The Human Body Project: Increasing the credibility of human anatomy and physiology information on English Wikipedia
Out of the 6000+ featured articles, only one related to anatomy or physiology has attained featured status so far.
Using a WikiCred microgrant, The Human Body Project is aimed at increasing the quality and credibility of the content related to anatomy and physiology on English Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. The project will do this by integrating the content from the ‘Anatomy and Physiology’ Openstax textbook. The contents of the textbook will be integrated into Wikimedia projects according to the guidelines for adding open-licensed text to Wikipedia.
English Wikipedia is a frequently visited source of health information, including information related to the anatomy and physiology of the human body. For instance, articles belonging to Category: Anatomy on English Wikipedia have 1,500,000 daily pageviews, and articles belonging to Category: Physiology have 1,900,000 daily pageviews. The article ‘Heart’, which predominantly contains anatomy and physiology information, has a daily average of 3000+ pageviews.
However, out of the 6000+ featured articles, only one related to anatomy/physiology [menstrual cycle] has attained featured status so far. There are 46 good articles in anatomy, while no physiology articles are named in the good article list. Given their wide popularity and need for improvement, the articles related to anatomy and physiology on English Wikipedia are likely to benefit from more content and images.
The Human Body Project is aimed at increasing the quality and credibility of the content related to human anatomy and physiology on English Wikipedia. This will be achieved by integrating the contents of the OpenStax textbook ‘Anatomy and Physiology,” which is an open textbook licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. This is a frequently updated textbook (last updated in 2022), written by eminent educators in the field, and has been used in over 2000 classrooms.
Most of the contents of this dynamic textbook are compatible for free reuse with attribution on Wikipedia. As a part of this project, the contents of this textbook, including images extracted from the textbook, will be integrated into English Wikipedia, thereby strengthening the credibility of anatomy and physiology articles.
The relevant articles on English Wikipedia that fall under the scope of this project will be mapped. They will be checked for information gaps that can be bridged using the contents of the ‘Anatomy and Physiology’ textbook. As the licence of the textbook is compatible with Wikipedia, the contents of the book could be added unaltered, if so needed.
Wikipedia’s manual of style will be followed in the case of all content additions, and existing content in the articles will not be altered or removed. The lists and tables of glossary terms given in the textbook will be integrated into list articles on English Wikipedia. Appropriate credits will be given to the authors of the book according to the guidelines for adding open licence text to Wikipedia.
What’s Next?
By the end of this project, the content from “Anatomy and Physiology” will have been added to at least 100 articles on English Wikipedia, thereby increasing their credibility and quality of content.
