I am working for Consumer Reports on a project to improve the quality of health articles on Wikipedia. This is part of an educational outreach campaign called Choosing Wisely. There is a large amount of information about Choosing Wisely on the Internet – just lately I realized that hundreds of news sources have been covering this. It might be the most publicized non-governmental health campaign ever organized, but if not that, then it certainly is well-publicized.
In the campaign Consumer Reports disseminates health information delivered by medical specialty professional organizations. Each of these organizations represent the doctors practicing in their respective fields, often by publishing a specialized journal, organizing the field’s annual conference, and facilitating the communication between peers in specialized medicine. Since the United States has international prestige in medicine, one might say that any given medical professional society in America is an international authority since their statements would represent a consensus in health practice from the largest body of what anyone would recognize as those among the world’s top physicians. I certainly think that medical professional organizations are fit to share information, especially peer-reviewed information published in journals, and especially literature reviews of peer-reviewed information in journals.
The Wikipedia community has an aversion to what it calls “paid editors”, who are broadly defined as anyone who receives compensation for developing Wikipedia articles. This is with good reason because most paid editors do nothing except create messes and work burden on the volunteer community, so the aversive attitude has served the project well so far. People who want to learn more to the general conflict of interest policy, but I would say that this policy has insufficient community backing to be of much use and no one is particularly satisfied with it. The content through that link will change since it is controversial and in live Wikipedia space. It has nothing to do with that link, but the conflict of interest noticeboard is a graveyard of dozens of instances of spammers who come to Wikipedia to ham-handedly push some self-aggrandizing fluff onto Wikipedia’s community space without having any consideration of whatever policies may exist.
Here are the reasons why I think that I should write a Wikipedia article about Choosing Wisely, despite having the conflict of interest in writing about my own work:
- I cannot reasonably expect anyone else to write this article
- I am familiar with the topic and can write it more ably than any non-volunteer
- People deserve an explanation of what I am doing on Wikipedia in my job, and a Wikipedia article on Choosing Wisely would be a natural and necessary part of the explanation of what I am doing.
- The public deserves the kind of presentation of the campaign that is only possible in the medium of Wikipedia
- This campaign involves a lot of players and it is a matter of personal safety and good health practice that people be able to access Wikipedia articles on the entities generating information for this campaign and disseminating information in this campaign
I put health information onto Wikipedia because I feel strongly that it matters. I like Wikipedia because I feel that it represents free access to community-reviewed information to be presented to the general public. I feel that people have a human right to access information which will help them make decisions about their own health. I would not advocate that people trust information that information on Wikipedia is anything more than what community consensus and the ephemeral Wikipedia development process has produced at any given time, but at the same time I want for health educators to all recognize that Wikipedia is the most popular source of health information for many topics and that people are going to Wikipedia for information. Knowing that the public is going to Wikipedia for health information, what then should a health educator do in response? Who is responsible for the quality of Wikipedia articles? Who ought to be?