Wikipedia

Wikipedia
Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a free on-line encyclopedia which contains over 36,000 English language health-related articles. Wikipedia is written collaboratively by the people who use it. Articles related to human health are viewed over 10 million times a day across 286 languages on Wikipedia.

Cochrane has partnered with Wikipedia to improve health-related content that is accessed online. The goal of the Cochrane-Wikipedia project is to include Cochrane evidence and to ensure that health-related evidence presented in Wikipedia articles is accurate and unbiased. A 2019 Cochrane Learning Live Webinar on Wikipedia provides an overview of the project.

How to use Wikipedia to share your review findings

Cochrane Review Groups, Geographic Groups, and Fields are sharing their Cochrane review findings through Wikipedia as part of their knowledge translation work.

  • Visit Cochrane-Wikipedia Project: Getting Started for information on:

    - A step-by-step training resource for new Wikipedians
    - Information on how to create a Wikipedia account
    - An "Introduction to Medical Editing cheat sheet

    Once you have a Wikipedia account you can help by:
     
  • Adding New Evidence to Wikipedia: Add information from your Cochrane Review to Wikipedia, or choose a Cochrane Review from our list of Reviews that are not yet in Wikipedia (or from the Cochrane Library).
     
  • Keeping Wikipedia up to date with the latest evidence. Do your Cochrane Review findings add more information on an existing page? Visit Cochrane-Wikipedia update project for more information on how to update pages.
     
  • What content is appropriate to add? Cochrane evidence can be paraphrased from the Plain Language Summary, abstract, or full-text version of the review (as appropriate) and inserted into health-related Wikipedia articles with the Cochrane citation. This blog discusses how to improve the quality of Wikipedia using Cochrane evidence.

If you have any questions on how to get started, please contact the Wikipedia Consultant for Cochrane, Jennifer Dawson, at jdawson@cochrane.org

Wikipedia in different languages

Wikipedia includes health-related articles in 286 languages. There are presently active Cochrane-Wikipedia projects in English, French, Spanish, and Russian. See our Projects page for the latest information and links to these projects.

Examples of Wikipedia posts

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