Cochrane–Wikipedia Initiative

Special report

Cochrane–Wikipedia Initiative

Wikipedia is a powerful public health knowledge-translation tool. Across all languages, medical-related Wikipedia articles receive over 10 million visits per day from around the world.^[1] To improve the quality of health-related Wikipedia articles, the Cochrane-Wikipedia Initiative was developed in 2014. Presently, there are over 2000 uses of Cochrane Reviews in Wikipedia. Many Cochrane Groups are training Wikipedia editors and developing new ways to share high-quality evidence on Wikipedia. Wiley and the Cochrane Library have distributed over 85 free accounts to Wikipedians to support the sharing of Cochrane evidence on Wikipedia.

What is Cochrane?

Cochrane is a global non-governmental organization that works with a network of contributors from around the world. These collaborative teams produce Cochrane Reviews, a high-quality source of health-related information. Cochrane Reviews help people make informed decisions about treatment options by providing a summary of the best evidence in the field. Cochrane Reviews are peer-reviewed, credible, and unbiased (Cochrane does not accept funding from commercial sponsors or other potential conflicts of interest, for example). Cochrane Reviews meet Wikipedia’s reliable sources for medical articles criteria WP:MEDRS.

Improve the evidence base of Wikipedia articles using Cochrane evidence

Pneumonia was updated with new evidence from a Cochrane Review thanks to this initiative. See JenOttawa's Cochrane-Wikipedia dashboard for more.

Many content errors in Wikipedia articles are due to not enough skilled editors inserting new evidence.^[2] A new Cochrane project is tackling this! We have created a Wikipedia project page that includes a list of all the Cochrane Reviews not presently in Wikipedia. Volunteers will be directed to the project page, given Wikipedia-editing support, and encouraged to “be bold” (Wikipedia-style) and select Cochrane Reviews to insert into Wikipedia. There are over 5000 reviews on the list, and while not all of the reviews will have an obvious home in Wikipedia, it is our goal to work through the list over the next 12 months and add in new Cochrane content. We are recruiting editors for this new task through Cochrane's TaskExchange or visit the project page directly and start editing!

Keeping Cochrane evidence up to date in Wikipedia articles

Cochrane Reviews are updated regularly based on need and updated reviews receive a new citation on MedLine. Once these updates are published, the next step is to update the citation within the Wikipedia article and make sure that the new conclusions are reflected on Wikipedia. Out of date Cochrane Reviews are flagged automatically in Wikipedia with the "Cochrane-Update-Bot", that is now run once a month. This volunteer task does not take a lot of time to perform, but the potential impact is very large. Between May 2017–October 2017, volunteers updated 340 Wikipedia articles and the articles have already received close to 32 million views. Please check our project updates page for articles newly eligible to update.

If you are interested in becoming involved or want more information, please visit the Cochrane-Wikipedia Initiative project page or contact User:JenOttawa.

Jennifer Dawson works with Cochrane’s Communications and External Affairs team as a Wikipedia Consultant. Her role includes maintaining and building further relations with Wikipedia, connecting new editors to the Wikipedia community, and supporting requests for engagement in Wikipedia work from the Cochrane community.

^ Heilman, James M.; West, Andrew G. (2015-03-04). "Wikipedia and medicine: quantifying readership, editors, and the significance of natural language". Journal of Medical Internet Research. 17 (3): e62. doi:10.2196/jmir.4069. ISSN 1438-8871. PMC 4376174. PMID 25739399.
^ Shafee, Thomas; Masukume, Gwinyai; Kipersztok, Lisa; Das, Diptanshu; Häggström, Mikael; Heilman, James (November 2017). "Evolution of Wikipedia's medical content: past, present and future". Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. 71 (11): 1122–1129. doi:10.1136/jech-2016-208601. ISSN 1470-2738. PMC 5847101. PMID 28847845.

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5 February 2018 (all comments)

Op-ed

Discuss this story

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Cochrane has been a great partner for wiki editors in the field of medicine and for Wikipedia's public image in general. I edit Wikipedia's medical articles and do outreach to health organizations to invite them to edit Wikipedia articles. Many organizations already imagine that Cochrane is the standard for conservative and non-controversial health information, and when I mention that Cochrane itself has a wiki partnership, the fact of that collaboration goes a long way toward persuading other organizations to be involved in editing wiki. JenOttawa has been a great go-between for explaining Wiki to Cochrane and Cochrane to wiki contributors. These kinds of collaborations are invaluable for developing Wikipedia with the best possible source material. Blue Rasberry (talk) 16:38, 6 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
As encouraging as this article might be, I am concerned that it generates more publicity than actual content additions. Please don't get me wrong, I use Cochrane all the time. I was a little confused about this announcement between WP and Cochrane because Cochrane's content was accessible before the partnership. I am also taking a look at the list generated here by Jen to see what I can do to help. The first link I opened and evaluated was about evidence that was inconclusive and it stated that more research was needed resulting no relevant information that could be added to a WP article. Editors are viewing this Cochrane to-do list at rate of 5 views per day. This was calculated by subtracting the number of total edits (which, of course are counted as page views) from the total page views since the creation of the list. Admittedly, this may not be the best way to evaluate the impact of the list and our partnership with Cochrane. Only five editors have edited the page to indicate that they have added or evaluated the content of the Cochrane articles listed on the page. I guess what I am saying is that more eyes have read this Signpost article than have given the Cochrane list a look. The results have been better with another project of Jen's and the WikiEd Foundation. Student editors have added more medical content in a week's time than the five editors working on the Cochrane list have added in the past 111 days. I have another theory. It is a rare thing for a medical editor to create content that is listed in a 'to-do' created by another editor. Very little collaboration occurs between WP medical editors to improve medical content unless you count reversions, removing vandalism, fascinating talk page discussions, deletions and disappearing references when content is merged. Our problem is not accessing Cochrane reviews - our problem is retaining medical editors and creating a positive environment for those who want to add content. I can explain it from another perspective: medical editors are so busy fighting vandalism and updating information it is difficult to expect them to add content based upon the list generated by Cochrane. I remain positive and will do what I can to incorporate Cochrane reviews on our list, but I am not optimistic about the partnership actually improving medical articles. Sorry to be a party pooper. Best Regards, Barbara (WVS) ✐ ✉ 22:30, 6 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I review a lot of edits to medical articles, and have seen an up tick in new editors added good summaries of Cochrane reviews to Wikipedia over the last couple of years. The effort to update articles via that list is just one effort via Cochrane. IMO Jen and Cochrane have been doing an excellent job. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 07:25, 13 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

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