It has been a few years since we first met Lane Rasberry, a local Wikipedian with an interest in engaging Wikipedia editors. Lane reached out to Doctor of Physical Therapy (DPT) Program Director/Chair, Dr. Jill Horbacewicz, looking for the opportunity to engage our students and train them in the art of sharing important health information with the millions of viewers who turn to Wikipedia for health information.

Not long after, Lane, Jill, and I found the perfect venue for introducing Wikipedia to Touro (Manhattan) DPT students. A class called Education, which I taught, was already part of the curriculum. The class objectives emphasize educating patients, clients, caregivers and the general public about health information that can be used to promote optimal function and enhance wellness. We could not have planned a better match, and after several discussion the first Touro DPT Wikipedia Editathon was planned.

Prior to an Editathon, and working closely with Lane, Wikipedia’s built-in metrics are used to identify frequently visited health pages with poor citations. These are precisely the pages that are targeted for editing, with a special focus on choosing health pages with relevance to physical therapy. Working in small groups, students choose a topic, read the Wikipedia page, and ask themselves what information a person reading the same page might be seeking about physical therapy. This leads them to explore the literature and identify references that may inform the development of supplemental information to add on the day of our Editathon. As for the references, Wikipedia has a predetermined definition for what constitutes a useful reference, focusing on high quality systematic reviews and clinical practice guidelines that are less than five years old (when available). Our students read, search, read some more, and then synthesize their findings using language that the average reader can understand. They are then ready to engage as Wikipedia editors.

Each Editathon begins with a presentation by Lane Rasberry, explaining to the students the infrastructure that allows for an open editable format, yet verifying the content that is added. While he emphasizes that no encyclopedia should ever be cited as a reference, Wikipedia’s infrastructure and world-wide community is committed to ensuring the validity of the information that is posted and the sources that are cited. He openly admits to his early forays on Wikipedia as a vandal, determined to corrupt what he believed to be useless information. Through those efforts Lane was ‘caught’ and advised that there are proper and improper ways to engage with Wikipedia, and if interested, he could learn how to be an important contributor. That brings us to the present, where Lane reports that vandals remain the best recruitment strategy for valuable Wikipedians. In years past, this constant patrolling of Wikipedia content has become apparent, as there were several instances where DPT students received instantaneous challenges to their postings.

Since that first event in 2016, the collaboration expanded and has led down various paths. As one of the only DPT programs actively engaging Wikipedia editors, Lane recognized an opportunity from various funders to support these efforts. Along with Lane, Dr. Horbacewicz and I applied for and received funding from Consumer Reports and Wikimedia to support and promote dissemination of Touro’s Wikipedia Editathons. Through this support we attended an international Wikipedia conference, were interviewed for a podcast and networked with colleagues from other institutions of higher education engaged in similar efforts. It was at this conference that a new relationship was forged, with a Wikipedian working closely with dental students at the University of Dundee in Scotland. Discussions led to a mutual desire for interprofessional partnering, and this year there were two DPT-dental teams editing Wikipedia pages, temporomandibular joint dysfunction and rheumatoid arthritis, conditions with health concerns to both these student groups. Funding was also used to support publication of a manuscript in an open access peer-reviewed journal, Journal of Medical Internet Research, as publishing for a subscription-only audience defies the very mission of Wikipedia. This year Touro’s Occupational Therapy faculty and students joined in as DPT students presented their individual contributions to specific health pages.

To date, we have had four Editathons, engaged 112 DPT student editors, and modified 38 health pages, all of which have been accessed by 4 million users. Three DPT faculty members (Drs. Jill Horbacewicz, Yocheved Bensinger-Brody and I) and three librarians (Sara Tabei, Juliana Terciotti Magro and Donneer Missouri) have been engaged in this process, both guiding the students and learning alongside them. Those involved in clinical care and research are well aware of the difficulty in disseminating health information in a timely and useable manner. There is research suggesting that the lag for translating clinical research into practice is estimated to be 17 years. While there are no simple solutions to this problem, Touro’s DPT students are doing their part to get the word out to Wikipedia’s vast audience.

Based on experience, most of us are aware that Wikipedia often appears early in most internet searches. Wikipedia is a frequented site across disciplines, with an estimated 40 billion views of its health pages in 2018. All of us, students and faculty alike, if honest, will confess to using Wikipedia as a gateway to further research, as it provides an overview, with references, to guide continued investigation. Based on our Editathon experience, exploring the pages of Wikipedia is something we should not hide. Wikipedia, despite its openly editable format, has a built in infrastructure for quality control. In classrooms of higher education, we expect that novel ideas are exchanged, research is used to reinforce or challenge new ideas and hypotheses are continually tested. The outcomes of what transpires in our classrooms forms the basis for the most current trends of thought within our specific areas of expertise. If, and only if the research supports these innovative ideas, then Wikipedia is the simplest and best way to disseminate these bits of novel information to the masses.