Pharmacy students can improve access to quality medicines information by editing Wikipedia articles

Abstract

BackgroundPharmacy training programs commonly ask students to develop or edit drug monographs that summarize key information about new medicines as an academic exercise. We sought to expand on this traditional approach by having students improve actual medicines information pages posted on Wikipedia.MethodsWe placed students (n = 119) in a required core pharmacy course into groups of four and assigned each group a specific medicines page on Wikipedia to edit. Assigned pages had high hit rates, suggesting that the topics were of interest to the wider public, but were of low quality, suggesting that the topics would benefit from improvement efforts. We provided course trainings about editing Wikipedia. We evaluated the assignment by surveying student knowledge and attitudes and reviewing the edits on Wikipedia.ResultsCompleting the course trainings increased student knowledge of Wikipedia editing practices. At the end of the assignment, students had a more nuanced understanding of Wikipedia as a resource. Student edits improved substantially the quality of the articles edited, their edits were retained for at least 30 days after course completion, and the average number page views of their edited articles increased.ConclusionsOur results suggest that engaging pharmacy students in a Wikipedia editing assignment is a feasible alternative to writing drug monographs as a classroom assignment. Both tasks provide opportunities for students to demonstrate their skills at researching and explaining drug information but only one serves to improve wider access to quality medicines information. Wikipedia editing assignments are feasible for large groups of pharmacy students and effective in improving publicly available information on one of the most heavily accessed websites globally.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1186/s12909-018-1375-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Situating Wikipedia as a health information resource in various contexts: A scoping review

“…Explorations into the various roles of Wikipedia in health and medical education have a strong presence within the literature (S4 Appendix, Table 6), which includes editing Wikipedia as an educational tool in the classroom [49,50,52,[65][66][67][68], measuring student interactions with Wikipedia [48,51,53,69], and its utility in knowledge sharing between professionals or for daily reference in everyday practice [52,[70][71][72][73].…”

“…Since then, the inclusion of editing Wikipedia in health education courses has crossed a number of health disciplines. Pharmacy students have been asked to write content in Wikipedia as an alternative to composing pharmaceutical drug monographs [65] and a gerontology instructor identified gaps in Wikipedia's content on aging and assigned students the task of using their term papers to edit it [67].…”

Integrating Wikipedia editing into health professions education: A curricular inventory and review of the literature

“…It is not subject to copyright under 17 USC 105 and is also made available vague with authors noting those teaching simply as faculty or instructors without indication of profession except in the case of librarians, which were reported in four courses [11,48]. In Apollonio's course near-peer students who had previously completed the course taught a handson demonstration session [12]. Five authors stated course objectives, which related to EBM and enhancing Wikipedia's content (Table 3).…”

Is Medical Education Ready for Universal Open Access to Research?

“…13 And some medical education courses introduce students to the editing and critical appraisal of Wikipedia health articles. 14,15 The goal is to further develop this public resource as a shared health benefit, while giving students a sense of how new medical knowledge is built through the accumulation and review of new studies. This approach has the added bonus of increasing students' familiarity with the structure and nature of the increasingly available biomedical literature that may benefit their patients.…”