In a post about Wikipedia in 2009 I suggested that initiatives like Ganfydor Medpedia, might be a solution to Wikipedia’s accuracy and credibility problems, because only health experts are allowed to edit or contribute to the content of these knowledge bases.
MedPedia is a more sophisticated platform than Ganfyd, which looks more like a simple medical encyclopedia. A similar online encyclopedia project with many medical topics, Google Knol, was discontinued by Google as of May 1, 2012.
But now it appears Medpedia may have followed Google KNOL into the same blind alley.
On its homepage Medpedia was described as a “long term, worldwide project to evolve a new model for sharing and advancing knowledge about health, medicine and the body.” It was developed in association with top medical schools and organizations such as Harvard, Stanford, American College of Physicians, and the NHS. Medpedia was running on the same software and under the same license as Wikipedia and aimed both at the public and the experts. Contrary to Wikipedia only experts were qualified to contribute to the main content (although others could suggest changes and new topics). [3, 4 , 5, 6] In contrast to many other medical wikis, Medpedia featured a directory of medical editor profiles with general and Medpedia-specific information. This is far more transparent than wikis without individual author recognition [5].
Although promising, Medpedia never became a real success. Von Muhlen wrote in 1999 [4] that there were no articles reporting success metrics for Medpedia or similar projects. In contrast, Wikipedia remains immensely popular among patients and doctors.
Health 2.0 pioneers like E-Patient Dave (@ePatientDave) and Bertalan Meskó (@berci) saw Medpedia’s Achilles heel right from the start:
We need Medpedia to provide reliable medical content? That’s what we are working on in Wikipedia.
I believe elitism kills content. Only the power of masses controlled by well-designed editing guidelines can lead to a comprehensive encyclopaedia.
E-patient Dave(who is a fierce proponent of participatory medicine where everyone, medical expert or not, works in partnership to produce accurate information), addresses his concern in his post
The title says it all. In Dave’s opinion it is “an error to presume that doctors inherently have the best answer” or as Dave summarizes his concern: “who will vet the vetters?”
In addition, Clay Shirky noted that some Wikipedia entries like the biopsy-entry were far more robust than the Medpedia entries [9,10 ].
Ben Toth on the other hand found the Atrial Fibrillation-Medpedia item better than the corresponding Wikipedia page in some respects, but less up-to-date [11].
In her Medpedia review in the JMLA medical librarian Melissa Rethlefsen [5] concludes that “the content of Medpedia is varied and not clearly developed, lacks topical breadth and depth and that it is more a set of ideals than a workable reference source. Another issue is that Medpedia pages never ranked high, which means its content was hardly findable in today’s Google-centric world.
She concludes that for now (2009) “it means that Wikipedia will continue to be the medical wiki of choice”.
I fear that this will be forever, for Medpedia ceased to exist.
‘It appears that Medpedia is now closed but there is no information about it closing. Their Facebook and Twitter feeds are still open but they have not been updated in a few years. Their webpage now goes to a spam site.
[me: ] I hope that you don’t mind that I use LinkedIn to ask you some questions about Medpedia.
{James:] I don’t mind at all!
Is Medpedia dead? And if so, why was it discontinued?
For now it is. We worked on it for 6 years, had a fantastic team of developers, had fantastic partners who supported us, had a fantastic core group of contributors like yourself, and I personally spent millions of dollars on it. In other words, we gave it a really good effort. But it never got the sort of scale it needed to become something important. So for the last two years, we kept looking for a new vision of what it could become, a new mission. We never found one, and it was expensive to keep running.
In the meantime, we had found a new mission that Medpedia could not be converted into, so we started a new company, Jiff, to pursue it. “Health Care in a Jiff” is the motto. Jiff continues the idea of digitizing healthcare, and making it simple and transparent for the individual, but goes after it in a very different way. More info about Jiff here: https://www.jiff.com and here https://www.jiff.com/static/news. Jiff has taken our time and attention, and hopefully will produce the kinds of benefits we were hoping to see from Medpedia.
Why weren’t people informed and was Medpedia quietly shut down?
We definitely could have done a better job with that! I apologize. We were under a tight time frame due to several things, such as people leaving the effort, technical issues around where the site was being hosted, and corporate and tax issues after 6 years of operating. So it was rushed, and we should have figured out a way to do a better job of communicating.
Couldn’t the redirection to the spam-site be prevented? And can you do something about it?
I didn’t know about that! I’ll look into it and find out what’s going on.*
Your LinkedIn profile says you’re still working for MedPedia. Why is that? Are there plans to make a new start, perhaps? And how?
Yes, I haven’t updated my LinkedIn profile in a while. I just made that change. We have no current plans to restart Medpedia. But we’re always looking for a new mission that can be self sustaining! Let me know if you have one.
And/or do you have (plans for) other health 2.0 initiatives?
Jiff is our main effort now, and there’s a wonderful CEO, Derek Newell running it.
I know you are a busy man, but I think it is important to inform all people who thought that Medpedia was a good initiative.
Thank you for saying you thought it was a good initiative. I did too! I just wish it had gotten bigger. I really appreciate your questions, and your involvement. Not all projects flourish, but we’ll all keep trying new ideas, and hopefully one will break out and make the big difference we hope for.
*somewhat later James gave an update about the redirection:
By the way, I asked about the redirect, and found out that that that page is produced by our registrar that holds the URL medpedia.com.
We wanted to put up the following message and I thought it was up:
“Medpedia was a great experiment begun in 2007.
Unfortunately, it never reached the size to be self sustaining, and it ceased operations in early 2013.
Thank you to all who contributed!”
I have one question left : what happened with all the materials the experts produced? Google Knol gave people time to export their contributions. Perhaps JamesCurrier can answer that question too.
I also wonder why nobody noticed that Medpedia was shut down. Apparently it isn’t missed.
Finally I would like to thank all wo have contributed to this “experiment”. As a medical librarian, who is committed to providing reliable medical information, I still find it a shame that Medpedia didn’t work.
I wish James Currier all the best with his new initiatives.
[a] Medpedia and [b] James Currier , last edited at 6/30/13* and 7/12/13 respectively (crunchbase.com)
Laurent M.R. & Vickers T.J. (2009). Seeking Health Information Online: Does Wikipedia Matter?, Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 16 (4) 471-479. DOI: 10.1197/jamia.M3059
von Muhlen M. & Ohno-Machado L. (2012). Reviewing social media use by clinicians, Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 19 (5) 777-781. DOI: 10.1136/amiajnl-2012-000990
Rethlefsen M.L. (2009). Medpedia, Journal of the Medical Library Association : JMLA, 97 (4) 325-326. DOI: 10.3163/1536-5050.97.4.024
Do you ever use Wikipedia? I do and so do many other people. It is for free, easy to use, and covers many subjects.
But do you ever use Wikipedia to look up scientific or medical information? Probably everyone does so once in a while. Dave Munger(Researchblogging) concluded a discussion on Twitter as follows:
“Wikipedia’s information quality is better than any encyclopedia, online or off. And, yes, it’s also easy to use”.
Wikipedia is an admirable initiative. It is a large online collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia written by contributors around the world.
But the key question is whether you can rely on Wikipedia as the sole source for medical, scientific or even popular information.
Well, you simply can’t and here are a few examples/findings to substantiate this point.
RANKING AND USE
E-patients
When you search for diabetes in Google (EN), Wikipedia’s entry about diabetes ranks second, below the American Diabetes Association Home Page. A recent study published in the J Am Med Inform Assoc [1] confirms what you would expect: that the English Wikipediais a prominent source of online healthinformation. Wikipedia ranked among the first ten results in more than 70%of search engines and health-keywords tested, and outranked other sources in case of rare disease-related keywords. Wikipedia’s articles were viewed more frequently than the corresponding MedlinePlus Topic pages. This corroborates another study that can be downloaded from the internet here [10]. This study by Envision Solutions, LLC, licensed under the Creative Commons License, concluded that the exposure of Internet user’s to health-related user-generated media (UGM) is significant, Wikipedia being the most reference resource on Google and Yahoo.
According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project*, 10 million US adults search online for information on health each day [1]. Most (66%) begin their research on a search engine like Yahoo or Google. In addition, Americans are saying that the information they find on the Internet is having an impact. According to Pew, “53% of health seekers report that their most recent health information session [influenced] how they take care of themselves or care for someone else.” In addition, 56% say the information they find online has boosted their confidence in their healthcare decision-making abilities.
In 2000, 46% of American adults had access to the internet, 5% of U.S. households had broadband connections, and 25% of American adults looked online for health information. Now, 74% of American adults go online, 57% of American households have broadband connections, and 61% of adults look online for health information.
Thus a lot of people look online for health care questions and are more inclined to use highly ranked sources.
This is not unique for Health topics but is a general phenomenon, i.e. see this mini-study performed by a curious individual: 96.6% of Wikipedia Pages Rank in Google’s Top 10 [12]. The extreme high traffic to Wikipedia due to search referrals has even been been denounced by SEO-people (see here) [13]: if you type “holiday” Wikipedia provides little value when ranking in the top 10: everybody knows what a holiday is 😉
A nightmare for most educators in the curriculum is that students rely on UGM or Web 2.0 sites as a source of medical information. Just walk along medical students as they work behind their computers and take a quick glance at the pages they are consulting. These webpages often belong to the above category.
‘Many students said I know I shouldn’t but….’ and then qualified that they used Wikipedia first because it was easy to understand, they felt it was reasonably reliable, and accessible. One student used it to search directly from her phone when on placement..
50% of the doctors use it!
But these are only medical students. Practicing doctors won’t use Wikipedia to solve their clinical questions, because they know where to find reliable medical information.
A recent qualitative study published in Int J Med Inform [2]examined the “Web 2.0” use by 35 junior physicians in the UK. Diaries and interviews encompassing 177 days of internet use or 444 search incidents, analyzed via thematic analysis. Although concepts are loosely defined (Web 2.0, internet and UMG are not properly defined, i.e. Google is seen as a web 2.0 tool (!) [see Annemarie’s critical review [16] the results clearly show that 89% of these young physicians use at least one “Web 2.0 tool” (including Google!) in their medical practice, with 80% (28/35) reporting the use of wikis. The visit of wiki’s is largely accounted for by visits to Wikipedia: this was the second most commonly visited site, used in 26% (115/44) of cases and by 70% (25/35) of all physicians.Notably, only one respondent made regular contribution to a medical wiki site.
The main motivation for using the Internet for information seeking was the accessibility and ease of use over other tools (like textbooks), the uptodateness, the broad coverage and the extras such as interactive immages. On the other hand most clinicians realized that there was a limitation in the quality or usefulness of information found. It is reassuring that most doctors used UGM like Wikipedia for background or open questions, to fulfill the need for more in depth knowledge on a subject, or to find information for patients, not for immediate solving of clinical questions.
Apparently some doctors also heavily rely on Wikipedia that they refer to Wikipedia articles in publications (see the Int. J Cardiol. PubMed [3] abstract below)!!
WHY WIKIPEDIA IS NOT (YET) A TRUSTWORTHY AND HIGH QUALITY HEALTH SITE
Whether the common use of Wikipedia by e-patient, medical students and doctors is disadvantageous depends on the quality and the trustworthiness of the Wikipedia articles, and that is in its turn dependent on who writes the articles.
Basically, the strength of Wikipedia is it weakness: anyone can write anything on any subject, and anyone can edit it, anonymously.
Negative aspects include its coverage (choice of subjects but also the depth of coverage), the “overlinking”, the sometimes frustating interactions between authors and editors, regularly leading to (often polite) “revision wars“, but above all the lack of ‘expert’ authors or peer review. This may result in incomplete, wrong or distorted information.
Positive aspects are its accessibility, currency, availability in many languages, and the collective “authorship” (which is an admirable concept).
Differences in the interests and attention of Wikipedia’s editors mean that some areas, in the traditional sciences, for example, are better covered than others. (…) Overall, we found that the degree to which Wikipedia is lacking depends heavily on one’s perspective. Even in the least covered areas, because of its sheer size, Wikipedia does well, but since a collection that is meant to represent general knowledge is likely to be judged by the areas in which it is weakest, it is important to identify these areas and determine why they are not more fully elaborated. It cannot be a coincidence that two areas that are particularly lacking on Wikipedia—law and medicine—are also the purview of licensed experts.
It is not unexpected though that Wikipedia’s topical coverage is driven by the interests of its users.
The actual coverage of medical subjects may vary greatly. In one study [5], abstract-format, 2007) Wikipedia entries were screened for the most commonly performed inpatient surgical procedures in the U.S. Of the 39 procedures, 35 were indexed on Wikipedia. 85.7% of these articles were deemed appropriate for patients. All 35 articles presented accurate content, although only 62.9% (n=22) werefree of critical omissions. Risks of the procedures were significantly underreported. There was a correlation between an entry’s quality and how often it was edited.
This study suggests that Wikipedia may be a useful point of engagement for consumers looking for drug information, but that it should be supplementary to, rather than the sole source of, drug information. This is due, in part, to our findings that Wikipedia has a more narrow scope, is less complete, and has more errors of omission versus the comparator database. Consumers relying on incomplete entries for drug information risk being ill-informed with respect to important safety features such as adverse drug events, contraindications, drug interactions, and use in pregnancy.
These errors of omission may prove to be a substantial and largely hidden danger associated with exclusive use of
user-edited drug information sources.
Alternatively, user-edited sites may serve as an effective means of disseminating drug information and are promising as a means of more actively involving consumers in their own care. However, health professionals should not use user-edited sites as authoritative sources in their clinical practice, nor should they recommend them to patients without knowing the limitations and providing sufficient additional information and counsel…
Not Evidence Based
German researches found [7], not surprisingly, that Wikipedia (as well as two major German statutory health insurances):
“…failed to meet relevant criteria, and key information such as the presentation of probabilities of success on patient-relevant outcomes, probabilities of unwanted effects, and unbiased risk communication was missing. On average items related to the objectives of interventions, the natural course of disease and treatment options were only rated as “partially fulfilled”. (..) In addition, the Wikipedia information tended to achieve lower comprehensibility. In conclusion(..) Wikipedia (..) does not meet important criteria of evidence-based patient and consumer information though…”
Wrong, misleading, inaccurate
All above studies point at the incompleteness of Wikipedia. Even more serious is the fact that some of the Wikipedia addings are wrong or misleading. Sometimes on purpose. The 15 biggest wikipedia blunders [23] include the death announcements of Ted Kennedy (when he was still alive), Robert Byrd and others. Almost hilarious are the real time Wikipedia revisions after the presumed death of Kennedy and the death of Ken Lay (suicide, murde, heart attack? [24).
In the field of medicine, several drug companies have been caught altering Wikipedia entries. The first drug company messing with Wikipedia was AstraZeneca. References claiming that Seroquel allegedly made teenagers “more likely to think about harming or killing themselves” were deleted by a user of a computer registered to the drug company [25], according to Times [26]. Employees of Abbott Laboratories have also been altering entries to Wikipedia to “eliminate information questioning the safety of its top-selling drugs.”(See WSJ-blog [27] , brandweeknrx.com [28], and recently Kevin MD[29])
These are “straightforward” examples of fraudulent material. But sometimes the Wikipedia articles are more subtly colored by positive or negative bias.
Take for instance the English entry on Evidence Based Medicine (in fact the reason why I started this post). Totally open-minded I checked the entry, which was automatically generated in one of my posts by Zemanta. First I was surprised by the definition of EBM:
Evidence-based medicine (EBM) aims to apply the best available evidence gained from the scientific method to medical decision making. It seeks to assess the quality of evidence of the risks and benefits of treatments (including lack of treatment).
instead of the usually cited Sacket-definition (this is only cited at the end of the paper):
“the practice of evidence based medicine means integrating individual clinical expertise with the best available external clinical evidence from systematic research”
In short, the whole article lacks cohesion: the definitions of EBM are not correct, there is too much emphasis on not directly relevant information (4 ways to grade the evidence and 3 statistical measures), the limitations are overemphasized (cf. chapter 7 with 6 in the Figure below) and put out of perspective.
Apparently this has also been noted by Wikipedia, because there is a notice on the Evidence Based Medicine Page saying:
This article has been nominated to be checked for its neutrality. Discussion of this nomination can be found on the talk page. (May 2009)
Now why in earth would some advocate of CAM write the Wikipedia EBM-entry? I can think of 4 (not mutually exclusive) reasons:
When you’re an EBM-nonbeliever or opponent this is THE chance to misinform readers about EBM (to the advantage of CAM).
The author was invited to write this entry.
No EBM-specialist or epidemiologist is willing to write the entry, or to write for Wikipedia in general (perhaps because they find Wikipedia lacks trustworthiness?)
EBM specialists/epidemiologists are not “allowed”/hindered to make major amendments to the text, let alone rewrite it.
According to Mr Naturopath point 2 is THE reason he wrote this article. Now the next question is “exactly by whom was he invited?” But the TALK-page reveals that Mr Naturapath makes it a tough job for other, better qualified writers, to edit the page (point 4). To see how difficult it is for someone to re-edit a page, please see the TALK-page. In fact, one look at this page discourages me from ever trying to make some amendments to any Wikpedia text.
SOLUTIONS?
Changes to Wikipedia’s organization
Wikipedia has long grasped that its Achilles heel is the free editability (see for instance this interview with Wikipedia’s founder [30]). Therefore, “WikiProjects” was initiated to help coordinate and organize the writing and editing of articles on a certain topic, as well as “Citizendium” which is an English-languagewiki-based freeencyclopedia project aimed to improve the Wikipedia model by providing a “reliable” encyclopedia. “It hopes to achieve this by requiring all contributors to use their real names, by strictly moderating the project for unprofessional behavior, by providing what it calls “gentle expert oversight” of everyday contributors, and also through its “approved articles,” which have undergone a form of peer-review by credentialed topic experts and are closed to real-time editing.”
Starting this fall Wikipedia will launch an optional feature called “WikiTrust” will color code every word of the encyclopedia based on the reliability of its author and the length of time it has persisted on the page: Text from questionable sources starts out with a bright orange background, while text from trusted authors gets a lighter shade.
The Wikipedia EBM article is within the scope of these two projects, and this is good news.However, Wikipedia still clings to the idea that: “Everyone is welcome to join in this endeavor (regardless of medical qualifications!).” In my opinion, it would be better if Wikipedia gave precedence to experts instead of hobbyists/ people from another field, because the former can be expected to know what they are talking about. It is quite off-putting for experts to contribute. See this shout-out:
Who are these so-called experts who will qualify material? From what I’ve seen so far, being an academic expert in a particular field hardly protects one from edit wars–Julie and 172 are two primary examples of this. Meanwhile, the only qualification I have seen so far is that they have a B.A. Gimme a friggin’ break! (and before I get accused of academic elitism, I make it known that I dropped out of college and spend an inordinate amount of time at work correcting the BS from the BAs, MAs, and PhDs).
While anyone can still edit entries, the site is testing pages that require changes to be approved by an experienced Wikipedia editor before they show up, the so called Flagged protection and patrolled revisions. (see Wikimedia) This proposal is only for articles that are currently under normal mechanisms of protection (i.e. the Obama-article cannot be edited by a newcomer).
Although this seems logic, it is questionable whether “experienced” editors are per definition better qualified than newcomers. A recent interesting analysis of the Augmented Social Cognition group [31], (cited in the Guardian [32]) shows a slowdown in growth of Wikipedia activity, with the activity slightly declining in all classes of editors except for the highest-frequency class of editors (1000+ edits). Here is an increase in their monthly edits.
In addition the study shows growing resistance from the Wikipedia community to new content. The total percentage of reverted edits increased steadily over the years, but more interestingly, low-frequency or occasional editors experienced a visibly greater resistance compared to high-frequency editors . Together this points at a growing resistance from the Wikipedia community to new content, especially when the edits come from occasional editors.
This is more or less in line with an earlier finding [9] showing that Wikipedia members feel more comfortable expressing themselves on the net than off-line and scored lower on agreeableness and openness compared to non-Wikipedians, a finding that was interpreted as consistent with the possibility that contributing to Wikipedia serves mainly egocentric motives.
A less noncommital approach is the demand to “Publish in Wikipedia or perish”, as described in Nature News[9]. “Anyone submitting to a section of the journal RNA Biology will, in the future, be required to also submit a Wikipedia page that summarizes the work. The journal will then peer review the page before publishing it in Wikipedia.” The project is described in detail here [10] and the wiki can be viewed here
Wiki’s for experts.
One possible solution is that scientist and medica experts contribute to wiki’s other than the Wikipedia. One such wiki is the wiki-surgery [5]. PubDrug, RxWiki , WikiProteins [11] and Gene Wiki [12] are other examples. In general, scientists are more inclined to contribute to these specialists wiki’s, that have oversight and formal contributions by fellow practitioners (this is also true for the RNA-wiki)
A medical Wikipedia
Yet another solution is a medical wikipedia, such as Ganfyd or Medpedia . Ganfyd is written by medical professionals. To qualify to edit or contribute to the main content of Medpedia approved editors must have an M.D., D.O., or Ph.D. in a biomedical field. Others, however, may contribute by writing in suggestions for changes to the site using the “Make a suggestion” link at the top of each page. Suggestions are reviewed by approved editors. Whether these medical wikipedias will succeed will depend on the input of experts and their popularity: to what extent will they be consulted by people with health questions?
I would like to end with a quote from Berci during twitterview (link in Wikipedia):
@Berci : @diariomedico And as Wikipedians say, Wikipedia is the best source to start with in your research, but should never be the last one. #DM1 9 months ago
REFERENCES
Scientific Articles
Laurent, M., & Vickers, T. (2009). Seeking Health Information Online: Does Wikipedia Matter? Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 16 (4), 471-479 DOI: 10.1197/jamia.M3059
Hughes, B., Joshi, I., Lemonde, H., & Wareham, J. (2009). Junior physician’s use of Web 2.0 for information seeking and medical education: A qualitative study International Journal of Medical Informatics, 78 (10), 645-655 DOI: 10.1016/j.ijmedinf.2009.04.008
Lee, C., Teo, C., & Low, A. (2009). Fulminant dengue myocarditis masquerading as acute myocardial infarction International Journal of Cardiology, 136 (3) DOI: 10.1016/j.ijcard.2008.05.023
Halavais, A., & Lackaff, D. (2008). An Analysis of Topical Coverage of Wikipedia Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13 (2), 429-440 DOI: 10.1111/j.1083-6101.2008.00403.x
Devgan, L., Powe, N., Blakey, B., & Makary, M. (2007). Wiki-Surgery? Internal validity of Wikipedia as a medical and surgical reference Journal of the American College of Surgeons, 205 (3) DOI: 10.1016/j.jamcollsurg.2007.06.190
Clauson, K., Polen, H., Boulos, M., & Dzenowagis, J. (2008). Scope, Completeness, and Accuracy of Drug Information in Wikipedia Annals of Pharmacotherapy, 42 (12), 1814-1821 DOI: 10.1345/aph.1L474 (free full text)
Mühlhauser I, & Oser F (2008). [Does WIKIPEDIA provide evidence-based health care information? A content analysis] Zeitschrift fur Evidenz, Fortbildung und Qualitat im Gesundheitswesen, 102 (7), 441-8 PMID: 19209572
Amichai–Hamburger, Y., Lamdan, N., Madiel, R., & Hayat, T. (2008). Personality Characteristics of Wikipedia Members CyberPsychology & Behavior, 11 (6), 679-681 DOI: 10.1089/cpb.2007.0225
Daub, J., Gardner, P., Tate, J., Ramskold, D., Manske, M., Scott, W., Weinberg, Z., Griffiths-Jones, S., & Bateman, A. (2008). The RNA WikiProject: Community annotation of RNA families RNA, 14 (12), 2462-2464 DOI: 10.1261/rna.1200508
Mons, B., Ashburner, M., Chichester, C., van Mulligen, E., Weeber, M., den Dunnen, J., van Ommen, G., Musen, M., Cockerill, M., Hermjakob, H., Mons, A., Packer, A., Pacheco, R., Lewis, S., Berkeley, A., Melton, W., Barris, N., Wales, J., Meijssen, G., Moeller, E., Roes, P., Borner, K., & Bairoch, A. (2008). Calling on a million minds for community annotation in WikiProteins Genome Biology, 9 (5) DOI: 10.1186/gb-2008-9-5-r89
Huss, J., Orozco, C., Goodale, J., Wu, C., Batalov, S., Vickers, T., Valafar, F., & Su, A. (2008). A Gene Wiki for Community Annotation of Gene Function PLoS Biology, 6 (7) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0060175
Other Publications, blogposts (numbers in text need to be adapted)
Wikipedia, has become a rich and complex source of documents linked to each other. When you’re looking for a subject and you follow several links you easily loose the overview.
For instance, when I used wikipedia the other day to gather background information about Mimivirus and the origin of life (for the Sputnik virus-news, see posthere), I hip hopped from Mimivirus to Virus to Bacteriophage back to Virus and forth to Life… Origins and Lifeformdebate. Thus, it is not always straight forward to find the information you are really looking for or to keep track of where you are in the sheer bulk of information.
But now there is Wikimindmap. With this free tool you can easily make an overview of the Wiki content on a specific subject. The wikimindmap is inspired by the mindmap technique, a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged radially around a central key word or idea. Mindmapping is often used to visualize, structure and classify ideas to aid learning.
Below is the wikimindmap for virus.
I choose the English wikipedia to make the wikimindmap. If you typ the plural form “viruses” (which is not the correct entry-term) you see the correct singular form linked to it. By clicking the green arrows you can make “virus” the main topic and you get the full mindmap shown below.
Moving you mouse over boxes, you see more information about the topic groups. Topic groups (+) can be opened by clicking at the boxes. Clicking on the text will bring you to the corresponding position in the Wiki (in a separate tab).
Another nice feature is that you can load the mindmap directly toFreemind (click here to download the software first), a free mind-mapping Java. In Freemind you can edit the mindmap to use it for educating purposes for instance. However you can no longer link to the corresponding wiki-page (without adding the link yourself). My first attempt to make a Freemind mindmap of the virus-wiki is shown below. In fact the end-result is like an organised (non-random) Wordle-graphic (see this post).
Of course you can also use Freemind to create your own mindmaps.
Wikipedia is een rijke en complexe bron van allerlei aan elkaar gelinkte pagina’s. Wanneer je aan het zoeken bent en verschillende links volgt kom je al gauw op zijpaden uit en is het moeilijk het overzicht te houden.
Toen ik laatste bijvoorbeeld in Wikipedia wat achtergrondinformatie zocht over mimi- en andere virussen en de definitie van leven (in verband met het Spoetnik virus-nieuws, zie hier voor bericht), hopte ik van Mimivirus naar Virus naar Bacteriophage terug naar Virus and verder naar Life… Origins en Lifeformdebate. Hoe al deze termen samenhangen en hoe je er doorheen bent gewandeld is vaak niet meer duidelijk.
Hierboven (engels gedeelte) de wikimindmap voor ‘virus’.
Ik koos de Engelse wikipedia om de wikimindmap te maken. Als je het meervoud “viruses” opgeeft zie je de juiste term, “virus” in enkelvoud ermee verbonden. Door op de groene pijlen te klikken maak je virus tot het centrale thema en krijg de wikimindmap van het figuur hierboven.
Als je met de muis over de rechthoeken schuift, verschijnt er meer informatie over de term. Onderwerpsgroepen kun je open- (+) of dichtklikken (-). Door op de tekst te klikken kom je op de bijbehorende wiki.
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