The Wikipedia: WikiProject Medicine is an online elective course. It involves selecting and improving important medical topics and developing them to a high level of quality. In 2013, Dr. Amin Azzam, MD, Adjunct Professor at UCSF School of Medicine, founded the WikiMedicine Project and has since worked with medical students from such institutions as UCSF, Rush University, University of Central Florida, and Vanderbilt to offer immersion elective rotations for fourth-year medical students to receive academic credit for editing Wikipedia. In this Wikipedia-editing elective course, students hone research and digital literacy skills while writing and editing articles on the Wikipedia platform. Course faculty use their subject-matter and research methods expertise to evaluate the quality of student contributions while emphasizing values such as knowledge sharing and diverse viewpoints. Students also learn skills that help them detect the quality of information on the site.
The course elective is designed, delivered, and evaluated by faculty, health sciences librarians, and personnel from WikiProject Medicine. The course goal is to contribute to and improve the Medicine content. Students will also enjoy the opportunity to “give back” specifically to Wikipedia and broaden their sense of the scope of physician responsibilities in our socially networked information era. Students will be encouraged to choose an article of high importance and low quality and seek a balance between comprehensiveness and readability. The student should also gain an appreciation for open-access health knowledge and their capacity to contribute.