Some people at the National Institutes of Health have long had interest in partnering with Consumer Reports in contributing to Wikipedia. On Friday 13 March 2015 some of us met there to present an editing event and to meet the staff’s request for more collaboration.
As background to this, WikiProject National Institutes of Health is the project space documenting NIH projects on Wikipedia. Wired in 2009 published a story which was based on an NIH-published story about collaborating with Wikipedia. In May 2013 I and others hosted an editathon at NIH and they again published a story about the event. Around that time NIH developed organizational guidelines for staff editing Wikipedia. There are other projects and collaborations which have not been documented. Overall, many people at NIH have been very supportive of Wikipedia.
The NIH’s interest in Wikipedia is in partnering for information dissemination. That ought to be every organization’s interest in Wikipedia, but sometimes I feel the need to say it explicitly even though people ought to already know. Wikipedia is useful because it is a popular source of information. It is popular mostly because of its foundation of prominence in search engines, but it also enjoys a good brand name and social support. For a lot of organizations, when they think of Wikipedia, they think of its potential as an advertising vehicle to the information they present elsewhere. Advertising from traditional channels like newspapers, billboards, and broadcasting or from new channels like Facebook, Internet click ads, or social media still is the model that most organizations use for media partnerships, and not actually delivering some value to the end user without getting a conversion to take their content in their own controlled form of it. With Wikipedia, any advertising which happens is only because someone shared good information on Wikipedia which meets the needs of most users, but the few users who want more can follow through to the source and get more information in the cited publication. More powerfully on Wikipedia, Wikipedia is able to present enough information in a place where people already go to satisfy the needs of most users. For organizations which are happy to share information, and who care less about how that information is actually delivered, then Wikipedia is an ideal partnership. Since the NIH is government funded to produce and disseminate information and they have no need to send everyone to their own publications, they recognize that Wikipedia can be an outlet for them to achieve their mission. My organization Consumer Reports is much the same with its health information, but a difference with NIH is that since their content is in the public domain as a work of the US Federal Government, there are some things that they can share that it would be difficult for CR to share.
In any case – we had this editing event at NIH. They had been thinking of why collaborating had stalled in the past, and part of the problem was in learning the rules that Wikipedia has for sharing health content. Wikipedia regulates health content more than it does other content, and while it is not so complicated, some of the rules can be a barrier. To bypass difficulties it was decided that editing biographies would be a way to introduce Wikipedia’s editing interface and learn the rules, and that it also would be fun and relevant to the NIH mission. Because of interest in Women’s History Month and promoting STEM fields, it was decided that biographies of women about whom the National Library of Medicine had content would be the theme of the day.
About 40 people attended. In preparation, the National Library of Medicine collected information which could be used to make biographical Wikipedia articles about woman scientists. Some NIH wiki-staffers had cross-referenced what articles are already in Wikipedia with the biographies which were suggested, and then made lists of people who had no article but for whom information was available to make one, and then another list of people whose articles could be developed. At the event, attendees were encouraged to chose from these lists, as if they did, they could add content based on the information which had already been collected for them. In my opinion, this is a model event for how partnerships should work. The NLM staff had information in the library and it is their job to promote it. The staff wanted to learn Wikipedia, and it would have been time consuming for them to do library research, so it saved time to have had the library staff share information with them in advance. The Wikipedians in attendance were best used by helping people edit Wikipedia, and not by helping people find library resources. With all the pieces prepared before the event, as soon as everyone came together, I gave a short Wikipedia tutorial for not more than 10 minutes and within 10 minutes of its end, many people were already adding content and had done the basic functions on par with what anyone highly experienced would do.
That was the event! We did this in two iterations of 3 hours each. It was a fun day. The outcomes on Wikipedia were fantastic in terms of quality. I would not call this a high-impact project on Wikipedia in terms of the size of the audience reached, because most of the people featured are scientists and there is not a huge amount of popular demand for articles on the lives of scientists. However, there is a lot of talk about how girls are underrepresented in school science projects, and now with all of these biographies added, girls can more easily find role models in various fields of science and from diverse backgrounds. I was told that six of the biographies developed were of Hispanic scientists, and I presume that now Wikipedia must host the most comprehensive collection of biographies of female Hispanic scientists anywhere in the world. For the select audience which needs this, I can imagine there being children who would look at this resource and perhaps consider career paths that they would not have considered otherwise. From a global long term perspective, it might not be crazy to speculate that sometime in the next 20 years, at least one child will be motivated to study science who might not otherwise have done so had they not been influenced by finding records of role models online. If even one child chooses a STEM career path as a consequence of one of these events, then even though this event might have consumed 150 total volunteer hours, it still might be a net gain for the world to get someone’s career to move in the direction of STEM.
Beyond the impact of the contributions, now the staff who participated is more comfortable with Wikipedia. The end goal of the collaboration has been more about general health information, even though the social contributions are helpful too. They wanted to do more rounds approximately quarterly. I like the idea of going back when some people have participated in the past.