Pharmacy students can improve access to quality medicines information by editing Wikipedia articles.

ABSTRACT:

Background

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.

Methods

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

SUBMITTER: Apollonio DE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6245851 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature