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

[Frank Schulenburg]

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_%28April_2009%29.png

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_first_WP_Academy_July_2009

Thanks,
Frank