UC San Francisco soon will be the first U.S. medical school at which medical students can earn academic credit for editing medical content on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is one of the most widely used medical references in the world and the most consulted source for many health topics. But medical entries can lack reliable sources and have gaps in content.

Amin Azzam, MD, MA, will be teaching a UCSF course in which students will

contribute and edit medical information on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia generates more than 53 million page views just for articles about medications each month, and is second to Google as the most frequently used source by junior physicians, said Amin Azzam, MD, MA, an associate clinical professor at the UCSF School of Medicine and an instructor for the new class. Were recognizing the impact Wikipedia can have to educate patients and health care providers across the globe, and want users to receive the most accurate publicly available, sound medical information possible.

One of the key skills medical students are expected to acquire is the ability to seek, evaluate and interpret the medical literature for themselves, their peers and their patients. In traditional medical school courses, first and second year students are taught this skill in small group classroom sessions, while third and fourth year students are expected to apply this in the hospital wards and outpatient clinics.

Writing and editing Wikipedia articles requires a similar skill set, and teaches our students how to write for a broader audience and communicate with patients using consumer-friendly language rather than doctor jargon, said Azzam.

Enrolled medical students will edit articles remotely, adding images, reviewing new edits, adding citations to support unreferenced text, and providing a form of peer review. Professors can track the edits and changes made to each Wikipedia page to monitor the evolution of the content.

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UCSF First U.S. Medical School to Offer Credit For Wikipedia Articles