Talking hospitals
Getting out of the hospital is a lot like resigning from a book club. You're not out of it until the computer says you're out of it.
We return to our interview format this week, speaking with the participants of WikiProject Hospitals. This project, formed in 2010, has no Featured content and only three Good articles, yet aided by around 30 hard-working Wikipedians covers a topic that is essential to life. The only problem is that you tend to forget about hospitals until you or someone you know is put in one. The services they provide range from strapping broken fingers to life-saving surgery, plus long-term care for chronically or terminally ill patients. Certainly, they're quite important, but is enough time on Wikipedia being dedicated to them? From the creation of articles about small medical institutions around the world, to the giants of the hospital world including the Royal London Hospital and Clinical Dubrava, it's time to have a discussion and see what happens within this project with such a narrow scope, but so many articles. We spoke to Welsh, PCHS-NJROTC, Wpollard and Bluerasberry.
What motivated you to join WikiProject Hospitals? What aspects of hospitals interest you the most? Have you ever worked within a medical establishment?
- Welsh: My first interest was stirred when I was at the bedside of my father in Cheltenham General Hospital, but found that the article did not exist, despite being a reasonably sizable establishment! Initially I was intrigued that hospitals are often local, regional or national institutions that are really important to their patients and staff, but often are unknown beyond that. There are also many historic hospitals that are now disused or converted into other uses. When I looked at the local coverage in Wales, I discovered a very patchy picture, and decided to improve the subject by revitalising the hospitals WikiProject.
- PCHS-NJROTC: I was actually the one who spearheaded the idea as a proposed WikiProject, after creating a few hospital articles and noticing that, unlike schools which have long had WikiProject Schools (which I am also part of), hospitals did not have a WikiProject at the time and were under a more general WikiProject. Since then, while I've become a lot less active at Wikipedia than I once was, I still do participate a little here and there, and others have done a wonderful job maintaining and contributing to the project. I was a hospital volunteer for three years and I worked as a hospital food service worker for 9 months.
- Wpollard: I originally was not very interested in this project, because I had at that point worked fifteen years in various health settings and really wanted to write about other topics. I drifted into this when on travel I visited hospitals in England, the Philippines and Jamaica. I found many hospitals, including important ones, had nothing written about them in Wikipedia. I like to create new articles and I wanted to explore all aspects of these undocumented hospitals and medical clinics. I have in twenty years time worked in nine hospitals and I think six clinics and old-age facilities. My occupation has been as a respiratory therapist, a care worker and as a sleep technologist.
- Bluerasberry: I work for a nonprofit organization in the United States which rates the quality and value of hospitals by examining their safety records and the prices they charge, and I came to this WikiProject to see if there was some way I could share information here. I have hardly contributed so far, but I am sure that I am not the only person who has imagined large collections of hospital reviews becoming more accessible through Wikipedia as a way to improve public health and empower patients. Every hospital says their service is the best, but government safety reports say that the number of problems that hospitals have vary a lot even within small geographical areas. I wish Wikipedia could tap into this kind of information.
Have you contributed to any of the project's Good Articles?
- PCHS-NJROTC: Only minor edits and vandalism reversions.
- Wpollard: I have only done minor editing to a few of these articles.
Is it difficult to find images for hospital articles? Do you find that photographs are easily available or do they need taking especially?
- Welsh: Hospitals are often the subject of local photographers, so images are readily available, for example on Geograph Britain and Ireland with the appropriate licenses. Historic photos are harder to track down, though a set of old images of asylums was uploaded a few years ago.
- PCHS-NJROTC: For local ones, I'll usually try and take a picture myself.
- Wpollard: I have not made an effort to locate images, but in one case I referenced two photographs of a hospital that had no photo in its article.
How is the notability of a hospital or clinic determined?
- Welsh: I use a rule of thumb where the hospital is local and small (Low), regional and large (Mid), of National (High) or International (Top) importance. This seems to work well, and also means that hospitals in less represented countries have a way of levelling themselves with more popular nations. I usually look at the daily new article logs[1] and tag any of relevance from across the world.
- Wpollard: WikiProject Hospitals has a rating scale, as outlined in the first answer to this question. Also, another part of the rating scale examines the quality of the article itself. Once the rating has been done, it is much easier to see exactly what is needed to improve a particular article.
Does WikiProject Hospitals collaborate with any other projects? If so, how do you split the workload between these projects?
- Welsh: There is a tacit agreement that hospitals are documented here rather than in WP:Medicine. There is a little-used project for the UK NHS for which there is plenty of scope for expansion.
- Bluerasberry: I mostly participate in WikiProject Medicine and hospital information goes to this project. WikiProject National Institutes of Health is the lightly active WikiProject for the United States government division overseeing most government funded health research in the US, and I would like it to be related to this WikiProject because they have so many records on hospitals which I would like shared here. The WikiProjects for fictional hospitals portrayed in television shows have a lot of activity while the TV show is fresh, as in the cases of WikiProject Grey's Anatomy and the House task force.
What are the most urgent needs of WikiProject Hospitals? How can a new contributor help today?
- Welsh: There are many hospitals around the world that could be added as a record of their importance to their communities.
- PCHS-NJROTC: I concur with Welsh, there's still a lot of potential for new articles.
- Wpollard: Yes, there is a need for new articles and new people to write them. Also, a number of hospitals and articles have not been rated by WikiProject Hospitals standards. This helps establish the importance of a hospital and the quality of an article. Many unrated hospitals need more information either written or documented about them. And large medical clinics should have articles about them, as they usually provide much needed medical care to the areas they serve.
- Bluerasberry: This project will change radically as Wikidata becomes more developed and integrated into Wikipedia. In developed countries there are large databases of information available about hospitals. These datasets are difficult to access and interpret, but as organizations make them more available to the public, they also become more available for integration into Wikipedia. In my opinion, the most urgent need of WikiProject Hospitals is the development of Wikidata to serve as a back end for infoboxes to provide basic information about hospitals including their name, location, size, and other routine information. If that much were available, and if additionally a small amount of structured text could be designed so that all hospital articles could present a standard few sentences, then hundreds or thousands of hospital articles could be created quickly in the manner of the Rambot city creation articles. Almost every hospital is notable by Wikipedia's current inclusion criteria because all of them are independently reviewed by published third party sources, usually relating to reviews of their funding and safety practices. Right now, though, those reports are hard to access, tedious to compare one to another, and intended to be reviewed along with datasets which Wikipedia is not prepared to present without Wikidata.
Anything else you'd like to add?
- Any and all contributions welcomed!
So, there you have it. If you ever find yourself contributing to a hospital article, remember that these guys are there doing the hard work for the medically interested public. We're going to stay within the town for next week, as we interview WikiProject Urban Studies & Planning.
Discuss this story