Being physicians, we need constant reading, researching and thriving for betterment in the way we manage our patients. In the old days, doctors used to go to seminars, attend conferences and have lectures on the latest updated literature every once in a while. Gone are those days. Now most of physicians use internet and medical apps for keeping themselves up-to-date with latest developments in medicine. But we still a lack a medical encyclopedia which is updated and run by doctors. Although many physician and non-physician based companies took the initiative to start a wiki-type encyclopedia most of them eventually failed.
I think part of the reason in failing of a medical wiki is to be having a very general broad approach of “all-in-one specialities”. One wiki cannot convince all speciality physicians to agree on a certain guidelines or criteria for diagnosing, managing or screening certain conditions. As most of national sub-speciality organization even differ on certain guidelines, this hinder the making of a large all-in-one medical encyclopedia.
The best approach to have a successful and promising medical wiki is to have a specialized-wiki in a medical sub-speciality much like HemOnc.org where physicians from the same speciality can make a wiki. Started by Peter Yang, MD who is a fellow at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, this medical wiki specializes in developing an encyclopedia of hematology/oncology diseases. Till now, it has approximately 344 active articles related to their speciality and approximately 815 registered users who are editing it.
Although its new around on internet, who knows this medical wiki can develop into the largest hematology/oncology reference edited by free-lancing physicians.
After reviewing this wiki,I would suggest two things to the founders of this wiki. First, references should be added at the end of the articles instead of being at the end of each section. This will make the reading easier and more productive. Second, there should be some kind of verification of the users being registered, so that only medical professionals can edit this wiki.
I hope this wiki becomes successful and promising for the coming hematologists, which only time can tell. Lets see how this wiki turns out to be in next few years.
If you have any comments about this wiki, please write down below in comments section.
