A Medical Wikipedia?

Give me a break.. an online encyclopedia focused on explaining conditions, drugs, procedures, medial facilities and other medical topics written by physicians and PhDs?

Yeah.. It is true, the Medpedia Project launched a preview of the Medpedia site Wednesday with the support of medical heavyweights like Harvard Medical School, the Stanford School of Medicine, the University of Michigan Medial School and the University of California Berkeley School of Public Health.

These schools and other organizations have agreed to provide content to the project and to motivate their employees to sign up to be editors of the site, which is scheduled to go live with 1,000 pages of information by the end of the year.

The site, which is built with the same open source software that runs Wikipedia, will be written and edited by volunteer medical doctors or experts with PhD degrees, noted James Currier, Medpedia’s founder and chairman.

Currier said that unlike other online efforts around health information, Medpedia will provide all information relevant to a specific topic on one page and not chop it up over multiple pages to try to generate more page views. In addition, the navigation hierarchy has been designed to be simple for all levels of users. He also said that the bottoms-up, collaborative approach made popular by Wikipedia and other social networks is perfectly suited to the Medpedia goal of creating and interlinking content about 13,000 drugs and 30,000 medical conditions.

Medpedia is also receiving content and cooperation from the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, the Federal Drug Administration and other government research groups.

For me, this is a very promising project. It could help in expanding the knowledge in the field of medicine.