Mediwikis – a collaborative medical learning platform based on Mediawiki

This guest post was written by Stuart Maitland, Founder, Mediwikis

Mediwikis is a platform built on Mediawiki that supports the medical learning community in the UK. Medical students use Mediwikis to collaborate and share best practice, ideas, and learning strategies at their university, and to tap into the knowledge of students at other universities.

Medical students are in a perfect position to share the examples of best practice occurring in their institution – as part of their teaching they are often taught by a wide range of experts in their respective fields, and quickly have to build learning strategies for remembering large amounts of information. By enabling students to share the information and resources taught at their university on an open and collaborative platform, those resources can be shared and compared with students at other universities across the world.

Mediwikis’ enthusiastic editors tell us they contribute information to Mediwikis to “pay it forwards” to the next generation of medical students, and feel pride of being part of such a community. They feel ownership and academic self-esteem for contributing to the project and producing something that other students would find helpful.

We have been working with Wikimedia UK to realise this goal of making the information students write open and accessible to all. Our previous license, the CC Non-Commercial No-Derivatives, was certainly too restrictive for students to reuse the information in building their own resources, and the chapter has helped us to understand the benefits of open licence, and helped us in changing our license.

As Mediwikis is introduced to more universities, we begin to see the diversity of education methods for medicine in the UK and overseas. I hope that medical students everywhere will be able to utilise the strengths of certain universities and their peers across the country.

To find out more about Mediwikis, please visit us at www.mediwikis.com