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Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all medical knowledge. This is what Wikipedians are aiming for.
While the Wikipedia community has continually worked to improve the quality of its health content since the project's founding in 2001, few of the encyclopedia articles meet the quality standards that healthcare providers would expect before recommending that patients consult it. All the content is written, edited, and maintained by volunteers, and anyone visiting the website can click the "edit" button at the top of any article and instantly change any aspect of the presented content without seeking permission, getting moderator approval, or even registering an account.
Regardless of the dubious quality of Wikipedia, it persists as a popular source of health information, even for doctors. As of January 2014 there were 26000 articles in Wikipedia covering health topics including medical conditions, drugs, procedures, and diseases. These collectively were requested and accessed 178000000 times that month, representing an audience comparable in size to that of any other health publication. Wikipedia's reach, irrespective of its quality, means that those who care about the body of health information influencing public thought should consider the impact Wikipedia has as a health publication. For those who do wish to engage with Wikipedia, it is an open, volunteer, community project, and there are precedents for health partnerships.
Engaging with Wikipedia
Outside of Wikipedia's own volunteer community initiatives, the first attempt to conduct a health educational campaign by guiding the improvement of some Wikipedia articles began in 2012 when the ABIM Foundation, a non-profit organization established by the American Board of Internal Medicine, launched the Choosing Wisely campaign. Choosing Wisely asked most major medical professional societies in the United States to share their concerns about problems caused by unnecessary healthcare and to back them with citations from the medical literature. Participants in the campaign proposed to disseminate both the concerns themselves and the supporting citations, and the campaign was to target both healthcare providers and recipients.
Consumer Reports, a non-profit consumer rights advocacy organization, joined the campaign as a consumer communications partner. They recognized that Wikipedia was a candidate platform for both sharing healthcare information backed by the best possible medical sourcing,...