Background

McMaster University has a history of embracing Wikimedians, although I cannot speak to the experiences of those who came and left before my own involvement with Wikipedia. This summary of my activities within McMaster University’s Health Sciences Library, including triumphs and failures, will provide some insight into the work that has been done on campus within the health context.

In early 2017 I returned to full-time employment as a health sciences librarian after a year-long parental leave. The timing of my return to work was a challenge in that goals and projects for the academic year had been set and assigned to librarians months before. Jumping onto existing teams is always a challenge when the work is in-progress, so I found myself in an opportune position to start something new. I was interested in a project that offered flexibility as I contended with the varied challenges that accompany adjusting to a new work-life balance as a parent.

It was around this time that the Western New York Library Resources Council (WNYLRC) promoted its offering of a four-week lecture online workshop series about Wikipedia, hosted by Lane Rasberry: a prolific contributor to Wikimedia projects. At the time, Lane was Wikimedian-in-Residence for Consumer Reports, a nonprofit organization in the United States that aims to share information with consumers to promote informed decision making. In this four-week series, participants were offered a comprehensive tour of Wikipedia’s health information, an introduction to editing Wikipedia, a thorough discussion of quality control within the Wikimedia community and its projects, and an introduction to the various Wikimedia projects beyond Wikipedia. Simultaneously, the group spent three weeks practicing editing Wikipedia articles by making small contributions to articles of our choice, under the guidance and supervision of Rasberry.

My participation in this workshop ignited a spark that spoke to my lifelong passion for social fairness and a professional interest in health information equity. I asked myself whether experts should be ethically obliged to translate medical knowledge into plain language on Wikipedia. Particularly if they were using it already and were able to identify opportunities for improving it. I asked why more health professionals and experts were not making contributions to the world’s most frequently accessed information resource, and I wondered how more editors might be recruited, or feel invited, to improve the health and medical content on Wikipedia.

These questions resulted in an event that proved to be the first tile in a domino effect that continues to ripple throughout my decision-making as a librarian and in my academic research interests: the Wikipedia & Health Symposium. It has been my overall goal to shift the narrative around Wikipedia, as a resource that cannot be trusted, to a narrative that understands its value and utility for health consumers and professionals alike. This work can be divided into three categories: community engagement, education, and research.

Community Engagement

Wikipedia & Health Symposium

The Wikipedia & Health Symposium was intended to be an annual event hosted at the McMaster University Health Sciences Library. The inaugural event took place in March 2018 and was followed by a second in 2019. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the symposium was subsequently discontinued. Although it has been discontinued, these two events served as excellent catalysts for conversation about Wikipedia as a health information resource at the Faculty of Health Sciences.

2018

In its first year, the event focused on Wikipedia editing in the medical community. A panel discussion featuring McMaster University professors, health experts, and an experienced Wikipedian, opened the day with an exploration of the opportunities that editing Wikipedia offers health professional students, graduate students in the life sciences, and health professionals alike. The panel was followed by guest speaker, Amin Azzam (UC Berkeley, UCSF), an author of “Why Medical Schools Should Embrace Wikipedia” (2017), who collaborated on the first documented for-credit course for editing Wikipedia in a medical school. Azzam discussed working with medical students to improve Wikipedia as a for-credit course at University of California San Francisco and shared insights into its challenges and benefits.

The latter half of the day offered participants an opportunity to join an edit-a-thon where they were introduced to the basics of editing Wikipedia. Participants were invited to summarize and cite Cochrane reviews in relevant Wikipedia articles. Most attendees shied away from live edits despite their curiosity and eagerness to learn. The edit-a-thon concluded with 79 contributions made to 17 unique articles by 10 editors. Each contribution was verified with a reference to a Cochrane review.

The outcomes of this inaugural event were satisfactory to the library administration, but really drove home the grass-roots nature of Wikipedia editing. Despite a curiosity and interest in learning how to edit, actual edits represented about half of the participants. Furthermore, attendance was primarily dominated by librarians and library workers, with limited participation from the experts this event had aimed to involve. This suggested that barriers to participation for the target audience were present, but it is impossible to speculate what those barriers might have been.

2019

In March 2019 the Wikipedia & Health Symposium built on the previous year’s momentum. The half-day event included a panel of two physicians, a representative from Cochrane Canada who facilitates the relationship between Cochrane Canada and Wikipedia, a science journalist, and a public librarian. The discussion was particularly interesting because third-year students in the Bachelor of Health Sciences program were invited to develop and present questions about Wikipedia as a health information resource to the panel. While the 2018 symposium focused on engaging health experts in editing Wikipedia, the 2019 event focused on how the community could become more engaged with Wikipedia as either contributors or consumers. The questions asked by students were provocative and insightful, suggesting the potential for a symbiotic relationship between clinical journal publishers, the news media, and the knowledge translation opportunity that Wikipedia provides.

The second half of the symposium provided another opportunity for attendees to participate in an edit-a-thon. The audience was primarily students and, again, while there was deep interest in learning how to contribute to Wikipedia, the attendees shied away from making live edits to real articles. However, this became a valuable teaching opportunity and a representative from Cochrane Canada introduced attendees to the work that has been facilitated by the ongoing partnership between Cochrane and Wikipedia. Namely, getting Cochrane reviews summarized and cited in relevant Wikipedia articles.

WikiClub Hamilton

In 2019, I collaborated with an editor in Toronto to strike WikiClub Hamilton through Wikimedia Canada. This project received funding through a Rapid Grant from the Wikimedia Foundation. Despite our best efforts, advertising and marketing for monthly editing meet-ups proved ineffective. The club hosted one event in February 2020 with only one attendee. All subsequently scheduled events were cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. My collaborator has since moved out of Canada, and I moved out of Hamilton. It is unlikely that the activities of WikiClub Hamilton will resume unless another member of the community volunteers to take on this labour.

Education

In addition to engaging the campus community with events, I aimed to redirect the dominant paradigm around Wikipedia by engaging in education as an instructor at the undergraduate and graduate levels, in community spaces, supervising undergraduate independent projects and honours theses, as well as pursuing educational opportunities for myself. Since 2019, I have supported 157 new editors in their contributions to 74 health-related Wikipedia articles. These edits have contributed more than 190,000 words and citations to more than 2,500 references.

Undergraduate Education

The largest untapped resource for recruiting potential contributors to Wikipedia is the vast population of undergraduate students at any university and McMaster is no exception. The Bachelor of Health Sciences (BHSc) Program is a highly competitive undergraduate program in the Faculty of Health Sciences. Having worked with BHSc students in my professional duties, it became clear that this group of undergraduates are highly motivated, keen to take on volunteer opportunities, and eager to engage in steering their own learning.

In January 2019 I offered the first iteration of a course called the Politics of Health Information for third-year BHSc students. The course offered students an opportunity to explore the politics of information production and dissemination, challenge their stronghold on the notion that randomized controlled trials are the gold standard of information in any context, and encourage them to look beyond solely consuming information to become producers as well. This course has a single project: students must work in small groups to identify a Wikipedia article that requires attention, and collaboratively revise it over the course of the academic term. Since January 2019, this course has been offered five times. To date, students in this course have contributed to 59 unique articles with citations to more than 2,000 high-quality references.

Some students have subsequently pursued independent editing projects that were not for-credit. One student received special recognition on the WikiEducation Blog for his work that expanded the information on nutritional experiments in residential schools. Other students chose to edit a Wikipedia article their fourth year project or honors thesis project.

My work with undergraduate students has extended beyond the BHSc program. In 2019 and throughout 2020, I worked with undergraduate student volunteers in the Michael DeGroote Institute for Pain Research & Care. Each student was trained to edit Wikipedia and subsequently made contributions to articles related to pain or pain management.

Community, Graduate and Professional Education

My work in the community and in graduate and professional education is less in-depth than that in undergraduate education but I have represented McMaster in the following ways:

• As an instructor at Western University’s Faculty of Media and Information Studies, I teach Consumer Health Information to Master of Library and Information Science students where I dedicate space to Wikipedia as a consumer health information resource.

• In late 2019 I successfully proposed and developed a free continuing education program, hosted by McMaster, to teach seniors how to navigate health information online, specifically on Wikipedia. This course was cancelled due to the pandemic.

• I have provided training to Hamilton Public Library staff on how to assist library patrons in their online searching, including how to navigate a Wikipedia article. This session also introduced library staff to the #1Lib1Ref campaign.

• I was invited to compose and deliver a 4-week workshop series for McMaster University’s Program for Faculty Development. Participants were taught how to appraise a Wikipedia article, how to advise patients who use Wikipedia for health information, and how to edit Wikipedia articles. This series taught me that physicians were keen to learn how to rapidly assess a Wikipedia article for their patients.

Research

In 2018, I accepted an offer of admission to a PhD program in Library and Information Science at Western University. I enrolled as a part-time student with the goal of using this opportunity to learn more about research methods and pursue investigations into Wikipedia as a consumer health information resource. My work in this program led to the publication of a scoping review (Smith 2020).

My goal in the program was to apply the research training I would receive to a qualitative study of how health consumers engage with Wikipedia’s health content. This, in turn, could inform my practice as a health sciences librarian at McMaster. Unfortunately, the pandemic impacted the quality of my work, the time I was able to dedicate to this pursuit, and ultimately led to a decision to withdraw from the program so I could prioritize family obligations and paid work.

While this may be seen by some as a bump in the road, or a failure, I was still able to pursue my research interests in my role as a librarian. The training I’d received in the PhD program gave me confidence to revisit research when the pandemic waned.

Since 2019, I have produced work that provides insight into Wikipedia as a consumer health information resource. This work has included:

• A study protocol to determine whether the packaging of health information impacts its perceived reliability (Raj, Smith, and Heilman 2021);

• Positioning Wikipedia as an under researched resource in our understanding of health information behaviour (Smith 2022);

• A qualitative study of how health consumers engage with Wikipedia’s health and medical content (Smith 2022);

• An examination of the role of Wikipedia in COVID-19 in Canada (forthcoming)

• An editorial comment for the Journal of Consumer Health on the Internet on why it’s time to recognize Wikipedia as health information (forthcoming)

• An exploration of the role of Wikipedia in providing another dimension of insight into an institution’s research impact (forthcoming)

Wikipedia scholarship is growing and there is a small but active community of researchers who explore Wikipedia in many contexts. However, our understanding of this resource and its impact is still limited. I am encouraged by the flourishing body of work that continues to be produced. It has been my hope that my work affiliated with McMaster, including publications, will situate the university as one of the few academic institutions to contribute to efforts to understand Wikipedia and to participate in the shifting the paradigmatic stigma that continues to persist.

Looking back, moving forward

With six years of engagement with Wikimedia, specifically focusing on Wikipedia, I am a relative newcomer to the Wikimedia community. I have endeavored to situate Wikipedia as an undervalued and misunderstood tool for in-class and public health education. Wikipedia continues to face the challenge of reversing the stigma that surrounds it, despite its clear maturation over two decades. By creating space for Wikipedia at the university, it is my hope that acceptance and acknowledgement of this valuable resource spreads beyond health and medicine.

By the time this is published, I will have taken a new post at Brock University Library as head of the Research Lifecycle Department. I plan to continue my work establishing Wikipedia as a key information resource. Given its role in knowledge translation and the dissemination of new knowledge, I intend to bring Wikipedia, along with other Wikimedia projects, into the fold of research lifecycle discussions.

The impact of the pandemic on the trajectory of my efforts, in tandem with Wikipedia’s glory as a reliable resource for COVID-19 information during the peak of the pandemic, has emboldened me to pursue engagement with Wikipedia with more vigor. I urge libraries and library workers to consider learning more about Wikipedia, consider including Wikipedia in conversations about knowledge translation, dissemination, and access; consider also engaging patrons in conversations about Wikipedia: why are they using it? How can they assess its suitability for their individual needs? Libraries have influence in the realm of knowledge preservation and sharing. For Wikipedia, a resource that aims to summarize all of human knowledge, they are a fitting ally.