Medical Wiki Backed by Prominent Colleges Will Go Live by Year's End

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By MARIA JOSÉ VIÑAS

Medpedia, a new online medical encyclopedia to be written and edited by a collaborative group of thousands, with support from several leading medical schools, is calling for volunteers. But not everyone will be accepted. Only those who hold an M.D. or Ph.D. in a biomedical field need apply.

That is one way in which the ambitious project, which plans to go live by the end of this year, hopes to set itself apart from existing medical Web sites. In return for contributors' efforts, Medpedia expects to provide them with a reward. Contributing to the encyclopedia will be a career-booster, its founders say, and participants could gain international reputations as experts.

The project is backed by medical institutions like Harvard Medical School, Stanford School of Medicine, the University of California at Berkeley School of Public Health, and the University of Michigan Medical School, as well as the National Institutes of Health, the American College of Physicians, and several other organizations.

Medpedia is the brainchild of James Currier, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and one of the first proponents of user-generated media. Mr. Currier says his encyclopedia will be the most complete and up-to-date health site online.

"The breadth of information we can generate over three or four years is much broader, since we'll have tens of thousands of people with different expertise working on the project," Mr. Currier says.

Mr. Currier, a father of four, said the idea for Medpedia was born a few years ago when, every time one of his kids got sick, he spent a sleepless night surfing the Web for medical information. He realized that there was nothing in the health field that was comparable to a major collaborative online project.

"It seemed very underdeveloped, like stepping back to 1997," says Mr. Currier, who is managing and financing the Medpedia project through Ooga Labs, his primary company. He expects to bring in money from private donors and foundations, as well as from advertisements on the Web site.

Medpedia aims to create pages for more than 30,000 known medical conditions, as well as for the thousands of drugs being prescribed each year. All the available information on a subject will be presented in a single entry, and each topic will have an accessible version for the lay public and a more technical account for health professionals and other knowledgeable readers.

Mr. Currier says the wiki format will allow many links between topics, fast updates on the latest advances in medicine, and the use of translation tools that will make the information available to people in other countries.

Alexander M.C. Halavais, an assistant professor of communications at Quinnipiac University who has done research on Wikipedia's accuracy, says that how Medpedia deals with building consensus on controversial issues will be a critical factor in its success or failure.

T. Scott Plutchak, director of the Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, says that although Medpedia looks like a "really exciting and interesting effort," there has already been an increase in the number of authoritative and well-managed consumer information Web sites during the last few years.

He said medical librarians will be monitoring the evolution of Medpedia. If the project complies with the Medical Librarians Association's quality standards for health-information Web sites — which include easily identifiable site sponsors as well as frequent updates — the association will recommend it to the public.

On the subject of building consensus on controversial issues, Mr. Currier says that "it will evolve over time, and the community will shape it." He points out that each entry will have a debate page attached and that "the community will monitor that page closely," and over time, "will specify new features and language and community norms as we learn how best to handle these controversial medical issues."

Linda Hawes Clever, an adviser to the project and a clinical professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, has been working on ways to lure academics to Medpedia, emphasizing how the medical wiki could help advance their careers. Since the encyclopedia's contributors will create and join committees with areas of expertise, they could become known worldwide as experts in their field, Dr. Clever says.

Conflicts of Interest?

The editors will be screened for their credentials and, more importantly, to rule out financial conflicts of interest. The application Web site already asks prospective editors to disclose any contributions they might receive "for expressing their views as a member to Medpedia.com." But Dr. Clever says she doesn't like that wording and will suggest switching to a formula similar to what medical journals use.

Mr. Currier says Medpedia will have additional mechanisms to ensure that the editors are not biased, including allowing medical professionals to anonymously report conflicts of interest they are aware of. He says editors and users would also be fast to notice and call attention to sketchy edits, such as suspicious treatment recommendations, and such incidents would be recorded forever in the editor's profile.

"In a few years, Medpedia will be a safer environment than the real world because so many eyes will be watching," Mr. Currier says.

Besides the educational value to consumers, Medpedia will give health professionals a venue to learn from questions raised by the Web site's patient groups, says Anthony L. Komaroff, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and editor-in-chief of Harvard Health Publications.

Harvard is contributing consumer-health content that will accompany Medpedia's Web pages but won't be available for editing. Dr. Komaroff says he plans to find out what matters to patients by monitoring how the primary wiki evolves, and spotting whether information gets included there that the Harvard developers had initially discarded for their version.

"As a practicing physician, I learn from my patients all the time because I've read about their diseases," says Dr. Komaroff. "But they live with them."

The National Institutes of Health and the American College of Physicians have contributed to the project with health content that will be editable and expandable after the Web site goes live. The information will be available for everybody to use for noncommercial purposes.

First reactions to the Medpedia project announcement seem enthusiastic: The online-encyclopedia team received about 3,000 applications during the project's first 24 hours.