Wikipedia: Reliable Sources and Gene Wiki February 16, 2008

Wikipedia is a good first place to go to do your research, but should never be the last place to finish with!

We’ve got more than 2 million articles now so our only aim at this stage is to fill up the medical articles with proper references. For those who would like to know more about Wikipedia’s citation policy, check out this: WikiProject Medicine/Reliable sources.

Wikipedia’s medical articles, while not a source of medical advice, are nonetheless an important health information resource. Therefore, it is vital that medical articles be based on reliable published sources. These guidelines supplement the general guidelines at Wikipedia:Reliable sources with specific attention to sources appropriate for medical and health-related articles. The ideal source for such articles would be a general or systematic review in a reputable medical journal, or a widely recognised standard textbook written by experts in a field. It is also useful to reference seminal papers on the subject to document its history and provide context for the experts’ conclusions.

An other great project is the Gene Wiki presented by Nsaunders:

The goal is to create gene stubs for every gene in the human genome. The stubs will have some minimal amount of structured content – links to important databases, GO annotations, PDB structures, etc. It’s our hope/expectation that these stubs will then seed contributions from experts in the field, specifically the “free-text” and unstructured sort of knowledge for which there really isn’t a great resource available.

If you’re interested, check out this link (warning – large page with long load time!) which lists the ~8000 (and counting) pages at Wikipedia that have incorporated structured content from our effort.

If you plan to contribute to this project, take a look at these categories and pages:

• Category:Genes by chromosome
• Category:Genes associated with genetic disorders

Further reading:

• Medical wikis: the future of medicine?
• Medicine in Wikipedia: Reliable Information?
• WikiProfessional Alpha Testing: a wiki of web 3.0
• Radiopaedia: a wiki for radiology
• Ask Dr Wiki vs medicine in Wikipedia
• Medicine in Wikipedia and Citizendum
• Genetic Wikis