WikiProject Medicine was formed in 2004 by physicians and other medical professionals in an effort to improve the medical content on Wikipedia. Members of Wikiproject Medicine take primary responsibility for the biomedical content on Wikipedia. As co-founder Dr. James Heilman said, "it's easier to fix Wikipedia than it is to convince the [2] billion people each month who use it, not to."
Today, WikiProject Medicine has undertaken major educational and humanitarian projects and collaborated extensively with the wider biomedical community. For instance:
- The Cochrane Wikipedia Partnership encourages editors to add high-quality evidence to Wikipedia articles
- RNA Biology requires that new RNA families be added to Wikipedia when published in the journal
- PLOS One Topic Pages are review articles dual-published in PLOS One and into Wikipedia as a new page that can then be updated as needed
- WikiJournal of Medicine is an open-access, peer-reviewed journal hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation
- WikiProject Medicine provides support for the Wikipedia Education Program in Medicine, which helps instructors facilitate the incorporation of Wikipedia into classrooms.
- WikiProject Medicine has helped create several regional versions of an Internet-In-A-Box to provide people in areas without internet access the ability to read and download health information from Wikipedia.