No bugs after a major upgrade, phew!
Well, it’s been nearly a week now since we did a major upgrade of the Mediawiki installation that runs Physiopedia, and we are pleased to say (fingers, toes, legs and arms crossed!!) that all seems to have gone very well. Although we keep finding very minor bugs ourselves no-one has reported anything to us. Phew!
So we are now running Mediawiki 1.6 which is a very up to date version of the same code that runs Wikipedia. Has anyone noticed the subtle differences? So far the most significant changes that we have noticed are an improved search page, an improved upload file page and many more Special Pages to play with. If you do come across anything that doesn’t look quite right or isn’t working how you expected it to, please do let us know.
Publish Research in Physiopedia
Physiopedia now offers an open opportunity for you to publish your research.
The open and collaborative nature of Physiopedia offers an ideal opportunity for the publication of physiotherapy and physical therapy research, including work that might otherwise not get published. We are happy for you to publish your original research in Physiopedia, include a summary of your research prior to publication in a peer reviewed journal or to publish your student dissertation.
This is a great way of publicising student work, supporting new researchers and bridging the gap between completing research and publication. We welcome all types of research to be published in Physiopedia including randomised controlled trials, systematic reviews and meta-analyses, and case studies.
As a wiki which can be edited by physiotherapists and physical therapists from all over the world, Physiopedia lends itself as a good solution to open peer review of research. Each piece of research in Physiopedia has it’s own page, at the bottom of this page is a section for Physiopedia users to make comments and discuss the research.
Things to do in the new research section of Physiopedia:
Read Research in Physiopedia
The research section in Physiopedia is similar to that seen on journal websites to maintain a recognisable format. When research is added it will be included under the year/date at the time of inclusion.
See the Physiopedia Research – Table of Contents
Submit Research to Physiopedia
There are two ways in which you can add your research to Physiopedia:
All submissions should be submitted in the requested format. See submission guidelines.
Peer Review Research in Physiopedia
To review a piece of research that has been published in Physiopedia you should: go to the page for the piece of research that you wish to review, find the review section at the bottom of this page and add your comments as new bullets points in this section. All we ask is that when you make comments on other peoples research please respect their work and only provide critical reviews that are constructive. The review section of each research article will be moderated by our quality assurance and peer review team.
See how to peer review an article
If you would like to join the Physiopedia research peer review team, let us know.
We hope that this new feature offers an great opportunity to publish all types of physiotherapy and physical therapy research and that the community will collaborate to peer review the published research.
New social features in Physiopedia
Physiopedia has finally had a social face lift. This is the first part of a scheme to make Physiopedia a more social experience where our users will be able to connect with us and with each other. On the left we have added icons to the sidebar to enable you to quickly sign up for email alerts and RSS feeds and also to connect with us in Twiitter and Facebook. On the right we have added a button that allows you to easily save the current page as a bookmark or to share it with your friends via various applications, including Facebook and Twitter. We hope you find these additions useful.
Physiopedia in any language
Did you know that you can translate Physiopedia into one of 52 languages!! We use Google’s free online language translation service which instantly translates text and web pages and although it is not always the most accurate of translations it enables our non-English speaking to readers to make some use of the information provided on Physiopedia. To use this service all you need to do is look for the ’select language’ drop down menu ‘powered by Google’ at the bottom of the sidebar, see diagram below:
Physiopedia is contributing to health resources in Zambia
We are currently collaborating with the Sparkman Center for Global Health to add the contents of Physiopedia to the Widernet project of developing a digital library, entitled the eGranary, in several educational training institutions in Zambia.
Many of the developing country universities, schools, clinics and hospitals with whom Widernet work have no Internet connection. Those that are connected to the Internet have such limited bandwidth that they cannot offer free Web browsing to the majority of their staff and students. Bandwidth in Africa can cost up to 100 times what it costs in the U.S., so for some organizations a slim Internet connection can consume the equivalent of one-half their operating budget. Even for those individuals who have the wherewithal to pay for Web browsing, the experience can be frustratingly slow — it can take hours to download a single audio file.
The eGranary Digital Library addresses these issues by moving a large assortment of educational Web documents onto the subscriber’s local area network (LAN) so that the documents can be made available to everyone within the institution freely and instantly. In essence the Widernet project “stores the seeds of knowledge” inside the institution where they can be accessed even when the Internet connection is broken. More specifically, this particular eGranary that we are collaborating on is designed for Medical, Nursing, and Public Health students in Zambia. To date there have been requests for more physiotherapy information but few quality physiotherapy resources have been located thus far, so we are honoured to have been invited to contribute to this project.
Please help us to help those in less resourced countries in this way by contributing content to Physiopedia. Together we can contribute to improved global health.
