Help:Frequently Asked Questions

General FAQs

What is The Physiopedia Project?

The Physiopedia Project is an extraordinary global effort to build to collect, organize and make understandable, the world’s best information about health, medicine and the body and make it freely available on Physiopedia.com. Doctors, health organizations, medical schools, hospitals, health professionals, and dedicated individuals are coming together to build the most comprehensive medical resource in the world.

Developed in association with Harvard Medical School, Stanford School of Medicine, Berkeley School of Public Health, University of Michigan Medical School and other leading global health organizations, Physiopedia will serve as a catalog, database, and learning tool about health, medicine and the body for doctors, scientists, policymakers, students and citizens that will improve medical literacy worldwide.

If you have medical expertise and would like to join the community of people editing Physiopedia, apply to be a Member.

Who is Physiopedia intended for?

Physiopedia is intended for anyone with an interest in health, medicine and the body. For medical professionals, it’s a platform to share the most up-to-date medical knowledge. For health-related organizations, it’s an opportunity network among themselves and to reach the widest audience possible and fulfill their missions. For the general public, it’s a comprehensive educational resource that provides information related to their bodies, medical questions and health needs.

When will the Physiopedia site be live?

Physicians and organizations have begun to contribute content to Physiopedia and the site will be available to the general public at the end of 2008. Members of the medical community can apply to become editors starting July 23, 2008.

Who is responsible for content on Physiopedia?

Thousands of Editors with medical expertise are being called upon to add to different parts of this project. Additionally, seed content is being provided by organizations 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, Physiopedia Project staff and a few volunteers 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 and policy setting of the community.

Who can contribute to the content on Physiopedia?

Anyone. There are multiple ways of contributing. If you are an MD or PhD in the biomedical field, you can apply to become an Editor and make changes directly to Physiopedia articles (See more below). If you are anyone else, you can use the "Make a suggestion" link at the top of any page to make a suggestion for that page. An approved Editor will review and potentially add your suggestion.

What is an Editor and who can be one?

Editors are individuals that have applied to and been approved by the Physiopedia community. The application process includes Editors' real names, educational backgrounds, descriptions of areas of expertise and disclosures about compensation and conflicts of interest. Only M.D.s, Ph.D.s in a biomedical field and people with medical credentials will be allowed to make edits to Physiopedia. Anyone in the health and medical fields is invited to create a profile and be a Member of the Physiopedia professional networking community, and anyone is encouraged to contribute by writing in suggestions for changes to the site using the "Make a suggestion" link at the top of each page.

If you have medical expertise and would like to join The Physiopedia Project, apply to be a Member.

Will Physiopedia expand to include languages other than English?

Yes. 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, text-based advertising will be shown on the Physiopedia website through third-party ad networks such as Google’s AdSense or Healthline’s third party ad service. Next to these ads on the page will be a link “Flag inappropriate ads” so that the community can keep the ads on the site clean and useful.

Physiopedia.com Inc. is funded and managed by Ooga Labs a technology greenhouse in San Francisco developing several for-profit, mission-oriented companies to address worldwide needs in health, education, and activism.

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.