Medpedia to best the more democratic Wikipedia?
Medpedia, a collaborative project for medical information launched in February, is getting beyond the medical-data basics as it adds answers, alerts, and analysis.
Founded on the noble and semipractical system of providing free online medical information generated for and by physicians, journals, schools, patients, and more, Medpedia's three stated goals are to be collaborative, interdisciplinary, and transparent. The idea is to maximize knowledge and minimize the kind of screwing around that continually threatens the efficacy of other wiki-based projects. Of course, the extent to which this is successful hinges on the quality, integrity, and transparency of the editors.
While Medpedia uses the open-source software Mediawiki (also used by Wikipedia), it is less collaborative than the vast encyclopedia site, allowing only physicians and Ph.D.s approved by an editor to contribute to and edit articles. (The less medicine-literate masses are allowed to create accounts and suggest changes, but not actually make them.)
The jury's still out on whether Medpedia will be big enough to be a successful repository of up-to-date information and tame enough to be useful, but three new features, announced this week, might at least help push it out of beta incubation:
Medpedia Answers is a Q&A feature, collecting questions and answers about health, medicine, the body, etc., tagged for search optimization, and pushed to relevant articles and patient communities. Anyone who takes the time to create a profile can contribute to this section, with a top-contributors list cluing in users to which answers are written by the most informed (and involved) users.
Medpedia Alerts aggregates health and medical-news alerts. Anyone with an account can submit here as well, but this section appears intended to work something like Google Reader, with all sorts of feeds plugging into the platform.
And finally, Medpedia News & Analysis lets a wide range of sources accepted by the Medpedia community self-organize by category, and tag and cross-link to articles. This section is not, strictly speaking, licensed by Medpedia, so copyright is held by the authors themselves, which could prove tricky, as Medpedia hosts content that may or may not be allowed to be there.
Since Medpedia went live earlier this year, it has drawn thousands of members, including physicians, researchers, organizations, and experts contributing to its growing knowledge base. Plus, it has the likes of Harvard, Stanford, the National Health Services, and American Heart Association participating. Will Medpedia's less democratic editing system prove more bulletproof than Wikipedia's? So far, so good.
Elizabeth Armstrong Moore is a freelance journalist based in Portland, Ore. She has contributed to Wired magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, and public radio. Her semi-obscure hobbies include unicycling, slacklining, hula-hooping, scuba diving, billiards, Sudoku, Magic the Gathering, and classical piano. She is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. 
"Will Medpedia's less democratic editing system prove more bulletproof than Wikipedia's? So far, so good"
In the subject underconsideration... Medicine and Health, I think all of us want the most bulletproof and exact information, althought we kill the democratic-changing paradigm.
As for "errors" everybody can submit a request, so the benefit of crowd-sourcing is still there, with the cost of not getting corrections instantly.
How are you sure?
The title of this article makes little sense - how will it "best" Wikipedia if its goal is to only have a fraction of the coverage?
Perhaps its suggesting the system will be better. In that case, I don't know whether the author ignored or simply didn't know about Citizendium, a wiki project that requires users to use their real names with review of articles by verified experts. Of its 12,000 articles, only 120 have been "approved" and its still missing articles about core encyclopedia topics like nations in Africa and major cities.
A more useful comparison would have been to compare it to a site that had similar content in a different format. People aren't going to use it because its a wiki, they'll use it because of the information it has. WebMD would have been a better comparison IMO.
- by MichealJone November 15, 2009 4:23 PM PST
- Hmm looks interesting. Although ive never heard of this medipedia site, going to check it out now though..
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