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. 2018 Nov 20;18(1):265.
doi: 10.1186/s12909-018-1375-z.

Pharmacy students can improve access to quality medicines information by editing Wikipedia articles

Dorie E Apollonio  1 , Keren Broyde  2 , Amin Azzam  3 , Michael De Guia  4 , James Heilman  5 , Tina Brock  6   7
Affiliations

Pharmacy students can improve access to quality medicines information by editing Wikipedia articles

Dorie E Apollonio et al. BMC Med Educ. .

Abstract

Background: Pharmacy training programs commonly ask students to develop or edit drug monographs that summarize key information about new medicines as an academic exercise. We sought to expand on this traditional approach by having students improve actual medicines information pages posted on Wikipedia.

Methods: We placed students (n = 119) in a required core pharmacy course into groups of four and assigned each group a specific medicines page on Wikipedia to edit. Assigned pages had high hit rates, suggesting that the topics were of interest to the wider public, but were of low quality, suggesting that the topics would benefit from improvement efforts. We provided course trainings about editing Wikipedia. We evaluated the assignment by surveying student knowledge and attitudes and reviewing the edits on Wikipedia.

Results: Completing the course trainings increased student knowledge of Wikipedia editing practices. At the end of the assignment, students had a more nuanced understanding of Wikipedia as a resource. Student edits improved substantially the quality of the articles edited, their edits were retained for at least 30 days after course completion, and the average number page views of their edited articles increased.

Conclusions: Our results suggest that engaging pharmacy students in a Wikipedia editing assignment is a feasible alternative to writing drug monographs as a classroom assignment. Both tasks provide opportunities for students to demonstrate their skills at researching and explaining drug information but only one serves to improve wider access to quality medicines information. Wikipedia editing assignments are feasible for large groups of pharmacy students and effective in improving publicly available information on one of the most heavily accessed websites globally.

Keywords: Curriculum; Pharmacy; Students, pharmacy; Wikipedia.

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Conflict of interest statement

Ethics approval and consent to participate

The project was deemed to be exempt from full review by the UCSF Committee on Human Research (IRB# 15–17,660) which also approved the associated explanatory statement, consent procedure, and survey instruments. We expected all students to participate in the Wikipedia instruction and editing activities as a required assignment in the course. As part of this training, we informed them that their edits (like all edits in Wikipedia) would be accessible by persons within and outside the course and as such, could be used for purposes other than those originally intended. Students could elect to participate in the assignment-related evaluative surveys (ie, pre-assignment, post-training, post-assignment). For this process, we distributed an explanatory statement cover page which informed them that by electing to complete the surveys, they were providing written consent for their aggregated data to be used internally for course improvement and externally for presentation and publication about the project. We advised students that even after consent, they could request that their survey responses be removed from the dataset. To date, no students have requested that their data be removed.

Consent for publication

Not applicable.

Competing interests

At the time of this work, all authors declare that they had no actual or potential competing financial interests. Since January 2017, AA has served as a paid consultant on a grant from the Hewlett Foundation to promote open educational pedagogy.

Publisher’s Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Perceived preparedness to edit Wikipedia (before and after training session)
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Knowledge of Wikipedia, before and after training session
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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