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A WikiProject, or Wikiproject, is a
Wikimedia movement According to the Wikimedia Foundation, the Wikimedia movement is the global community of contributors to the Wikimedia projects. This community directly builds and administers the projects. It is committed to using open standards and software. ...
affinity group An affinity group is a group formed around a shared interest or common goal, to which individuals formally or informally belong. Affinity groups are generally precluded from being under the aegis of any governmental agency, and their purposes m ...
for contributors with shared goals. WikiProjects are prevalent within the largest wiki, Wikipedia, and exist to varying degrees within
sister projects Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative and multilingual encyclopedia website and project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. It has more than 48 million articles ( in English) written collaboratively by volunteers around ...
such as
Wiktionary Wiktionary ( , , rhyming with "dictionary") is a multilingual, web-based project to create a free content dictionary of terms (including words, phrases, proverbs, linguistic reconstructions, etc.) in all natural languages and in a numbe ...
,
Wikiquote Wikiquote is part of a family of wiki-based projects run by the Wikimedia Foundation using MediaWiki software. Based on an idea by Daniel Alston and implemented by Brion Vibber, the project's objective is to produce collaboratively a vast refer ...
,
Wikidata Wikidata is a collaboratively edited multilingual knowledge graph hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. It is a common source of open data that Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, and anyone else, can use under the CC0 public domain license ...
, and
Wikisource Wikisource is an online digital library of free-content textual sources on a wiki, operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikisource is the name of the project as a whole and the name for each instance of that project (each instance usually re ...
. They also exist in different languages, and translation of articles is a form of their collaboration. During the
COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identi ...
, CBS News noted the role of Wikipedia's WikiProject Medicine in maintaining the accuracy of articles related to the disease. Another WikiProject that has drawn attention is WikiProject Women Scientists, which was profiled by '' Smithsonian'' for its efforts to improve coverage of women scientists which the profile noted had "helped increase the number of female scientists on Wikipedia from around 1,600 to over 5,000".


On Wikipedia

Some Wikipedia WikiProjects are substantial enough to engage in cooperative activities with outside organizations relevant to the field at issue. For example, in 2014 Cochrane announced that it had entered into a partnership with Wikipedia's WikiProject Medicine, "to support sharing relevant Cochrane Evidence in Wikipedia’s health articles and to develop strategies to keep Wikipedia’s health-related content up to date, unbiased, and of high quality." Wikipedia has thousands of WikiProjects, primarily divided between specific topical areas and performing specific maintenance tasks.Phoebe Ayers, Charles Matthews, Ben Yates, ''How Wikipedia Works: And how You Can be a Part of it'' (2008), p. 213. One task commonly performed by topical WikiProjects on Wikipedia is the assessment of the quality of articles that fall within that topic area.Huijing Deng, Bernadetta Tarigan, Mihai Grigore, Juliana Sutanto, "Understanding the ‘Quality Motion’ of Wikipedia Articles Through Semantic Convergence Analysis", ''HCI in Business: Lecture Notes in Computer Science'', Vol. 9191 (July 21, 2015), p. 64-75. In Wikipedia and sister projects, WikiProject pages are located in project space, and the meta information regarding the association between the article and the WikiProject is usually included on the talk page of the article. WikiProjects provide an additional avenue for engagement between editors with similar interests, and have thereby been found to increase the productivity of such editors.Robert E. Kraut, Paul Resnick, Sara Kiesler, ''Building Successful Online Communities'' (2012), p. 207, "WikiProjects are groups of editors who work together on articles within a domain, like military history, sports, or medicine". In order to spur participation and concentrate effectiveness, WikiProjects on Wikipedia may engage in activities like having a "collaboration of the week", or designating one article to be improved to the point of achieving "featured" status. The WikiProject Council is a group of editors that assists with the development of active WikiProjects, and acts as a central point for inter-WikiProject discussion and collaboration. A 2008 academic study of Wikipedia concluded that participation in WikiProjects substantially improved the chances of an editor becoming an administrator, finding that one Wikipedia policy edit or WikiProject edit is worth ten article edits, and concluding:


WikiProjects and assessments of article importance and quality

The
English Wikipedia The English Wikipedia is, along with the Simple English Wikipedia, one of two English-language editions of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. It was founded on January 15, 2001, as Wikipedia's first edition, and, as of , has the most arti ...
currently has over 2,000 WikiProjects, with varying degrees of activity. In 2007, the English Wikipedia introduced an assessment scale of the quality of articles. Articles are rated by WikiProjects. The range of quality classes begins with "Stub" (very short pages), followed by "Start", "C" and "B" (in increasing order of quality). Community peer review is needed for the article to enter one of the highest quality classes: either "A", "good article" or the highest, "featured article". Of the about 4.4 million articles and lists assessed as of March 2015, about 7,000 (0.16%) are a featured article or a featured list. One featured article per day, as selected by editors, appears on the main page of Wikipedia. According to research in 2021, WikiProject
Tropical Cyclones A tropical cyclone is a rapidly rotating storm system characterized by a low-pressure center, a closed low-level atmospheric circulation, strong winds, and a spiral arrangement of thunderstorms that produce heavy rain and squalls. Dependi ...
has the most quality content in terms of good articles and featured articles. This is unusual, due to the project's narrow scope and member count of only around 100. The articles can also be rated for importance by WikiProjects. Currently, there are 5 importance categories: "low", "mid", "high", "top", and "???" for unclassified/unsure level. For a particular article, different WikiProjects may assign different importance levels. The Wikipedia Version 1.0 Editorial Team has developed a table (shown below) that displays data of all rated articles by quality and importance, on the English Wikipedia. If an article or list receives different ratings by two or more WikiProjects, then the highest rating is used in the table and bar-chart. Researcher Giacomo Poderi found that articles tend to reach featured status via the intensive work of a few editors.Poderi, Giacomo, ''Wikipedia and the Featured Articles: How a Technological System Can Produce Best Quality Articles'', Master thesis,
University of Maastricht Maastricht University (abbreviated as UM; nl, Universiteit Maastricht) is a public research university in Maastricht, Netherlands. Founded in 1976, it is the second youngest of the thirteen Dutch universities. In 2021, 22,383 students studied at ...
, October 2008.
A 2010 study found unevenness in quality among featured articles and concluded that the community process is ineffective in assessing the quality of articles.


WikiProject Medicine

WikiProject Medicine, formed in 2004, is a Wikipedia WikiProject dedicated to improving coverage of medicine-related topics. It has over 200 active volunteers, including
James Heilman James M. Heilman (born ) is a Canadian emergency physician, Wikipedian, and advocate for the improvement of Wikipedia's health-related content. He encourages other clinicians to contribute to the online encyclopedia. With the Wikipedia user ...
. About half of the volunteers are health care professionals or students. The project has established contacts with organizations such as
World Health Organization The World Health Organization (WHO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for international public health. The WHO Constitution states its main objective as "the attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level of ...
,
National Institutes of Health The National Institutes of Health, commonly referred to as NIH (with each letter pronounced individually), is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in the late ...
,
United States National Library of Medicine The United States National Library of Medicine (NLM), operated by the United States federal government, is the world's largest medical library. Located in Bethesda, Maryland, the NLM is an institute within the National Institutes of Health. Its ...
, and
Cancer Research UK Cancer Research UK (CRUK) is the world's largest independent cancer research organization. It is registered as a charity in the United Kingdom and Isle of Man, and was formed on 4 February 2002 by the merger of The Cancer Research Campaign and t ...
, and succeeded in creating several
Wikipedian in residence A Wikipedian in residence or Wikimedian in residence (WiR) is a Wikipedia editor, a Wikipedian (or Wikimedian), who accepts a placement with an institution, typically an art gallery, library, archive, museum, cultural institution, learned so ...
programs at medical institutions. A 2011 review of the project efforts praised it for assessing the vast majority of medical articles on Wikipedia (at that time about 25,000), at the same time remarking that only around 70 have been assessed as high quality. The reviewer also suggested improvements to the Wikipedia system, such as making article assessment more prominent to the readers, and requesting that reviewers leave notes on how to improve low quality articles. In 2012, a dedicated American NGO, Wiki Project Med Foundation (WPMEDF), was formed to support it. A 2016 review noted that the number of high quality articles has improved to about 80, noting that one of them (on dengue fever) was even formatted and republished in a peer reviewed journal. The review praised the efforts of the volunteers, but noted that participation levels are too low to promise any significant improvements in the thousands of lower-quality articles, calling for more medical practitioners to volunteer their time on Wikipedia. Regarding the quality of articles, the review also pointed that readability (complexity) of Wikipedia articles may be too high for its intended audience, and encouraged the Wikipedia volunteers to review this aspect.


WikiProject Medicine during the COVID-19 pandemic

CBS News described the role of Wikipedia's WikiProject Medicine in making Wikipedia a source of medical information relating to the
COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identi ...
, noting that a project member "edits and reviews all the medical content on Wikipedia", but also providing the caveat that "even though medical pages are strictly monitored by the WikiProject team, and hot topics that get a lot of page views are carefully edited, inaccurate information persists on some of Wikipedia's less-read pages".


References


External links

* {{Wikipedia Wikipedia Wiki concepts