NIH encouraging staff to edit healthcare-related Wikipedia pages

The Washington Post (7/28, Caputo) reports that as Americans increasingly turn to the Internet for healthcare information, "many end up at Wikipedia. 'More and more people are using the Web to get their health information to augment what they learn from their physicians,' says John T. Burklow, the public liaison for the National Institutes of Health.

To make that online information more reliable, NIH is encouraging its scientists and science writers to edit and even initiate Wikipedia articles in their fields. This month, it joined with the Wikimedia Foundation, which publishes the cyber encyclopedia, to host 'Wikipedia Academy,' a training session on the tools and rules of wiki culture, at NIH headquarters in Bethesda (MD).