Medical Wiki Backed by Prominent Colleges Will Go Live by Year’s End
From the Chronicle of Higher Education, Sept. 5, 2008:
Medpedia, a new online medical encyclopedia to be written and edited by a collaborative group of thousands, with support from several leading medical schools, is calling for volunteers. But not everyone will be accepted. Only those who hold an M.D. or Ph.D. in a biomedical field need apply.
That is one way in which the ambitious project, which plans to go live by the end of this year, hopes to set itself apart from existing medical Web sites. In return for contributors’ efforts, Medpedia expects to provide them with a reward. Contributing to the encyclopedia will be a career-booster, its founders say, and participants could gain international reputations as experts.
The project is backed by medical institutions like Harvard Medical School, Stanford School of Medicine, the University of California at Berkeley School of Public Health, and the University of Michigan Medical School, as well as the National Institutes of Health, the American College of Physicians, and several other organizations.
. . . Medpedia aims to create pages for more than 30,000 known medical conditions, as well as for the thousands of drugs being prescribed each year. All the available information on a subject will be presented in a single entry, and each topic will have an accessible version for the lay public and a more technical account for health professionals and other knowledgeable readers.
. . . The editors will be screened for their credentials and, more importantly, to rule out financial conflicts of interest. The application Web site already asks prospective editors to disclose any contributions they might receive “for expressing their views as a member to Medpedia.com.” But Dr. Clever says she doesn’t like that wording and will suggest switching to a formula similar to what medical journals use.
Read the article in it’s entirety (available to UI affliates or subscribers only)
