracting 398 million visitors monthly as of September 2010. There are more than 82,000 active contributors working on more than 35 million articles and files in more than 270 languages. The English Wikipedia currently contains more than 3.5 million articles. According to Internet marketing research companies like comScore and Alexa, Wikipedia is among the ten most visited websites worldwide, and it is the only non-profit organization in the top ten.

13 years, 2 months

The Signpost – Volume 7, Issue 5 – 31 January 2011

by Wikipedia Signpost

13 years, 2 months

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