Wikipedia is making its first Canadian university stop at McMaster Tuesday to encourage
students, faculty, researchers and staff to contribute to its medical and health pages.

The university's reputation for innovation and evidence-based collaborations got the
attention of Dr. James Heilman, president of Wikimedia Canada, a contributor to Wiki
Project Medicine and an emergency room physician in Cranbrook, BC.

“McMaster is a well-known innovator in health sciences. Wikipedia is attempting to
provide evidence-based medical content free to the world. Seeing as this concept was
initially developed at McMaster, I see this as an ideal university at which to begin our
collaborative efforts here in Canada,” he said.

Wikipedia is one of the world's major, non-commercial sources for health and medical
information. Its medical articles get between 150-200 million page views a month in
English alone, and up to 70 per cent of physicians use it in their clinical practice.

“Physicians in the Third World use Wikipedia all the time and without it they would not
have access to high quality information,” said Heilman. “Right now, Wikipedia is a good
source of information, but it could be better. To improve Wikipedia we need the input of
the academic community.”

Heilman said there is a need to write actual content so that everyone on the planet has
free access to high-quality health information in any language.

“There may be 20,000 medical conditions. If we were each to take one of them and write
a well-referenced review, or take an already high-quality article in the public domain
and translate it into another language, it would not be long before we had created an
excellent resource.”

There is no formal process to begin working with Wikipedia. The quality of all content is
subjected to a number of checks: Bots (computer programs) look at all new changes and
revert obviously poor edits; a group of volunteers go over all new changes to the
encyclopedia (known as Recent Changes Patrol); and some content at certain points in
time is locked into place to prevent its removal.

A free, half-day workshop on how to get involved in creating and editing health care
content for Wikipedia will be held at 1.30 p.m. in the Student Centre, Room 319.
Reservations may be made by emailing cindy.purnomo@hamilton.ca, and participants
are asked to bring their laptops.

The workshop is sponsored by McMaster's Department of Clinical Epidemiology and
Biostatistics, the National Collaborating Centre for Methods and Tools based at
McMaster and the City of Hamilton Public Health Services. It will include both
presentations and breakout workshops. Speakers include Jonathan Obar, Wikipedia
education programs advisor, Canada and Dr. Christopher Mackie, associate medical
officer of health for Hamilton and assistant professor in the Department of Clinical
Epidemiology and Biostatistics.

Further information is available href=”http://wikimedia.ca/wiki/Projects/Medical_student_outreach/Wikipedia_at_McMa
ster”>here or by contacting Cindy Purnomo at cindy.purnomo@hamilton.ca and
905-546-2424 ext. 2169.