AskDrWiki Logo

Our new logo is now finished!

We chose this as our new logo because we feel the different pieces of the caduceus represent all of the different contributions to AskDrWiki. It is our hope that these pieces through mass collaboration can collectively come together to advance medicine by creating an extraordinary wealth of information.

We are sure that there will be challenges with the use of medical wikis but we feel that we will also create tremendous opportunities. Medical wikis are more than just a piece of software that enable multiple people to add and edit articles. They are a tool that will bring together the talents of dispersed physicians to create a new era of collaborative medicine.

Wiki for physicians gains foothold

Nice article by Ken Terry in the Medical Economics Infotech Bulletin published about AskDrWiki discussing the differences between AskDrWiki and Evidenced Based Medicine Sites such as Uptodate, BMJ Clinical Evidence, and DynaMed.

The Full article can be found at the Medical Economics Website.

Wikitext Tutorial for Ask Dr Wiki

Since Medical Wikis have been attracting more attention this week we have received some great suggestions on ways we can improve this technology. We are always open minded to comments and we feel that the only way for this technology to succeed is to take input from the medical blogospshere and implement these changes.

The main complaint and concern we have heard is the difficulty in entering Wikitext. Wikitext language or wiki markup is a markup language that offers a simplified alternative to HTML and is used to write pages in wiki websites such as AskDrWiki and Wikipedia. Wikitext is very easy to learn, and most contributors can learn it quickly, but does present a hurdle that users have to cross before they start contributing.

Given this complaint we have made a short power point presentation to try to educate our users on how to enter Wikitext and we hope this will help some of our users get started.

We hope that in the future Mediawiki, which is the software that AskDrWiki and Wikipedia uses, will implement a good WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor, but until then we will teach our medical contributors wikitext. After years of college, medical school, and postgraguate training we feel they can learn.

Ask Dr Wiki in the News

This week has been an exciting week for Brian Jefferson and I since the Plain Dealer article by Zachary Lewis was published on the front page. We have had an enormous number of visitors because of this article and we have received some great suggestions from visitors as well as from blogs. Over the next week we will start implementing some of these changes in the hopes of making a medical wiki that provides safe and up to date information.

Some changes and suggestions that we will implement.
1. Creation of an editorial policy as per the suggestion of David Rothman
2. Create a list of all contributing editors with their pertinent credentials
3. Creation of a New Logo
4. Protection of Pages on the Wiki that contain any medication dosages so these pages can not be altered.
5. Addition of a clinical pharmacist to the editorial board.
6. Addition of a AskDrWiki page on Wikipedia.
7. Addition of a General Surgery, ENT, Vascular Surgery, Dermatology, Emergency Medicine, and Basic Science Editors

We would also like to thank Ves Dimov from Clinical Cases and Images , David Rothman from davidrothman.net, and Bertalan Mesko from scienceroll.com for their advice.

Other comments this week on AskDrWiki include:
eHealth and The Krafty Librarian