Editing Wikipedia articles during medical school

Editing Wikipedia as a health professional student is a great way to not only “learn by teaching” but also to ensure patients and your fellow healthcare professionals get accurate information.

Wikipedia is one of the most well-known websites around the world and individual articles can get thousands of views a day, so improving them is both rewarding and incredibly impactful.

To get started, the first thing you need to do is select an article, which may be easier than you think. If you look at the WikiProject Medicine page, you’ll see that there’s already a community dedicated to this work.

There’s a handy chart which organizes over 37,000 English Wikipedia health-related articles by importance and quality, and this is a great way to find a good article to get started with.

If you’re interested in other domains, there are more WikiProjects like anatomy, pharmacology, and women’s health, and of course you can always just search around for an article that catches your eye.Once you’ve found an article you’re excited to improve, the next step is to start editing.

You can start by going to the top right corner of the page and select the button labeled “edit.” Ideally, though, you should be logged in to your account first, at which point it’ll say “edit source”.

The visual editor is easy to use, and works almost the same way as any word processing software. As you’re editing, be sure to cite your sources by clicking the cite icon in the upper bar.

If you’re using the visual editor, adding the PubMed ID to your citations incorporates all the metadata of the citation.

Also on the article is the talk page. The talk pages are where people interested in a topic can collaborate with one another.

In addition to directly editing pages, another area that might be useful to you is your sandbox, which you’ll be able to see once you make an account and log in.

The sandbox serves as your own personal area to experiment with writing for Wikipedia without worrying about affecting externally facing content.

It’s important to know which sources to draw from.Use of primary sources is typically discouraged. Traditionally, Wikipedia editors turn to secondary sources, as these often give a better overview of scientific consensus on a topic.Secondary sources are written by individuals not directly involved in a study - they include pieces like literature reviews or systematic reviews.

One additional idea to consider is the concept of “foreground” vs. “background” literature.

While it might be tempting to limit yourself to sources only published in the last five to ten years, remember that certain things in health were discovered long ago.

For example, the heart’s been going “lub-dub” for centuries- so a medical textbook is a reliable “background literature source” that’s perfectly OK to cite.

In contrast, newer domains of health-related sciences will require “foreground” literature like meta-analyses, or systematic reviews such as those from the Cochrane database.If you’re enrolled at a university, it’s worth finding out what resources your library has available for you.

Lastly, when debating between two or more reliable citations, always include the one that is more open access-- so more Wikipedia readers can read the original citation for more in depth information if they want to.

When editing Wikipedia, it’s important to avoid copy and pasting from sources and to adhere to copyright standards, especially since your work will likely be viewed by a lot of people.

It's best practice to have at least one citation for every sentence you write while typically more than two or three is not required.

Additionally, every citation you use should truly support the content you are trying to convey. If you have one source that says A leads to B and another source that B leads to C, you should not generally write that A leads to C.

That's considered original research and is prohibited on Wikipedia. Instead, find a source that specifically connects A and C, or describe the two connections in separate sentences.

##SummaryAll right, as a quick recap - editing Wikipedia is exciting and impactful work.One way to get started, is to select an article that’s rated as having low quality, but high importance.You can edit using the visual editing tools.Remember your sandbox to test out your writing, but also use talk pages to collaborate with other Wikipedians.

Use both foreground and background literature as sources to cite your work appropriately.Thanks for making Wikipedia a better source for health-related information.

Happy editing! source for health-related information happy editing