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Wikipedia:Wikipedia in Health Professions Education/Tools

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Tools

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Learn about teaching with Wikipedia and design your own course. This module offers a beginner's step-by-step guide, teaching resources, and teaching advice from other HPE Instructors. Resources also include a video of Dr. Amin Azzam, a clinical professor at the University of California, San Francisco UCSF School of Medicine and the University of California, Berkeley, discussing his experiences teaching medical students with Wikipedia.

Starting Your Own Course:

1

Review Introductory Materials

Learn the basics of what it means to be a Wikipedian, including how to edit health articles, with the help of the following resources:

Overview: An Introduction to Medical Editing

Editing WIkipedia Articles (c) Mihir Joshi CC BY SA 4.0


2

Create a Wikipedia User Account

You do not need a Wikipedia account to read and edit Wikipedia articles, but you will need a Wikipedia account to start your own WikiEdu course. By creating an account you will also gain access to a number of other useful Wikipedia resources and features.


"hand holding wikipedia globe
Wikipedia is in the palm of your hand—all you need to do is edit an article.

3

Practice being a Wikipedian!

It is important to have some familiarity with the process of editing in the Wikipedia space. The following tutorial page will help give you some practice on what it means to be a Wikipedian. It is geared toward newcomers, but it also offers links to help anyone more easily navigate Wikipedia editing.


4

Design your Wikipedia Course

Now that you've created an account and have some practical knowledge it's time to design your course. This process will look different for every instructor, but the following pages by the Wikipedia Education Foundation will help break some of this down and start you on your way to setting up your own HPE course.


5

Fine Tune your Course using Advice from HPE Instructors
Watch Dr. Amin Azzam explain lessons learned from teaching 4th year medical students editing Wikipedia medical content through WikProject Medicine in an interview with Peter Frishaulf.
From Wikipedia education program in medicine.


The following quotes are drawn from interviews conducted in 2020 and reported in Paolo C. Martin, Lauren A. Maggio, Heather Murray, John M. Willinsky, "Enculturating a Community of Action (CoA): A qualitative study of health professions educators’ perspectives on teaching with Wikipedia” (preprint here)

Find Existing Courses
. . . join someone else's course who has already taught it and look to see how that's organized. If there's any way, shadow a course. — Librarian
Be a volunteer, be a fly on the wall, for a course and actually take a course, because you have to experience it in order to teach it. — Librarian
Collaborate
Co-teach and make sure that you are learning together and can have some of that collaborative learning. — Librarian
Collaborate with other professionals who are doing the same thing already, because there is a network out there and you don't have to look too hard to find it. — Physician
. . . you need to bring to the course someone who knows how to edit to accompany the students. — Physician
Set Realistic & Intentional Expectations
. . . some sort of milestone set-up is useful where you just try to keep people on track so they'll be successful. — PhD faculty member
. . . you really have to be clear with expectations to students upfront because students that think that they're going to embark on a project and overhaul a page within the context of a handful of weeks will be very disappointed because it doesn't happen that seamlessly or that quickly, so [manage] expectations. — Physician
Use WikiEdu Resources
. . . valuable to go through the teacher training part of it, and then to also go through all of those student modules. — Librarian
Use the Wikipedia staff, because they're so helpful, and they answer all of your questions immediately and will meet with you online or via WebEx if you have questions. — Librarian
WikiEd, WikiEd, WikiEd. Why reinvent the wheel, when there's a whole infrastructure, a non-profit foundation, whose sole mission is to be the bridge between academia and Wikipedia? — Physician
Next Steps
BE BOLD! — Physician

6

Check out Additional Teaching Resources

Wiki Education Wiki Education is 501(c) nonprofit organization designed to connect higher education and Wikipedia. Their Wikipedia Student Program includes a range of resources for university faculty who incorporate Wikipedia assignments into their courses.

Wikipedia Student Information Page and Editing Guides In response to numerous teaching initiatives on Wikipedia, Wikipedians created an information page with suggestions for developing student assignments editing Wikipedia. This page contains information for instructors on best practices for course design, including a specific section for editing medical articles.

Wikipedia relies on volunteer editors and the Wikipedia community provides many resources and guidelines about how to edit in Wikipedia. Some basic Wikipedia sites are listed here:

Those who edit medical articles in Wikipedia follow strict guidelines, which include Wikipedia's Guideline for Reliable Sources for Medical Articles and Medical Manual of Style. We encourage educators to first familiarize themselves with these guidelines before sharing evidence on Wikipedia.

WikiProject Medicine WikiProject Medicine was developed to manage and help in curation of Wikipedia's medical articles. WikiProject Medicine has generated a number of resources that are helpful for university faculty who incorporate Wikipedia assignments into courses in the health care fields. WikiProject Medicine has created a resource to guide for new student editors of Wikipedia pages about healthcare. This notice for students includes information about proper Wikipedia editing formats and is designed to be added to student talk pages.

  • Template (copy and past the following template onto student talk pages): {{subst:Medical student notice}} ~~~~