Reinventing Information Literacy with Wikipedia in Medical Education

Abstract

Wikipedia: everyone's patrons are using it, including medical patients seeking information on everything from colic to COVID-19. As the size and accuracy of Wikipedia increases, it becomes more important for librarians to be invested in the validity of the contents and the information literacy of the users. To this end, the Health Science Library at the John A. Burns School of Medicine participated in one of Wikipedia's outreach efforts, Wikiproject Medicine, engaging medical students to improve the completeness of articles about medicine and Hawai'i while also enhancing their level of information literacy. As a result, articles like those about The Queen’s Medical Center and Trauma Teams were vastly improved and the medical students learned a lot about communicating accurate information in plain English. Our presentation will tell you how we did it, the lessons we learned, and how you can try it, too!