Wikipedia For The Medical Editor

NOT AVAILABLE FOR AY2026-2027

Department of Health Sciences Education

  • Course Information

    Course Number: RHSE665

    Prerequisites: Completion of Phase 1

    Length of Time: 4 weeks

    Phase Availability: Phase 2 and Phase 3

    Credit Type: Open

    Call: No

  • Contact Information

    Program Directors: Maureen Richards, PhD; Kevin Wombacher, PhD

    Coordinator/Scheduling: Allison King (aking75@uic.edu)

    Location: Online

Narrative Description: This course will be offered to third- and fourth-year medical students to enhance their communication skills as it pertains to explaining complex medical conditions, treatments, and healthcare systems to non-medically trained individuals. Being able to successfully communicate complex medical information to patients is an invaluable skill for students and physicians to have. This course will help develop the ability of students to communicate with individuals who have a lower health literacy level. Students will also learn how to condense information from secondary resources into best practice guides using systematic reviews, literature reviews, and foundation papers to update wiki-articles.

Learning Objectives:

  1. Discuss neutrality, conflict of interest and bias avoidance in scientific writing and discussing medicine with patients and society.
  2. Identify resources that provide a broad understanding of a topic and synthesize that information to educate non-medical educated individuals on a given topic.
  3. Evaluate the importance of primary research and reliable secondary sources in continuing to educate a clinician’s practice over the course of their career.
  4. Understand the influence that Wikipedia and other resources have in managing patient expectations and knowledge of medicine.
  5. Practice utilizing information from a wide variety of sources to update Wikipedia while avoiding plagiarism and close paraphrasing.
  6. Discuss the difference between editing an open-access encyclopedia like Wikipedia from writing literature or systemic review.
  7. Understand health literacy and how it can impact how a physician interacts with a
  8. Learn best practices for communicating with patients with low health

Learning Activities:

This will be an online course. Students will be enrolled in the course for 4 weeks in total. During this course, students will be grouped into groups of 6 or fewer students. Students will be responsible for completing all of the Wiki-training modules. Each week students will meet with instructors online to engage in classroom discussions on the topics listed on the Wikipedia course page. Students will be required to choose a page to edit or create during the first week of the block, they will then have 2 weeks to edit their page before engaging in the peer-review process. During the final week, they will respond to peer review and present what they learned during the course.

Method of Assessment:

Students will be assessed by the following parameters:

  1. Completion of all required online training
  2. Attendance at each of the weekly online discussion
  3. Completion of edits made to at least 1 article per group; this will be tracked using the wiki-course dashboard and the article’s talk page.
  4. Completion of the peer review project; this will be tracked using the wiki-course dashboard and the article’s talk page.
  5. Presentation video submitted to course directors on what was

Required Reading: None

Additional Resources: None

Miscellaneous Information: None