Doctors, Ph.D.s to edit new Wikipedia of medical information

Computerworld - A project launched today aims to create what is in essence a medical version of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia focused on explaining conditions, drugs, procedures, medical facilities and other topics written by physicians and Ph.D.s.

The Medpedia Project launched a preview of its site on Wednesday with the support of medical heavyweights such as the Harvard Medical School, the Stanford School of Medicine, the University of Michigan Medical School and the University of California Berkeley School of Public Health.

These schools and other organizations have agreed to provide content and to urge their employees to sign up to be editors of the new site, which is scheduled to go live with 1,000 pages of information by the end of the year.

The site, which is built with the same open-source software that runs Wikipedia, will be written and edited by volunteer medical doctors or experts with Ph.D. degrees, noted James Currier, Medpedia's founder and chairman. The site will provide profiles of each editor, including their background and areas of expertise, he added.

The volunteer editors will also have to disclose any compensation received from key outside entities such as pharmaceutical companies. Experts can now apply on the site to be editors. Those selected will work with committees organized by specialties like pediatric oncology or dermatology to update and edit Medpedia Web pages.

Currier, who has worked on creating online communities since the 1990s, said that Medpedia aims to help apply the collaborative approach that user-generated content brings to Web 2.0 sites to the medical community, which has traditionally been governed by the hierarchical, top-down approach of doctors handing down information to patients. Currier also founded Tickle Inc., a psychological and self-assessment testing company that was sold to Monster Worldwide Inc. in 2004 for more than $90 million.

While the Medpedia plans initially received a "tepid" response from some in the medical community, interest increased when users learned that the content would be created only by fully vetted and licensed experts, according to Currier.

Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus Development Corp. and the founding chair of the Mozilla Foundation, also supports the effort as a member of the Medpedia board of advisors, Currier said.

Currier said that the bottom-up approach made popular by Wikipedia and other social networks is perfectly suited to the Medpedia goal of creating and interlinking content about 13,000 drugs and 30,000 medical conditions.

"That problem alone is too complex for a top-down hierarchy," he said. "Whenever you have a very complex, interrelated ever-changing body of knowledge like medicine, it is a perfect marriage with this bottom-up, collaborative process we've seen on the Web. As [the editors] contribute small bits, the sum total is much greater than anything a directed system could produce. If there is a collaborative source, it will not ever be perfect, but it will be the best we could ever do just from a mathematical perspective."