The Medpedia Project recently announced the public launch of its namesake project: Medpedia, an online medical encyclopedia based on the Wikipedia model for collaborative content creation. It aims to become a “repository of up-to-date unbiased medical information, contributed and maintained by health experts around the world, and freely available to everyone”.
At the surface, the project appears like a medical version of Wikipedia. There are however several nuances that distinguish it from the latter, and could lead to greater acceptance within the medical community as a credible source of information, such as with the prevalent use of UpToDate.
1. Credible Sources
The most prominent misgiving about Wikipedia in professional circles has been the credibility and volatility of information. Anyone under the sun has access to Wikipedia and can manipulate the data for others to read. While the Wikipedia proponents argue that vandalism is rapidly corrected by the site’s hawk-eyed army of editors, it would be difficult to believe that in niche knowledge areas — particularly in medical subspecialties — there would be enough qualified volunteers to edit such information. Moreover, how would one know whether the information viewed at any moment had already been scrutinized appropriately?
To counter this frequent criticism of the Wikipedia project, Medpedia’s approach is to restrict the editorial base to “only physicians and Ph.D.s in a biomedical/health field”. Non-editors may however “suggest changes that must be approved by an Editor”. The service later emphasizes that, unlike Wikipedia, details of content creation and modification are recorded and linked to their respective authors. One would presume that the authors who have devoted years to their doctoral education would not want to compromise their reputations with patently misleading edits (although there have been cases in the real world). On the other hand, I wonder how the service verifies that an applicant is indeed a doctor.
2. Academic Support
On the website’s front page, there is a prominent footer with logos from four major medical/health institutions: Harvard Medical School, Stanford School of Medicine, UC Berkeley School of Public Health, and University of Michigan Medical School. The claim of support probably stems from the fact that the board of advisers and key advisers work at the aforementioned institutions. Most of them appear to be senior faculty members.
3. Additional services
Beyond being a knowledge base, Medpedia advertises additional features, including its “Professional Network & Directory” (for networking within the medical community or an organization) and “Communities of Interest” (for medical professionals to interact with the general public). I suspect the encyclopedia portion of Medpedia will be its sole predominant feature, as the latter two are not breakthrough ideas. The Internet is already inundated with diverse social networking services of every color and permutation thereof.
It is too early to predict whether Medpedia will rise above its myriad competitors in the medical wiki world. Will it eventually rival UpToDate or become another themed variant of Wikipedia? For now, at least the service demonstrates potential, appears professional, and has the backing of faculty from four major academic medical/health centers. To borrow the oft-used cliche … only time will tell.
