What is a wiki, and how can it be used in resident education?

Abstract

Training as a radiology resident is a complex task. Residents frequently encounter multiple hospital systems, each with unique workflow patterns and heterogenous information systems. We identified an opportunity to ease some of the resulting anxiety and frustration by centralizing high-quality resources using a wiki. In this manuscript, we describe our choice of wiki software, give basic information about hardware requirements, detail steps for configuration, outline information included on the wiki, and present the results of a resident acceptance survey.

Fig. 1

What do you access most versus server logs. Free responses from residents and hits in our server logs were grouped into the following categories: schedules, phone numbers, dictation templates, educational content, rotation/call information, and others, and graphed as a percentage of the total.

Fig. 2

Landing screen. Screenshot of the initial landing page for the resident wiki. Note the sidebar on the right that contains links to nearly all of the content on the wiki. Also note that the sidebar is organized according to access restrictions with the second category open to everyone within our department.

Fig. 3

Recent changes. Screenshot of the recent changes screen of the wiki. Scanning for recent changes is an important feature of maintaining and using a wiki. This screen documents not only identifies the pages that have recently been changed, but also identifies the user who last edited each page. Clicking on the sunglasses icon takes the user to the difference view (Fig. 4).

Fig. 4

Differences view. Screenshot of the differences view that allows a user to compare two versions of the current page. The differences view is important for editing and tracking document revisions. The left column shows the previous version of the file, while the right column identifies differences with + for added lines and − for removed lines in addition to color coding.