Wikimd

Welcome to wikiMD.org. WikiMD is a free wiki based medical encylcopedia and medical wiki community. My name is Prab and I am a current resident in Internal Medicine in Philadelphia, PA. I am also a techology enthusiast,having learnt several softwares and started websites like believerscafe, residentscafe and wikichristian. I started this wiki with a goal to build an open source, free medical encyclopedia using the collaborative Wiki technology.

Why a wiki?

It is found by various surveys that upto 60% of the people online have used the internet for accessing medical information. The wiki provides a wonderful opportunity to provide upto date information and links on any topic of interest in medicine. While there are great wiki projects like wikipedia.org for developping general encyclopedia's, there is no dedicated medical wiki project, to the best of my knowledge. I feel that, both the medical community and the general public interested in medical information, can interact in a wiki platform to share the latest ideas and trends in medical knowledge and arrive at a concensus.

According to Peter Frishauf, founder of Medscape, something like Wikipedia For Medicine is The Future! "For readers, Wikipedia is a win. In traditional publishing, readers must wade through many articles on a subject, each written by a few experts, published at 1 moment in time. In Wikipedia you read 1 living article written by many, continually updated by many. Who needs 50 articles on avian flu when 1 will do? And Wikipedia content is often the best on the Web, which means the best anywhere. For writers, Wikipedia offers neither authorship, recognition, reward, nor punishment. Articles aren't indexed, but with Google and Yahoo!, who needs it? The motivation for writing is love of information and a desire to share it. I say a variant of Wikipedia for medicine is the future -- and it's good."

While wikipedia serves as a general encyclopedia, WikiMD aims to be a medical encyclopedia with articles, links, images and information on everything related to medicine and health! This is a project with great potential! Many surveys have proven that patients find it difficult to find reliable health information. WikiMD tries to fill that void by providing a free medical encyclopedia that not only serves as a source of information, but also builds support groups. Together, we can do it! Join WikiMD in this unique endeavor!