A group of American medical schools is working on a project to essentially collect and organize all medical knowledge in a Wikipedia-like form. Access to MedPedia will be available to all, but editing rights will be limited to M.D.’s and Ph.D.’s in relevant fields of research. Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and Berkeley will kick off the site with initial content and work with the rest of the medical community to make it comprehensive. With that in mind, the project organizers are calling on all M.D’s and Ph.D’s to register to become editors of what they believe will be the largest and most complete encyclopedia of medicine in history.
From the press release:
Over the next few years, the growing community of Editors on Medpedia will create and interlink Web pages for the more than 30,000 known diseases and conditions, the more than 10,000 drugs being prescribed each year, the thousands of medical procedures being performed and the millions of medical facilities around the world. These pages will provide insight into the latest health and medical discoveries along with photographs, video, sound, and images. The site has been designed so that everything on a subject will be simple to access. The main topic pages will be written in language the general public can easily understand, and each topic page will have with it a “Technical” page for professionals to discuss the same topic in more clinical and scientific language. Medpedia will constantly improve in real time, keeping up to date with discoveries in health and medicine.
In anticipation of its launch later in 2008, today Medpedia is calling for the world’s qualified M.D.s, biomedical research Ph.D.s, and clinicians to go to www.medpedia.com to apply to become Editors of content. Only licensed medical professionals and organizations in good standing who are screened through a rigorous internal review process will be approved to provide and edit information.
Press release: MEDPEDIA ANNOUNCED, WORLD’S LARGEST COLLABORATIVE ONLINE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF MEDICINE AND HEALTH…
MedPedia…