WikiMD.org:About

Welcome to wikiMD.org. WikiMD is a free wiki based medical encylcopedia and medical wiki community. My name is Prab and I am a physician practicing 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.

Why WikiMD
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 article written by people with a professional degree, unlike wikipedia.

Professiional degree
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, with the key difference being WikiMD is edited by people with a professional degree in medicine which keeps the information more accurate!

Accuracy of information
As a significant proportion of the people on the web searching medical information, it is important to provide professional level information, edited and moderated by professionals in a wiki encyclopedia format.

Pit falls of crowd sourcing
When it comes to health, you do not ask the crowd for information, but seek professional level information and advice. The purpose of WikiMD is to provide the medical encyclopedia with a higher accuracy.

Project with great potential
Many surveys have proven that patients find it difficult to find reliable health information. If you are a medical professional interested in becoming a sysop user with administrative previleges or have other ideas to improve or work together in this project, please feel free to contact me at tumpati at hotmail dot com. I once again reaffirm that I do not have any commercial interest in this project other than providing information free of cost and with a focus on weight loss and wellness. Together, we can do it! Let us make a difference!

---Prab 02:13, 22 July 2006 (EDT) Prab R Tumpati, MD Founder, WikiMD Philadelphia, PA, USA.

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Note: Please also visit our other projects wikichristian and Usmlecafe wiki