WikiProject Medicine

Welcome to WikiProject Medicine! We discuss, collaborate, and debate anything and everything relating to medicine and health on Wikipedia on our discussion page.
Everyone is welcome to join!

Meet the participants

Nashedpotato

Michelangelo1992

PsyWoman

Resources

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Guidelines

An introductory video about how to edit Wikipedia and medicine.

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and has a distinct style that may take some time getting used to.
It is important that articles use the best sources and content is given due weight. Different from scientific papers, Wikipedia medical and health content is preferably sourced to secondary sources over primary sources. Citing a review article is preferred over an original trial.
To get you started and to explain why this is important here are a number of guides and guidelines:

WP:MEDRS		WP:MEDMOS
Reliable Sources (medicine)		Manual of Style (medicine-related articles)
WP:MEDCOI		WP:MEDHOW
Conflicts of Interest		How to edit

Our guides complement Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines and take great care to explain why they are relevant.

More resources

Tools

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Tools

— Article alerts

— Recent changes

— Tasks

— Requests

— Popular articles

—Assessment criteria

{{}} — Templates

more...
There is also a tool to find all our sub pages here — only for the truly curious

Discussions

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Have a question?

Ask the WikiProject

View Other Discussions

Last updated by Reports bot 42 hours ago [Refresh]

religion/religious background - christian? catholic? on Talk:Katalin Karikó
09:08, 11 May 2025 (UTC)

Infobox on Talk:Autism
07:24, 11 May 2025 (UTC)

Definitely available in Australia on Talk:Ranitidine
06:34, 11 May 2025 (UTC)

Color of urobilinogen on Talk:Urobilinogen
05:22, 11 May 2025 (UTC)

View full list – Add this feed to your Watchlist

Metrics

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Top-importance articles at B-class or above as of 7 January 2023: 79% complete

Goal: 80 featured articles: 81.3% complete

Goal: 500 good articles: 79% complete

WikiProject Medicine assessment statistics

worklist • log • category

152 edits	List of common misconceptions
138 edits	Comstock Act of 1873
126 edits	Nicol Spence Galbraith
107 edits	2024 Tamil Nadu alcohol poisoning
99 edits	James Alison Glover
45 edits	Source control (respiratory disease)
39 edits	Jenner Medal of the Royal Society of Medicine
33 edits	List of pharmaceutical companies
32 edits	Simone Badal-McCreath
32 edits	Influenza A virus

These are the articles that have been edited the most within the last seven days. Last updated 26 June 2024 by HotArticlesBot.

MCOTM

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Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

Each month we select a Medical Collaboration of the Month to focus our efforts on. Topics may either relate to medical basic sciences (such as anatomy or biochemistry), or clinical medicine (such as illnesses and surgical procedures). The project aims to improve medicine articles, and to give editors an opportunity to collaborate. Anyone can nominate an article, or vote on nominees at our project page. The collaboration of the month for May 2025 is Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease! Visit its talk page to help coordinate our efforts.

Related Projects

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WikiProject
Anatomy

WikiProject
COVID-19

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Hospitals

WikiProject
Neuroscience

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Physiology

WikiProject
Veterinary medicine

Cochrane–Wikipedia
partnership

Last updated by SandyGeorgia 18 months ago [Refresh]

WikiProject Pharmacology (view related)
1520 articles in common

WikiProject Psychology (view related)
1096 articles in common

WikiProject Molecular and Cell Biology (view related)
1032 articles in common

WikiProject Women's Health (view related)
765 articles in common

WikiProject Chemicals (view related)
656 articles in common

View full list – Add this feed to your Watchlist

Wikidata WikiProject Medicine: the partner project on Wikidata

Wikipedia education program in medicine: partnership with medical schools and other health science education programs

Wiki Project Med Foundation: a nonprofit corporation promoting development of medical content including other language Wikimedia projects

Wiktionary WikiProject Medicine: sister project on Wiktionary

WikiJournal of Medicine: medical education resources

Wikiversity School of Medicine: medical education resources

Internet in a box: provides Wikipedia content where Internet is limited

Offline medicalWikipedia: offline access to Wikipedia's health content

About

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WikiProject Medicine was started in 2004 by Dr. Jacob de Wolff as WikiProject Clinical Medicine with the later branch WikiProject Preclinical Medicine. These merged and WikiProject Medicine has since been one of Wikipedia's most active WikiProjects. WP:MED as it is known aims to manage and help in curation of Wikipedia's medical articles. We write articles and discuss all manner of issues on our talk page: WT:MED.

Through the years we've built up a catalogue of sub-projects and task-forces which vary in their activity, you can find some of them at the task force page.

News mentions

2022 and older
Nov 9, 2022 Wikipedia, Once Shunned, Now Embraced in the Classroom
Mar 3, 2021 Wikipedia maintained high-quality COVID-19 coverage during first pandemic wave
May 24, 2020 The rise of Wikipedia as a source of medical information
Mar 15, 2020 How Wikipedia Prevents the Spread of Coronavirus Misinformation

2016 and older

Dec 6, 2016 Wikipedia Thinks It Has Facebook Beat in Handling Fake News
Dec 2, 2016 Wikipedia is the world’s largest medical resource, but crucial information is often missing
Nov 10, 2016 Meet Doctor Wikipedia
Nov 9, 2016 Oriya Medical Wikipedia app growing popular
Nov 3, 2016 Should You Use Wikipedia for Medical Information?
Aug 30, 2016 Is Wikipedia a High Quality Evidence-Based Resource?
Aug 9, 2016 Translators Without Borders press release
July 4 Two policies in Conflict? Signpost
Jun 29, 16 radio in Italy
May 24, 16 Why getting medical information from Wikipedia isn’t always a bad idea
Apr 24, 16 Update on EranBot, our new copyright violation detection bot
Apr 24, 16 Knowledge Engine and the Wales–Heilman emails
Mar 29, 16 Wikipedia’s coverage of essential vaccines is expanding
Mar 17, 2016 Thursday Thinkpiece: Kleefeld & Rattray on Editing Wikipedia for Law School Credit
The Telegraph Feb 2, 2016 Scientific journal retracts research copied from Wikipedia entry
Tech News, Jan 21, 2016 About talks in TW
Washington Post, Jan 15, 2016 [1]
The Register, Jan 12, 2016 [2]
PR Wire Nov 17, 2015 [3]
Nov 5, 2015 Washington Post [4]
Oct 29, 2015 Copy and Paste Bot
Sept 14 2015 10 Wikipedians
Aug 2015 Oxford University Press Plagiarized Wikipedia, Now Who the Hell Should I Believe?
Aug 2015 The Covert World of People Trying to Edit Wikipedia—for Pay The Atlantic
July 2015 Dynamed
May 2015 CFCF's final report
June 2, 2015 Making Wikipedia’s medical articles accessible in Chinese Signpost
May 19, 2015 Towards ‘Health Information for All’: Medical content on Wikipedia received 6.5 billion page views in 2013. / Signpost
Mar 11,2015 Wikipedia's medical errors and one doctor's fight to correct them
Mar 3, 2015 The Doctor Who’s Healing Wikipedia
Feb 25,2015 Text from Wikipedia good enough for Oxford University Press to claim as own Signpost
Feb 4, 2015 Is Wikipedia for sale? Signpost
January 27,2015Murray, Terry. "WikiProject Medicine making progress". CMAJ. doi:10.1503/cmaj.109-4982.
Jan 6,2015 Improving the Accuracy of Wikipedia’s Medical Information Philanthropy New York
Dec 3,2014 Medical Students Learn to Treat Ailing Wikipedia Entries
Nov 20, 2014 Keeping the facts straight
Nov 4, 2014 Global Ebola
Oct 29, 2014 SBM on Wikipedia in Every Language
Oct 26, 2014 Wikipedia Is Emerging as Trusted Internet Source for Information on Ebola
Oct 1, 2014 Wikipedia article published in peer-reviewed journal; Wikipedia in education Signpost
Oct 2nd, 2014 A Fight for Awareness in the Age of Globalization
Sept 3, 2014 Copy and Paste Bot Sign Post
Aug 27 2014 UK Blog
Aug 11 BMJ blog
Aug, 2014 Simi Sara Show
Aug 21, 2014 Wikipedia's medical errors and one doctor's fight to correct them
Aug 14, 2014 Wikimania: student medics get credit for webside manner
Aug 5,2014 Blog 5 ways Wikipedia’s health information is improving
July 31, 2014 Canadian doctor leads Wiki Project Med Foundation
Wikipedia, a valuable resource "tertiary"
June 23, 2014 Is Wikipedia’s medical content really 90% wrong?
June 2, 2014 Wikipedia for medicine — right or wrong? Australian Doctor
"Trust your doctor, not Wikipedia, say scientists". Retrieved 2 June 2014.
Davide Bennato (27 May 2014). "Ricerca e comunicazione amori difficili ma non impossibili". Retrieved 27 May 2014.
Mar 26th, 2014 Information on health, free for all with Wikipedia (Italian)
Mar 5th, 2014, The Atlantic, Doctors’ #1 Source for Healthcare Information: Wikipedia [5]
Feb 20th, 2014, National Journal, Wikipedia Is a Massively Popular (Yet Untested) Doctor [6]
Feb 19th, 2014, Hindustan Times [7]
Feb 12, 2014, Sleep Review [8]
Open Science Jan 22, 2014 [9]
IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics [10]
Signpost Oct 9, 2013 College credit for editing Wikipedia [11]
Center for Digital Education Oct 9, 2013 [12]
Motherboard [13]
The Atlantic Oct 1st, 2013 [14]
NYTs Aug 29th 2013 [15]
UCSF press release [16]
Reader's digest, Sept 2013 [17]
NIH blog July 17,2013 [18]
Signpost July 3 Wikipedia's medical collaborations gathering pace [19]
World Health Organization Bulletin, Jan 2013 [20]

older

Research

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Wikipedia can be a great resource for getting to know a field — and it can give you an encyclopaedic overview of a subject, acting as a spring-board letting you dive deeper. It should however not be used as your only source when performing research, and you should never blindly trust Wikipedia. Over the years a lot of research has been amassed surrounding the reliability and biases of Wikipedia. To see some of the studies that have been produced on the quality and scope of medical information on Wikipedia take a look at some of the research:

Academic studies of health information on Wikipedia

This is a list of academic articles related to the coverage of health and medical topics on Wikipedia. For general academic articles see Academic studies of Wikipedia. For academic studies about the use of Wikipedia in education, see Academic studies of Wikipedia in education. For popular media coverage of Wikipedia's medical content see the popular media list.