The School of Medicine at the University of California San Francisco and Wiki Project Med collaborate in presenting Wikipedia to health care practitioners, especially by encouraging medical students to edit Wikipedia as part of their coursework. This partnership began in 2013 as coordinated by Professor Amin Azzam, on Wikipedia as user:AminMDMA, and continues to the present (2016).
The School of Pharmacy at the University of California San Francisco began integrating Wikipedia editing into its curriculum in 2014. Professor Tina Brock as Wikipedia user:Tmpbrock, former Associate Dean of Global Health and Educational Innovations for the School of Pharmacy and now an adjunct professor at UCSF and Director of Pharmacy Education at Monash University and Dorie Apollonio as Wikipedia user:Health policy, lead pharmacy students in this effort as part of a required Health Policy course. Third year pharmacy students are assigned articles to edit from Wiki Project Pharmacology as a required part of their course. This capitalizes on skills from a prior required course in medicines information that all pharmacy students take in their second year.
The UCSF student editing project has gotten as much media coverage as any other Wikimedia outreach project. The below sources are supporting evidence that there is public interest in learning about how medical students participate in Wikipedia and how this class can be a model for similar efforts.
school of pharmacy year 1 pilot results; presented at Monash Pharmacy Education Symposium; Prato, 2015.SOP training materials and WikiEd dashboard as teaching tools
The Western Group on Educational Affairs is a regional division of the Association of American Medical Colleges. At their spring 2015 conference the project team shared these presentations:
Persons who have participated in the program may add the "UCSF editing" box to their userpage by adding the following template to their userpage after creating a Wikipedia account: {{User UCSF Editing}}
"Editing Wikipedia articles on medicine", a classroom handout
The Wikipedia Education Program is a project to connect students and the Wikipedia community to share information together through Wikipedia. Background information is available at Wikipedia:Education program.
Partnerships with medical schools are important because Wikipedia has substantial coverage of the majority of medical topics. Wikipedia medical articles are highly trafficked: over 25,000 medicine articles receive almost 200 million views per month and nearly 8,000 pharmacology articles receive over 40 million views per month as shown at Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Popular pages. Research supports Wikipedia's increasingly influential role as the dominant online reference in delivering medical information to the lay public—as well as being a frequently consulted resource for medical professionals. The Wikipedia article "Health information on Wikipedia" summarizes this, and for more information, see Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Research publications for a list of academic studies of Wikipedia's health content.
