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Dr. James Heilman, Cranbrook ER physician and founding member of Wikimedia Canada as well as Wiki Project Med Foundation

image credit: Mike Turner photo

One of the most revolutionary aspects of our new digital information age is the advent of Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is a free-access, free content Internet encyclopedia, supported and hosted by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. It is the sixth-most popular website in the world and is the Internet's largest and most popular general reference work, arguably the number one go-to source for information.

So when a highly publicized event occurs like the ebola outbreak this year, it is important that information on the topic is factual, accurate and up-to-date.

Dr. James Heilman, a Cranbrook emergency physician, is an advocate for the improvement of Wikipedia's health-related content. He was a founding member of Wikimedia Canada (an NGO that promotes Wikipedia in Canada) and is an active contributor to WikiProject Medicine, which works to broaden the scope and improve the quality of medical articles on Wikipedia.

With a focus on medical and disease related articles on the online encyclopedia, Dr. Heilman at once noticed a huge jump in traffic related to ebola, as a result of the outbreak in Africa and a couple of highly publicized cases in the U.S.

Back in April of 2014, I was working to improve Wikipedias content on neglected diseases, Dr. Heilman told Mike Turner of Global News. And as part of this project I went and improved our article on ebola virus disease. Since that time the media on this topic exploded, around July, 2014.

Dr. Heilman says there is a lot of fear and misinformation surrounding the current ebola outbreak, as a result of intense media publicity. Wikipedia can play a key role in making sure the facts about ebola and other diseases are presented properly.

One of the most concerning rumours circulating lately is that ebola has become airborne, Dr. Heilman said. This generates further fear theres no evidence of airborne transmission among people. There is some research that raised slight concerns, but that research was carried out in pigs and does not appear to apply to humans.

Excerpt from:
Keeping the facts straight