On April 17, Bring Your Skills– to the NNLM Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon!

Posted by Ann Glusker on April 9th, 2018 Posted in: Health Literacy, News from NNLM
Tags: citation, Edit-a-thon, genetic diseases, Wikipedia

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You may have heard of Wikipedia Edit-a-Thons, where rooms full of people add content and citations to Wikipedia, to make it a better, evidence-based resource.  Does the idea intrigue you?  Are you a killer searcher and verifier?  Or even pretty good?  If so, we have an opportunity for you!

Join us at the NNLM Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon, from 6AM to 6PM Pacific Time on April 17 (it’s online only– no travel required!).  We’ll be focusing on diseases listed by the Genetic and Rare Disease Information Center (GARD), and improving them using trusted National Library of Medicine resources like Genetics Home Reference, MedlinePlus, and PubMed. You just find a disease name in GARD, see if it needs better citations in Wikipedia, find good content to add, and then edit that page!  Add the #citeNLM2018 tag in your edit summary, and you’re done!

Sound daunting?  Trust us, it isn’t!  If you set up your Wikipedia account (in advance—it can take a day or two), you are most of the way there.  For tutorials and support, check out our edit-a-thon project page on Wikipedia, which features a recording of a teaching session by Dr. James Heilman (Doc James) from WikiProject Medicine.  It also has the link to the WebEx page (our virtual classroom on April 17), which will be open all day for chat and support. Also, our dashboard page, on which you can register and be counted, has some nice to-do lists in advance of the event.  WebJunction also has some amazing content, should you find yourself hooked!

We hope to “see” you on the 17^th!  If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact Ann Glusker, at glusker@uw.edu.  Happy editing!