Orthopaedia: Wiki Publishing and Collaborative Knowledgebase Development in Orthopaedics
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Abstract
Purpose
The emergence of the Internet and the recent developments in online collaborative technologies has provided new tools with which to find, use, share and expand knowledge. Wiki technologies challenge the traditional notions of authorship, editing and publishing and have the inherent potential to change how we construct knowledge repositories and collaborate on the Web. Despite the extraordinary success of Wikipedia and the potential of wiki publishing, its adoption in the academic community has been limited. Orthopaedia has been designed to address key elements of medical publishing that create barriers to wiki adoption with first generation wiki platforms: 1) authorship, 2) peer review, 3) copyright and 4) academic motivation.
Method
A detailed market analysis of wiki platforms was conducted to determine which wiki matched the development needs and modeling of the orthopaedic community of practice. An enterprise wiki platform was selected for its advanced capabilities such as unlimited workspaces, space permissions, page templates and versioning, rich text editor, multimedia content and attachment handling, notifications, search indexing, professional networking and extensible plugin architecture. Templates for structured content creation were developed for each repository of educational material. Custom plugins were developed to address the need for peer review, authorship and citation management. A Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license was selected to address copyright concerns.
Results
As of Oct 29, 2011, Orthopaedia has over 27,000 content assets (11,298 pages, 15,139 attachments, 259 blogposts, 311 comments) organised across 132 workspaces and contributed by 772 members. Thirty-four different groups have been created to handle different content view/edit permissions and requirements within the wiki including residency programs, associations and self-published online textbooks. The closed membership model has prevented content quality issues seen with Wikipedia.
Since Jan 1, 2010, over 766,500 unique visitors from 216 countries have generated more than 1.65 million pageviews. Top countries include US (51%), UK (8.5%), Canada (6.9%), Australia (4.6%) and India (3.5%). 81% of traffic comes from search engines, 9% from direct traffic and 10% from referring sites. The open peer review workflow model is a 4 stage process – Draft, Under Review, Reviewed, and Reviewed by Editorial Board. During each stage notifications are sent via email and the process and status is tracked online in a workflow diagram.
Conclusion
In contrast to conventional static publications, dynamic publications in the wiki model have no final version, no definite date of publication and continuous integration and synthesis of new findings and insights. A dynamic collaborative orthopaedic knowledgebase can be developed using wiki technology that provides authors with due credit and that can evolve via continual revision and integration of more traditional peer review models into a rigorous clinical, educational and research tool. The enterprise architecture of Orthopaedia allows customization of the wiki platform to meet the diverse needs of different stakeholders in the orthopaedic community of practice.
The emergence of the Internet and the recent developments in online collaborative technologies has provided new tools with which to find, use, share and expand knowledge. Wiki technologies challenge the traditional notions of authorship, editing and publishing and have the inherent potential to change how we construct knowledge repositories and collaborate on the Web. Despite the extraordinary success of Wikipedia and the potential of wiki publishing, its adoption in the academic community has been limited. Orthopaedia has been designed to address key elements of medical publishing that create barriers to wiki adoption with first generation wiki platforms: 1) authorship, 2) peer review, 3) copyright and 4) academic motivation.
Method
A detailed market analysis of wiki platforms was conducted to determine which wiki matched the development needs and modeling of the orthopaedic community of practice. An enterprise wiki platform was selected for its advanced capabilities such as unlimited workspaces, space permissions, page templates and versioning, rich text editor, multimedia content and attachment handling, notifications, search indexing, professional networking and extensible plugin architecture. Templates for structured content creation were developed for each repository of educational material. Custom plugins were developed to address the need for peer review, authorship and citation management. A Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license was selected to address copyright concerns.
Results
As of Oct 29, 2011, Orthopaedia has over 27,000 content assets (11,298 pages, 15,139 attachments, 259 blogposts, 311 comments) organised across 132 workspaces and contributed by 772 members. Thirty-four different groups have been created to handle different content view/edit permissions and requirements within the wiki including residency programs, associations and self-published online textbooks. The closed membership model has prevented content quality issues seen with Wikipedia.
Since Jan 1, 2010, over 766,500 unique visitors from 216 countries have generated more than 1.65 million pageviews. Top countries include US (51%), UK (8.5%), Canada (6.9%), Australia (4.6%) and India (3.5%). 81% of traffic comes from search engines, 9% from direct traffic and 10% from referring sites. The open peer review workflow model is a 4 stage process – Draft, Under Review, Reviewed, and Reviewed by Editorial Board. During each stage notifications are sent via email and the process and status is tracked online in a workflow diagram.
Conclusion
In contrast to conventional static publications, dynamic publications in the wiki model have no final version, no definite date of publication and continuous integration and synthesis of new findings and insights. A dynamic collaborative orthopaedic knowledgebase can be developed using wiki technology that provides authors with due credit and that can evolve via continual revision and integration of more traditional peer review models into a rigorous clinical, educational and research tool. The enterprise architecture of Orthopaedia allows customization of the wiki platform to meet the diverse needs of different stakeholders in the orthopaedic community of practice.
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