I attended the American Medical Student Association (discussed as an acronym “AMSA”) conference in DC Friday and Saturday February 27-28. I had been wavering about going. I wanted to meet some medical student organizations to seek partnerships for contributing health information on Wikipedia, but as the organization is governed by medical students, the turnover of active members in the organization cycles with medical school entry and graduation plus the entire community is pressed for time in the way medical students are. Because of this, some AMSA people with whom I was friends in the past have moved on, and the people I would meet at this conference would soon also.
Amin Azzam wrote to me saying that he was going, because he also wanted to meet student groups and encourage them to contribute Wikipedia in the model of his own class at University of California San Francisco. He cc’d Fred Trotter whom I did not know, and suggested that we all attend. This was my first time meeting Amin in person despite my having met with him online in the first iteration of his class outreach and our having talked a bit otherwise, and having been interviewed together virtually. In meeting Fred Trotter I found that we had a lot in common. He manages health IT projects and as a technologist, explains health IT to layman audiences. He wrote the 2011 Hacking Healthcare, which is interesting to me for giving commentary on the standards in place and the processes used to manage health information. Beyond that, he is in the middle of Wikimedia tech projects which already work well enough, but which need polishing. One project is an automated scoring system for the quality of Wikipedia’s health articles based on the frequency of citations made and the kinds of sources they cite. Another project is a browser extension which medical students could install to track them when they use Wikipedia, and watch where they go after visiting a Wikipedia health article. Both of these projects are of interest to me for the sake of my work.
We collected contacts of various community organizers within AMSA. I will follow up with them, and it was nice to have met them face to face. We talked ot various student groups, and one which was attractive to all of us and which liked speaking with us as well was an organization interested in alternative medicine. Wikipedia’s health articles are popular, and the articles on alternative medicine are especially popular. This includes integrative medicine, naturopathy, and other treatments at the edge of standard medical practice. I will be talking more with them, but as I understand, they worry about public misconceptions, and themselves had struggled in their practice with over-emphasis of case studies and insufficient documentation of what is supported as evidence-based medicine. In my opinion, having a professional organization even at the student level to check in on Wikipedia articles in this field would be a benefit to Wikipedia’s audience, the profile of Wikipedia’s medical content generally, me as someone who is doing outreach to the general public, and to practitioners in that field who themselves want to make the best available information more available. If they are willing to partner with me, then I would like to support them. I think having them interact with the medical literature on Wikipedia would be good for everyone involved.
Amin, Fred, and I made lots of plans and will be sorting our ideas to find what is most important, but at least after having all met we are all in agreement that we all would like to offer Wikipedia to more medical students in more medical schools.