Portal talk:Internal medicine

I am planning on starting contributions to the school, as is my partner. If anyone wants to start laying out specific needs, that would be great.Palmd001 16:05, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

I've started a Category:Internal Medicine Interest Group to help with development.--PalMD 19:08, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

Welcome! Broadly speaking, here we are trying to develop viable online learning communities around online learning resources. Personally, I think the possibilities are endless, but a good rule of thumb is to first develop materials that you are most interested in. Please feel free to add whatever educational materials you see fit. It's always great to come across new users with such enthusiasm! --HappyCamper 19:18, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

Goals

• What material should be included in IM? Links to other Wiki resources? Original articles? Modified articles?
• What level(s) should we speak to? Lay public? Internists? Med Students?

--PalMD 18:20, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

This first rule is that Wikiversity editors should have fun. For some of us, part of having fun is being efficient. Here at the start of the Wikiversity project, some of our efforts towards being efficient should involve building the project in ways that make it easy for additional people to get involved. What can we do that will attract more editors to Wikiversity? I suspect that the vast majority of people who come to Wikiversity come here by way of Wikipedia. There is an effort at Wikipedia to create encyclopedia articles that are "middle of the road". Often this results in articles that are to complex and full of jargon for some readers while at the same time not being detailed enough for others. Are there any approaches to creating Wikiversity content for medical topics that can serve both non-experts and medical students? In my experience, Evidence-based medicine is a topic that needs learning resources targeted to both "the man on the street" and medical students. Wikipedia could benefit from having learning resources at Wikiversity that Wikipedians could use in order to be able to do a better job of creating evidence-based Wikipedia articles. I think we should select health-related topics that are in the news and create learning resources at Wikiversity that can help people sort through the evidence related to those topics. As we create such resources, we can make links to them from the related Wikipedia pages. This will attract more participants to Wikiversity and with time Wikiversity will come to have useful learning resources for all medical topics. As we go along, we can put textbook material at Wikibooks. Hopefully Wikiversity can be a place for people to get involved with learning projects that allow them to investigate medical topics they are interested in and sort good information from the junk science that too often gets thrown around by special interest groups. --JWSchmidt 20:19, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

I am trying to imagine where we are going with this as far as what will differentiate this space from WP. For one thing, there will be (probably) an emergent organization to the material here that will help bundle it differently than on WP. The articles that parallel WP articles will be ?very different. I guess we will wait and see. --PalMD 21:51, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

My thinking goes like this.....Wikiversity should have learning resources for people of all ages. There might be millions of adolescents who need good information about Sexually Transmitted Diseases. The Wikipedia article on STDs might not provide the kind of introduction to the topic that is needed by young teens and the Wikipedia article is not crafted as a learning resource for medical students either. Wikiversity can point to the Wikipedia article as a resource, but also develop pages for the topic that are targeted to specific audiences that are not adequately served by the single article at Wikipedia. --JWSchmidt 22:11, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

Many med students and residents (and attendings) use pda-based or paper pocket guides for everyday reference. Perhaps many of the articles here could aim at that audience? Yet, be well-enough linked and un-jargonized enough for a wider audience?PalMD 20:16, 10 May 2007 (UTC)