Project grant/Wikipedia Collaboration of Dental Schools 2024

Basic information

Project Title (If applicable)

Wikipedia Collaboration of Dental Schools 2024

Proposed by

Kirsty Kirkpatrick

Project description

Briefly describe the issue or problem that motivates this application. What needs are you meeting?

Background: The Wikipedia Editing project was started in January of 2016 by undergraduate dental student Nour Geres. The project taught students to edit articles on Wikipedia and they have successfully been working on dental content since. Due to growing interest from the dental community, in February 2017 Dundee began the Wikipedia Collaboration of Dental Schools, which included Glasgow, Aberdeen and Manchester (UK) and Tufts, Harvard and NYU (USA). Dental articles on Wikipedia are largely deficient, inaccurate and for some topics altogether absent. This is due to the low number of active dental editors. Most dentists/dental students are aware of this issue, but do not know how to edit and are not aware of the types of citations required on dental articles. Therefore, this project is vital to increase the access to quality dental education amongst the wider public and dental professionals alike. Aim: The aim of the Collaboration is to create an international community of dental editors from across the globe. We will achieve this by educating and setting up dental editing groups in dental schools around the globe that will be continuously running in order to update, expand and improve dental content using evidence-based information. We also aim to translate pages (as we have already begun to do) in order to make information available in third-world countries to address inequalities in access to information. A secondary aim is to contribute to Wikimedia Commons. Overall, this initiative will benefit the general public, dental students as well as professionals.

Describe project activities. What will you use the funding to do?

The funding will be used to travel to Malaysia from the United Kingdom to train dental students at the International Medical University. I will train the dental schools to carry out what has proven to be successful here in the UK. I will teach them how to set up and run an editing group, how to edit Wikipedia and collaborate with the British schools to ensure diverse contributions on pages as well as an organised dynamic of a very quickly growing community. The schools will then edit for approximately 5 months.

Describe your plan for evaluating this project. How will you measure success? What types of things will you measure (e.g. content, participants)?

Methods of evaluation: Both qualitative and qualitative analysis for this project will be carried out: 1. We have already begun and will continue to develop data on Excel to analyse the pages and specific sections edited. We will look at the quality of the edits and the views per page. This will allow us to gain a perspective on the impact of the work done.

2. Feedback form will be collected at events. The dental faculty at IMU has made the project mandatory for students; therefore, it is guaranteed that those we train will participate in achieving the aforementioned objectives.

Identify key people involved in this project. How will or could the wider Wikimedian community be involved?

I have been leading the Project since 2023 and have been reporting progress to Professor Peter Mossey and Dr Andrew Mason. Dr Mason has played a key role in setting up the collaboration between the University of Dundee Dental School and the International Medical University.

The Wikimedia community may contribute to the identification of any dental-related pages on Wikipedia that require development by bringing them to our attention via the WikiProject Dentistry Page.

If applicable, identify partnering organisations for this project (not essential)

1) Primarily the University of Dundee, but also all dental schools who are currently involved or will become involved in the Collaboration (Toronto, Malaysia)

2) Cochrane Collaboration (Oral Health)

Estimated cost

£250 To travel from United Kingdom to Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur). We will fund our travel from Malaysia back to the United Kingdom ourselves.

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