Wikipedia:Redaktion Medizin/Cochrane Collaboration/en

This subpage is used to coordinate Wikipedia's contribution to the Cochrane Collaboration's pre-conference on October 1st, 2015 in Vienna.

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Current news

• Monday, August 31st 21:00 CEST: chat of the project group in our wikiproject's IRC channel, Wikipedia:Redaktion_Medizin/Chat

Concept

Background

Wikipedia (WP) is worldwide among the leading sources of medical information for lay people, and for experts als well. Alltogether the 288 language versions contain more than 155.000 medical articles, which are clicked and read more than 4.9 billion times per year.

Concerning accurateness, comprehensiveness, actuality, and readibility, the quality of our medical information compares well to other good sources in many topics, but not in all of them. We need substantial more voluntary contributors to enhance this quality on the long term. One of Wikimedia Foundation's primary strategic objectives is to increase the number of authors.

The Cochrane Collaboration (CC) was founded 1992 to coordinate and support about 31.000 voluntary authors in writing evidence based literature reviews for ongoing medical questions, and to publish these reviews in its Cochrane library. CC aims to provide doctors, therapists, and patients all over the world with practical, comprehensive, up-to-date knowledge. This means that - on the medical field - CC shares our vision.

Situation

To ensure quality, Cochrane Collaboration only accepts teams of medical experts as authors, and subjects them to its rigid technical manuals and operative standards. Once published, a review cannot be modified but following a regularized update process. Only the abstracts are freely accessible, most complete articles are protected by Wiley-Blackwell's paywall.

Wikipedia on the other hand relies on open, collaborative work done by as many different, independant authors as possible, and on continuous Improvement. Our authors often are anonymous, and we don't have proof of their knowledge. Our formal rules can be altered like our content. And we put all content under free licenses.

Despite we share goals and ideals, these differences hamper our mutual confidence, and make it difficult for eligible authors to engage in both projects or exchange information between them.

On these grounds, in 2013 members of en:WP:Wikiproject Medicine established contact to CC and managed to stipulate a cooperation. Until now, identifiable results include free access to Cochrane library for our authors (see en:WP:Cochrane), joint symposia and editing sessions during CC's annual meetings 2013 in Québec (abstract, bulletin) and 2014 in Hyderabad (m:Wikipedia_and_Cochrane_Symposium,_2014, abstract, Doc James' slides), and recently the engagement of a payed wikipedian in-residence (WIR) by Cochrane Collaboration.

Vienna 2015

We want to continue, and intensify the cooperation of our communities and projects in 2015. Furthermore, the german-speaking communities on both sides should be involved for the first time. This year's scheduling of Cochrane Collaboration's annual world meeting in Vienna gives us a good opportunity for that. We (the english- and german-speaking medicine wikiprojects) are planning to use this occasion for another joint WP/CC symposium.

WIR Sydney Poore (en:User:FloNight) took part on our redaction meeting via Skype and informed us about the plannings so far. Cochrane Collaboration has located its 2015 colloquium for early October to Messe Wien (trade fair of Vienna). Sydney has booked a slot on October 1st 9:00–17:00 called "pre-colloquium symposium Wikipedia". en:User:Doc James (James Heilmann MD) plans to attend as well..

On our side, we would try to enhance the usage of CC's ressources in our article writing. Furthermore, we will try to motivate as many CC-authors as possible to extend their help to Wikipedia. On their side, CC people are interested in faster knowledge dissemination by our channel, and in global augmented reach.

Procedure

This symposium will introduce Wikipedia and show the participants how they can contribute to its articles. Additionally, we want to clarify Wikipedia's role in the field of medical publications: its abilities and weaknesses. We will explore the possible usage of Cochrane reviews (their results, respectively) as high-quality sources in our medicine articles.

Detailed contents are to be developed. Until now, plannings include the following topics (announced by FloNight), following the last year's event:

1. Introduction of Cochrane and Wikipedia Initiative
2. Why it is important to add high quality medical content to Wikipedia
3. Training session on editing
4. Editing session
5. Other^*
6. Next steps

^*) Other possible conference topics might be:

• extending the Cochrane licenses for their open access documents, regarding the fact that they now aren't compatible to our licenses [4]
• more effective transfers with bot- or script-driven tech [5]
• result-producing usage of Wikidata for medical information [6] [7] [8]
• translation of review abstracts by WP authors while they use them
• presentation of Cochrane's translation strategy [9], considerations about dividing of our translation teams' labour
• ...<please add your topic>

Results

At first, some seats were still free

The event was conducted as planned. It had about 20 international participants, half CC and WP. Room and catering were provided by CC, and information material came from WMAT and WMDE (thanks to the respective offices!) Thanks also to the Viennese wikipedians, who had engaged all day had for this date, and also to Braveheart, Boshomi, Regiomontanus and Whomiforgot for transporting and installing the heavy roll-up banners.

The Symposium continued as scheduled from 9:30 until about 5:00 pm, with lunch and two coffee breaks. Lectures and exercises alternated in a loose row. Between the units and at the end we examined articles and trained the Mediawiki interface in small mixed groups.

Presentations in the morning:

• Welcome and introduction by Nancy Owens, social media editor in the CC central executive staff ([10])
• FloNight presented the Wikipedia-Cochrane initiative and the Cochrane update project. She also showed the plan to attract women increasingly as authors, and on the other hand write missing articles about relevant women: en:Wikipedia:WikiProject women/women in red
• MBq introduced the Wikipedia:Redaktion Medizin: what we see as our task, and where our challenges lie. We can't write everything ourselves, but we can organize, control, and assist authors in writing. Problems of varying difficulty: vandalism (example), original research (example), paid editing (example), user conflicts and flame wars. Example of a collaborative article: Homöopathie
• Andrea Kamphuis showed the tables which are laid out in her userspace to match between IQWiG reports or Cochrane reviews about diabetes and pancreas, and the corresponding Wikipedia articles.
• Hubertl reported very entertaining about his work with students in the Wikiversity, using as an example the most recent course v:Kurs:Krieg und Propaganda: bis zum 1. Weltkrieg (SS 2015). Wikiversity as virtual exercise room, without notability criteria etc, is more appropriate than Wikipedia for this. "Never ask the professor to do something – he doesn't want, and won't do anything, he wants to see results." Wikipedians provide the infrastructure and help with the syntax. The WP-tutors must only do what they can do anyway and love to do. "Students dont't start working until the last third of the given period, - then they advance fast."
• Tobias1984 explained Wikidata basics: items, properties, claims, name spaces, structure of a data set, obligation of source citations. This developed into a lively discussion on how we can use this in the medical field. Information from Wikidata could be incorporated into article via templates, or bots could vice-versa systematically incorporate information from the articles in Wikidata, and update it later. Differences between the language versions could be resolved by maintenance lists. Advantage of the bot method: articles can be edited as before. Wikidata so far is hidden and difficult for newcomers. Main chance: automatic acquisition of standardized information from external, reputable databases. Main problem: copyright issues (compare the ICD classification). Even the licensing of freely accessible databases [11] might not be compatible to our licenses. Another problem: We'll do even more the groundwork for Google's Knowledge Graph [12].

Topics in the afternoon:

• Keynote by en:User:Doc James (slides). James introduced himself and how he entered our project ("...then suddenly I realized that I could fix the internet"), proceeded to the magnitude of the reading accesses of Wikipedia overall and in the medical field, and emphasized our high quality. The average American sees his doctor only 3x a year, but spends 52 hours on searching for health information on the Internet. 7 billion visits per year to 188,000 Medicine articles in Wikipedia = 3% of all WP page reads. Half of them are on en.wp, then follow es.wp and de.wp One in two page retrievals comes from a mobile device. en:Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Stats

• James reported about some projects of the English-speaking medical editors: the "Wikiversity Journal of medicine" publishes featured articles peer-reviewed, pubmed-indexed, with DOI and ISSN, crediting the authors' real names. This comes free for the authors, and allows them to show their work in an academic context. So far 15 articles.

James showed this promotional video for Wikipedia Zero

• Translation of important medical articles in many languages, to reach non-English-speaking people: en:Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Translation task force. In Nigeria alone, there are >500 languages. The TTF plans to translate 100 "featured articles" (which corresponds to our 'excellent' honor) completely, and 1000 other articles as multilingual summaries. A simple, understandable language of the new texts is important. General knowledge of the infection routes in the country's population could have save many lives during the Ebola epidemic. But Ebola is only an example; the ignorance of most people i.e. of simple measures to aid children with diarrhea is dramatic. Other approaches to increase the impact of the WP: offline Android app 'WikiMed' [13] with medical articles (via Kiwix); and the global program for free Wikipedia access on mobile phones Wikipedia Zero. Beside other topics, the discussion revolved about the requirements of our CC license on translated articles. James will seek an official clarification of the WMF position for this.

Reported by MBq, 2nd 2015