July 23, 2008
Medical Version of Wikipedia, With Universities' Help, Gets Ready to Go Live
With the backing of some top medical schools, a foundation is calling on physicians and scientists to help them build a huge online encyclopedia of medicine, called Medpedia. Today the Medpedia Foundation raised the curtain slightly on their Web site, giving prospective collaborators a peek.
The effort is supported by Harvard Medical School, the Stanford School of Medicine, the University of Michigan Medical School, the University of California at Berkeley School of Public Health, and several health organizations.
The goal is to have, by the end of 2008, a site that covers more than 30,000 medical diseases and conditions and 10,000 drugs, as well as medical procedures and facilities throughout the world. Articles will be contributed and edited by online collaborators, like the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Unlike that effort, which allows everyone to contribute, Medpedia is only going to let certain people edit their content. Medical doctors, other clinical practitioners, and biomedical researchers can apply to become editors, and the foundation will screen and select them.
One wonders about those screening criteria, which have not been publicized, and whether Medpedia will require authors and editors to disclose financial conflicts, such as ties to pharmaceutical companies, as many medical journals do, so readers can judge potential bias for themselves. —Josh Fischman
Posted on Wednesday July 23, 2008 | Permalink |Comments
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I can see the part about “medical procedures and facilities throughout the world” as a possibility, but what’s the matter with medlineplus.gov?
— Judy Jul 23, 09:19 PM #
I am one of the community managers at Medpedia and making a correction/clarification: when the site launches at the end of 2008, it will not have 30,000 diseases and 10,000 drugs covered. It will only have a fraction of that. As we said in the press release: “Over the next few years, the growing community of Editors on Medpedia will create and interlink Web pages for the more than 30,000 known diseases and conditions, the more than 10,000 drugs being prescribed each year,…” with the emphasis on “Over the next few years.” When Medpedia opens up, it will not be a revolutionary information resource on the first day. What will be revolutionary on day one is the creation of a collaborative community on a scale that hasn’t existed before, and the creation of a process by which content will created and be updated. The idea is that with both the community and the process in place, over many years, the resource could become one of the best in the world!
— Andrea Spillmann Aug 4, 12:39 PM #