Help:Frequently Asked Questions

General FAQs

What is Physiopedia?

Physiopedia is a resource for rehabilitation professionals throughout the world, offering a place to contribute, share, and gain knowledge. The content of Physiopedia will be driven by experts and represent an evidence-based approach to patient care. As a worldwide site, Physiopedia works to unite physiotherapists and physical therapists from all reaches of our planet.

Developed in association with Webducate and leading physiotherapy and physical therapy institutions, Physiopedia will serve as a catalog, database, and learning tool about all physiotherapy matters for health profesionals, students and the public that will improve physiotherapy knowledge worldwide.

If you have physiotherapy expertise and would like to get involved in the editing of Physiopedia, apply to be a Member.

Who is Physiopedia intended for?

Physiopedia is intended for anyone with an interest in physiotherapy. For physiotherapists and physical therapists, it is a platform to share the most up-to-date physiotherapy and physical therapy knowledge. For educational institutions, it is an opportunity to get involved in the development of this valuable global collaborative effort.  For the general public, it’s a comprehensive educational resource that provides information related to physiotherapy.

When will the Physiopedia site be live?

Physiotherapists, physical therapists and related educational organizations have begun to contribute content to Physiopedia and the site will be available to the general public in 2009. Members of the physiotherapy and physical therapy community can apply to become editors starting September 1, 2008.

Who is responsible for content on Physiopedia?

Editors with physiotherapy expertise are being called upon to add to different parts of this project. Additionally, seed content is being provided to Physiopedia so that Editors will have something to edit when the site first opens.

Who owns the content on Physiopedia?

Content on the Physiopedia site is freely available for reuse under the GNU Free Documentation License.

Who governs activity in Physiopedia?

Initially, rhe volunteer Physiopedia Project staff will oversee activity on the site. Over time, as the community of Editors grows, a hierarchy of volunteer administrators will take over the day-to-day governance of the community.

Who can contribute to the content on Physiopedia?

Anyone with knowledge related to the physiotherapy and physical therapy professions. If you are a qualified physiotherapist or physical therapist, a student physiotherapist or physical therapist under the guidance of an approved educator or an approved expert clinician from an associated clinical speciality you can apply to become an Editor and make changes directly to Physiopedia articles.

If you have physiotherapy expertise and would like to get involved in the editing of Physiopedia, apply to be a Member.

Will Physiopedia expand to include languages other than English?

Possibly. If you can help with that, please contact Physiopedia here.

Do Editors receive payment for their involvement?

No. Physiopedia Editors are volunteers. Editors get involved for many different reasons including passion for their subject, the drive to contribute to an important resource of knowledge and the ability to increase their reputations in their field of expertise.

How will Physiopedia be supported?

To support the costs of operation in the future, non-invasive advertising will be shown on the Physiopedia website.

Physiopedia is funded and managed by Webducate, an e-learning company in the UK.

Content FAQs

How reliable is the content on Physiopedia?

The seed content available on Physiopedia at launch is up to date, accurate, and provided by reputable sources. After launch at the end of 2008, once Editors start making edits and adding new pages to the seed content, it is possible, and even likely that there will be mistakes and language that is unclear. This is the nature of a collaborative wiki.

It is anticipated that hundreds of Editors will soon be reading the articles and monitoring changes using the Recent Changes page. The model, therefore, is that incorrect information will be corrected quickly, and the overall accuracy of Physiopedia will always be improving.

Thus, if you see information you think is wrong, it is in your power to correct it. Please apply to become a Editor and make the change yourself, or email Physiopedia and it will be reviewed by an approved Editor and possibly changed.

The content on, or accessible through, Physiopedia.com is for informational purposes only. Physiopedia is in no way a substitute for professional advice or expert medical services from a qualified healthcare provider. Further, Physiopedia does not recommend or endorse any treatment, institution, professional, physician, product, procedure or other information that may be mentioned on Physiopedia.

How is previously copyrighted information now available?

In the spirit of building this collaborative resource, forward thinking institutions have contributed seed content to the main wiki pages and released that content from copyright restrictions so that it can be freely editable by the Physiopedia community of Editors. Organizations are honored for their contributions on the Record of Merit page. An organization’s content will be absorbed into the general body of Physiopedia content, and over the course of several months or years, may become unrecognizable in comparison to its original form. Organizations are not required to pay Physiopedia to participate, and Physiopedia offers no monetary compensation to any organization for participation.

If you are an organization with medical content that you would like to donate to Physiopedia, please apply to contribute content. Doing so will secure your organization a place on the Record of Merit page.

How often are Physiopedia pages updated?

Given the collaborative, volunteer nature of Physiopedia, there is no schedule for changes and improvements to the pages. As Editors have time, have access to more information, or as new health-related discoveries emerge, new pages will be created and existing pages will be updated. Eventually, thousands of people will be editing Physiopedia, and the overall accuracy and comprehensiveness of the site will be improving on a daily basis.

Why can’t I edit articles anonymously on Physiopedia?

To help minimize inaccuracies and abuse, individuals who want to edit articles must first be approved by the Physiopedia community. Viewers of Physiopedia -- meaning people who are using the information on Physiopedia and not contributing – will not need to log in and their identities will never be exposed publicly by visiting the website. For more see the Physiopedia Privacy Policy.

If you have medical expertise and would like to participate in The Physiopedia Project, apply to be an Editor.

How technical will the language on Physiopedia become?

The editorial aim of the community is to keep the main pages understandable by someone who reads at a high school level. The information on those pages should be structured to answer the most common questions people have about a topic and be written with little medical jargon so the everyday user can understand. Each page should be laid out so that all of the information on a topic is available on one page in an easy to read format. More technical content will also be available on “Technical” sister-pages allowing for interested readers and Clinicians to find and share more in-depth references and clinical materials.

How is Physiopedia different from other health sites on the Internet?

Physiopedia is a bottoms-up collaborative body of work where content is written, edited and constantly re-edited by the Physiopedia community of Editors. It’s not licensed from third parties, and the content is not top-down and static, but rather, constantly changing and growing. Much of the design and many of the features of Physiopedia are intended to nurture and support the community of Editors, who have highly valuable and specialized information to share.

Physiopedia content is freely usable under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) license. People are encouraged to discover ways to use this valuable resource.

How is Physiopedia different from Wikipedia?

The founders and editors of Wikipedia, more than anyone, demonstrated the power of bottoms-up collaborative communities to produce a complex and accurate information resource. They are the leading open source community and the inspiration for Physiopedia.

There are unique requirements when dealing with health and medical information and distinct differences between the two sites. They are:

• Physiopedia is focused 100% on health, medicine and the body, whereas less than 2% of Wikipedia’s content is related to health and medicine.

The Physiopedia website and seed content has been developed in association with and contributions from top institutions and individuals within the health and medical world.

• Physiopedia has an extensive professional networking infrastructure for the clinicians to use in any way they see fit, including collaborating on editing content on the site. In other words, there are clear professional benefits for individuals with the specialized knowledge needed to create Physiopedia content to come to the site and return regularly, regardless of their level of contribution.
• Twenty-one major software modifications have been made to the MediaWiki software to accommodate the unique requirements of health and medical information. These changes include:
  • Only medical professionals who have completed an extensive profile including disclosures, applied to be an Editor, and been accepted by the community are allowed to modify the content.
  • Each main article page has three additional “sister pages” that can be accessed by prominently placed tabs. The “Technical” sister page is where clinicians can use the health/medical/technical nomenclature to discuss and explain the topic to each other and to very advanced patients. The “Debate” sister page is where, for subjects on which consensus has yet to be reached, Editors can lay out their evidence and reasoning around hypotheses they are developing. The “Accredited” sister page is where clinicians can add content to Physiopedia that cannot be edited by others, other than being deleted altogether. This Accredited page is useful either for Editors who want to gradually start contributing or for Editors who want to maintain their copyright.
  • A “Scrub Room” content management system and a team of M.D.s that work with organizations that wish to contribute large amounts of copyright-free content. This system “scrubs” the content and puts it into the wiki format, interlinks it, and integrates it with what’s already there.

How can I contact Physiopedia?

For questions not answered here or elsewhere on the site, you can email here.