In 2016 Dundee Dental School launched the Dundee Dental Wikipedia Editing Project, with the support of Cochrane Collaboration, to expand and improve Dental Wikipedia. Following growing interest from the dental community, the Wikipedia Collaboration was launched in 2017 to include numerous participants from dental schools in the UK, North America, Africa and Canada. This includes Dundee, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Manchester in the UK, Harvard, Tufts and NYU in the USA, and the University of Toronto in Canada. It all started when students at Dundee Dental School first learned of the deficiency and often absence of dental information on Wikipedia from a former Wikipedian in residence with the Cochrane Collaboration. A group of students felt change was necessary as they were disappointed from their own experience of having used Wikipedia to search for dental topics. So they decided to take the lead in establishing the UK’s first continuously running ‘Dental Editing Group’. By participating, students at IMU contributed to the future of dissemination of dental information. Joining the Dental Wikki group was an excellent opportunity for networking by getting to know dentists and dental students in and out with our own school.
IMU’s Participation
An IMU team was formed with a group of participants from Semester 7 and 10 dentistry students. This group was assigned a leader from the committee who was asked to be well-versed with editing Wikipedia pages. This whole exercise created chances for our students meeting new people from different areas of expertise in dentistry which would help build and expand their future career network. Three students were assigned to one topic who under the supervision of one Faculty supervisor, was able to produce a strong article for publishing at Wikipedia Dental Page. For the first time, the group was given specific topics of Wikipedia pages which require editing after consultation with the Dundee team. This project took place from September 2019 to February 2020 in a year’s cycle, starting from editing within our school to presenting our findings to other dental schools at the end of it.
| Wikipedia Hands-On Workshop at IMU |
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| Building on the experience and knowledge of the delegates, the one-day hands-on workshop provided a platform for more detailed knowledge-sharing and action-planning for Semesters 7 and 10 students. The main focus of this workshop was on helping the IMU committee and participating students to understand the whole process and develop their editing skills relevant to the topics. |
After article submissions and publishing, Tan Wan Yee and Voon Ying Xuan, Year 5 dental students, had presented their own and Semester 7 students work in the 4th Annual “Wikipedia Collaboration of Dental Schools: 4th Annual Conference” held on 7 March 2020 at Faculty of Dentistry, University of Dundee. Dental Wiki office at Dundee had informed the University that Wan Yee and Ying Xuan “were brilliant ambassadors of the university”. They won the prestigious “WCODS-Borrow Foundation Innovative Poster Award” judged by Dundee Professors against competition from Queen’s University Belfast, University of Aberdeen, University of Glasgow and USM (non-Dundee category).
The Steering Committee at IMU led by Dr Umer Daood will be developing more articulation of the Wikipedia cycle for 2020-21 with future students, to further raise the profile of the IMU Group and recruit potential students. The Committee will also follow-up on the student leads identified at class meetings.
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