 Wonderful. Excellent. Thank you for inviting me to speak. This is a topic I care a great deal about. I'll give you an introduction to editing Wikipedia. We'll go over what Wikipedia is, how it came to be, what is a wiki, why Wikipedia matters, over how one uploads images. We'll go over some stuff on preview. This is what Wikimedia Canada does, the distinction between Wikimedia Canada and Wikipedia. We'll discuss the scholarship opportunities and see some time for questions. So a little bit about myself. I'm a small town emergency physician. I have some academic affiliations, but I'm a long way from any university. I'm right down the corner of the province there in the town of Cranbrook, about 18,000 people. I became involved with Wikipedia in 2008 coming across some port quality medical articles, and I've been an active volunteer with Wikipedia ever since. This is a wiki. Wiki means fast for quick and Hawaiian. It was software first developed in 1994. The software is known as MediaWiki, and this software creates a website that allows the editing of interlinked articles or pages. It allows the clap to the user, which is one of its benefits. So what is Wikipedia? Wikipedia is a website that builds upon this software. It's a multi-lingual encyclopedia based on the MediaWiki. It first started in 2001, and it's one of a number of projects run by the non-competitive districts. As of July, there were 200 English. With the editors, 90,000 people contribute to Wikipedia monthly, and it's actually equivalent to about 5 to 10 billion pages of use. It's the largest and most popular reference work on the internet, and the fifth most popular website overall. Now, here's a graph looking at the popularity of Wikipedia and how it's changed since about 2009 till today. In 2009, it got about 10% of global internet users use Wikipedia daily. Its popularity has increased, such that today about 14% of everyone on the internet visits Wikipedia in a given day. There's 23,000 medical articles on Wikipedia. These are the ones I'm most involved with, as this is my area of expertise. They get about 150 to 200 million page views a month. The pharmaceutical articles get about 35 to 40 million page views a month. Now, if you look at who's using Wikipedia, they've done surveys of physicians, both in North America and in Europe, and they've found that 50 to 70% of physicians use Wikipedia in clinical practice. It's the most common resource used by both junior physicians besides Google. So Google's the only source that's used more often than Wikipedia. 35 to 70% of pharmacists and questionnaires also admit to its use. If we're to look at the size of Wikipedia, if you take Wikipedia and you're printed out, this is the bookshelf it would look like. If you look at what's being there on the left-hand side, it's a massive amount of text. Now, Wikipedia is not here to replace academic publishing. It's not here to replace libraries. It's sort of a conduit or it's sort of the stopping point between academia and the rest of the world. Its goal is to summarize world knowledge and provide enough format that's accessible to everyone. The philosophy behind the project, here's the co-founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, there on the right. His philosophy is imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing. Now, the number of editors on Wikipedia has fluctuated over time. We noticed that in 2007, the red line there peaked. These are the number of people who edit Wikipedia in a given month. Since 2007 has been declining. There's a number of reasons or a number of theories put forward for this. One of the theories of the easy work on Wikipedia has been done. Almost everything is covered to some extent and to some degree. Now, what is needed is we need greater depth. We need people with more academic skills to come along and improve the quality of the articles that are already there. Wikipedia has also introduced more stringent criteria for reading. One of the major stringent criteria is referencing is more or less required. You need to reference academic sources. If you're not interested in, or if you don't reference academic sources, what you add will be quickly removed. How does Wikipedia work? Anybody can edit. At least some of the content initially, but there's multiple safeguards in place. For example, some ways to come along and vandalize a page, a lot of automated tools that come along and automatically revert obvious vandalism automatically remove spam without any human control. New changes are also monitored by a group of dedicated volunteers called the Recent Change Patrol and they go over new additions to the encyclopedia. If they deem that it's not an improvement, they will revert that change as well. Another measure that's used to maintain quality is a watch list. These watch lists alert editors when changes are made, such that the editor can review changes to topics they're interested in. There's a group of editors on the English Wikipedia and all the other language Wikipedia called administrators. They have some special abilities to protect pages. If there's an article that gets a great deal of vandalism or there's a great deal of controversy surrounding it, the page can either be semi-protected so that only established users can edit it or the page can be fully protected such that only administrators can edit it. And there's about 1,500 administrators on the English Wikipedia at this point in time. Administrators also have the ability to block editors who consistently edit poorly. So if somebody makes multiple vandalisms to Wikipedia, they will lose their editing privileges. Controversial content may also be locked into place. For example, the Rochart ink blocks generate a great deal of controversy a few years ago and were repeatedly removed by a broad selection of editors. And what was done is that those images were locked into place based on community consensus to decrease the controversy surrounding them. Wikipedia also has mechanisms to determine conflict of interest. We're able to follow the IP addresses of contributors. There was a case a couple years ago where a well-known pharmaceutical company was removing material negative that was negative towards their drugs. We discovered who they were, we discovered what edits they were making, and they got some negative press regarding those actions and now are much more careful when they contribute to Wikipedia. So with respect to the mechanics of editing Wikipedia, you can edit anonymously, but we really encourage people to create accounts. There are a number of benefits to creating an account. One of them is it gives you increased credibility. It gives you your own user page where you have the opportunity to write a little bit about yourself. It gives you access to your own watch list and it makes sure your edits remain associated with you. So you can look at all the edits you have made, other people can look at the edits you have made, et cetera. So here's an example of Wikipedia on obesity. We see that little tab up there that says Oracle. We see this little tab just to the right that says Discussion. If you click on that, that will bring you to the discussion page for the obesity article. And that's an area where you ask questions, you make comments about the article, you suggest how the article can be improved. If you're editing that article and you're having difficulty with another editor, the discussion page is the first place you go to deal with controversy, you deal with disagreements. Next, you see these three tabs over here. You see a read tab, you see an edit tab, you see a view history tab. That edit tab will allow you to make changes to the entire body of the text. The view history tab will show you everybody who has made edits to this article. So you can go back and you can see which editor has made which changes at what point in time. This little star you see right here, that if you're logged in, allows you to put this article on your watch list. And then you have a few other tools here that have special ability to take a peek at those. Now, look at the main article here. We see this little padlock here. That padlock means that this article is semi-protected and only established users can edit it. We've had a great deal of problem with the obesity page of people replacing the page with vanity, with the names of their friends. So we've blocked that and it has dramatically increased the stability. The other thing we notice on this page is a little green circle with the plus in it. This indicates that this page is of good quality. The top two, there's a quality assessment process on Wikipedia where articles are graded by how good they are, by Wikipedians themselves based on certain criteria. That little green plus means this is a good article. This is the second highest grading scale. It means that this article has been peer reviewed and has been deemed to be of relatively good quality. The other thing we notice is, of course, these little blue text here. If you click on any of the words in blue text, that will bring you to the article of that name. So if you're reading along and you see heart disease and you want to learn more about heart disease, you can click on a heart disease and that will bring you to the Wikipedia article that addresses that topic. And then, of course, we see the little numbers here. Those are references for the text that they follow. And if you click on them, that will automatically bring you to the bottom of the article to see what source is supporting that bit of text. So first and foremost, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. It is attempting to summarize the opinions of the academic community. It is not here to promote specific ideas. It's not here to host original research. It's not here to replace journals. Of course, it's based on journals, but it's not here to replace any of those. Also, it's not a textbook. It's here to inform rather than instruct, and we need to be careful of that in the writing form we use. It's also not a collection of external links to other sites. We're trying to provide an overview of the topic here on Wikipedia rather than just links to other people who have provided this sort of information. Another important thing to keep in mind is we're writing for a general audience. Thus, when it comes to medicine, we use terms like person rather than patient. We use terms like kidney rather than renal. So we're trying to keep the language general and accessible. Other types of content, such as textbooks, such as class notes, such as teaching tools, are suitable for other Wiki projects. There's Wiki books, which is for textbooks, Wikiversity for course material, et cetera. So when you become involved with Wikipedia, it's often best to start small. If you see little errors, just try your hand at fixing them. Hit the little edit button and see what you can do. It's useful to look at high-quality articles to determine how you want formats, the writing style, the referencing style. Those can be a little bit complicated to figure out, but if you look at how other articles have done it, that's probably the fastest way to figure it out. Referencing, referencing, referencing. Editors of Wikipedia are not verifiable themselves. Thus, the references need to stand on their own merit. Review articles, either literature reviews or systematic reviews are strongly preferred for medical and scientific content. Major textbooks may also be useful sources as are statements by governmental bodies. We try to stick away from using primary research as it often contradicts itself and prefer to stick with review articles. Wikipedia loves PMIDs and ISBNs, and there's tools built into Wikipedia that will take that simple piece of information and automatically generate the rest of the reference for you, and we can touch on that if people are interested at the end. So if you do not provide references, this is what will happen. You will have a Wikipedia come along and either cite or either tag what you've written or they will just remove it completely. Consensus. Wikipedia is based on consensus. Usually you discuss the resources or the references and come to how one should summarize them and how one should go from there. There are a few controversial topics on Wikipedia. However, most receive little attention and as such it's quite simple to make significant improvements to them. If you do find yourself in disputes or if disputes occur, the first place to start for dispute resolution is the discussion page. If you're dealing with medical topics, there's a page called WikiTalk Medicine, which is a Wiki project which is a group of editors who are interested in a topic area. You can post questions there to gain more input in what you're dealing with. There's also something called a request for comment, which asks for further input into questions if you're having difficulty. There's another mechanism called notice boards that pertain to referencing quality, to conflict of interest, to different subtopics to garner further input. The last dispute mechanism on Wikipedia if all others fail is called the arbitration committee. This is a group of elected, highly respected Wikipedians who deal with very controversial issues. They were involved with the Scientology issue. There was an issue with Scientologists trying to edit a large portion of psychiatry to fit their belief system. The conclusion of the arbitration committee was that all Scientology IPs were blocked from further editing to deal with their conflict of interest in the realm of psychiatry. Be bold. Try not to get discouraged by negative feedback. There's a lot of culture in Wikipedia. There's a lot of rules. There's a lot of bureaucracy. It takes some time to figure it out. It's easy to get tripped up, so it's important not to get discouraged if you do get negative feedback. So here's the page for the WikiProject Medicine. If you have questions, if you just click on that little plus there, that will add an area for you to write comments or write concerns about medical content. There are 2,000 other WikiProjects dealing with different topic areas and you just pick the WikiProject that deals with the content you're interested in. So summary on how to edit. Stick with review articles or statements from major organizations. There's a guideline for medicine called the Medical Reliable Sources Guideline, which we see highlighted there in blue. Summarize your source rather than quoting it word for word to keep us out of the realms of copyright violation. We need to take our sources and reword them into our own words to avoid those issues. There is a manual style for Wikipedia. For medical-related content, we outline what sections should be contained in a disease article in what order so that we get consistency across articles pertaining to a similar subject. You find the same thing for, you know, chemical, you find the same thing for other topics as well. As I mentioned, there's a number of tools for formatting and references and we can touch on that as well. I'll quickly go over uploading images. So what we just dealt with was how one edits text. Images aren't typically stored on Wikipedia themselves. They're stored on one of Wikipedia's sister projects called Wikimedia Commons. Currently, there's 11 million freely usable files there. All the images there are typically released under a Creative Commons license. This means that if somebody was to reuse an image that was uploaded, they're required to attribute you and they're required to share your image under the same license that your image was uploaded under. It doesn't always occur, but that is what needs to occur if they're to obey copyright. So you're not going to get, you know, if you do upload images, you're not going to get a commercial organization showing up, taking your image and combining your image into their product without your permission because they need to release their product and you've released your image. So, you know, the times I've had my images reused in commercial products, they've emailed me asking for me to release my image to them under a less restrictive license. Oh, wrong way. So here's me prepared for work. I have my camera as you notice right there. My patients, by and large, I've only had a couple not interested in having their images taken. People are very happy to have their image of their disease taken and used on Wikipedia to help other people around the world. So if the person is identifiable, of course, you need to get signed consent. You need to keep signed consent. If they're not identifiable, verbal consent is usually sufficient. Here's a quick view of Wikimedia Commons. This is the area where images are uploaded. Here we see how many images were there when this screenshot was taken and there was about 11 million. There's this little button here. It says Upload File. You just click on that and it will walk you through the entire process of uploading an image to Wikipedia. A few comments on the peer review process. As I've mentioned, each article on Wikipedia has a quality scale. Here we see the quality scale and the criteria for it. The featured article is the highest quality article and these articles end up on the main page of Wikipedia. There's A's, there's good articles, and these two classifications here are peer reviewed. Good articles are reviewed by at least one other editor. Featured articles are reviewed by multiple other editors before they get that designation. And then we have the rest of the criteria there. So as mentioned, the quality is marked in the right upper-hand corner of the article. Overall, in the entire Wikipedia, there are 3,395 featured articles and 12,900 good articles. So there are a very small portion of the entire number of articles. In medicine, there are 63 featured articles, 109 good articles. So there's still a lot of work that needs to be done. There's still a lot of peer review that needs to occur. Here's a quick view. This is how one goes through the good article nomination process. All the rules and regulations are outlined there. Wikipedia is attempting to address both the needs of academics and the needs of the lay public. What we encourage, we encourage that the main article gives an overview of the topic in generally accessible language. And then sub-articles, that link from that main article go into greater depth and greater technical terminology. So, for example, for the article on obesity, you see a general overview in this box right here of the management of obesity. And that says it links to the main article on the management of obesity. And there's an entire article that deals with all the fine details of managing obesity from a medical perspective. A lot of people wonder if their contribution to Wikipedia matters. There are a number of mechanisms to determine how many people have looked at the article you've been working on. So, in a given month. So here we notice, this is for the top 500 medical articles. What we see here is we see that Aspergers in the month of September got 426,000 page views. Which is about 14,000 page views a day. Sexual intercourse came in number two for many obvious reasons. Leonardo da Vinci, DNA, Bipolar, Human, Schizophrenia. And then you can see how the quality of the article and then there's also an importance for the article. How important do we at Wikiproject Medicine consider this topic? Here's a look at another tool that shows you how many page views your article gets in a given day. This is for the Oracle on Dengue Fever which became a featured article and was displayed in the main page. On the 5th of, I think that was August, viewed 200,000 times in the month of August. So, a little bit about Wikimedia Canada here before I wrap up my part. Wikimedia Canada is a Canadian nonprofit started in November of 2010. It's one of 35 official national chapters of the Wikimedia Foundation. And it's here to promote Wikipedia and its sister projects. We are currently seeking volunteers. If anybody's interested, they're more than welcome to contact me. Here's our homepage here. We mentioned this half day at British Columbia here today. We discussed different projects that we're working on. We're interested to hear if other people have other projects for using Wikipedia they wish to propose. One of our projects this year is we at Wikimedia Canada are offering a $1,000 scholarship to Canadian post-secondary students. Applications for the scholarship opened September 10th, 2011 and they're running until February 28th, 2012. And this award is going to be given to the applicant who improved the disease-related article to the greatest extent. So, we're going to be looking at a number of things with respect to judging criteria. One is we're going to be looking at how important that topic is to the field of medicine. The other thing is we're going to be looking at whether or not it passed good article or featured article review. Applications for the scholarship can be found here and I have some posters up front if people wish to put them around campus. So, a little bit of trivia. This here, of course, is Jeopardy. And this computer in the middle here is Watson. Now, Watson, this was about six, 12 months ago. Watson is a computer developed by IBM which worked completely independently and played Jeopardy against Jeopardy's top players. Watson won and the interesting thing is part of Watson's brain was based on the entire English Wikipedia. So, Watson had English Wikipedia uploaded into it and he did very well in the Jeopardy contest.