Department of Clinical Pharmacy, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, California, USA.
King's College London, London, UK.
BMC Med Educ. 2018 Nov 20;18(1):265. doi: 10.1186/s12909-018-1375-z.
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.
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.
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.
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.
药学培训计划通常要求学生编写或编辑药品专论，以总结新药的关键信息，作为学术练习。我们试图通过让学生改进发布在维基百科上的实际药品信息页面来扩展这种传统方法。
我们将学生（n=119）分为四人一组，安排每个小组编辑维基百科上的一个特定药品页面。分配的页面点击率很高，这表明这些主题引起了广大公众的兴趣，但质量较低，这表明这些主题需要改进。我们提供了有关编辑维基百科的课程培训。我们通过调查学生的知识和态度以及审查在维基百科上的编辑来评估作业。
完成课程培训增加了学生对维基百科编辑实践的了解。在作业结束时，学生对维基百科作为一种资源有了更细致的了解。学生的编辑大大提高了所编辑文章的质量，他们的编辑在课程结束后至少保留了 30 天，并且编辑文章的平均页面浏览量增加。
我们的结果表明，让药学学生参与维基百科编辑任务是替代编写药品专论作为课堂作业的一种可行选择。这两个任务都为学生提供了研究和解释药品信息的机会，但只有一个任务可以改善更广泛的获取高质量药品信息的机会。维基百科编辑任务对于大量药学学生来说是可行的，并且可以有效地改进全球访问量最大的网站之一上的公开信息。
