Wikipedia:Cochrane Collaboration/Cochrane UK/About

The aim of this project is to improve the quality of Wikipedia articles with up-to-date, notable Cochrane evidence.

We suggest starting in one of three ways:

Choose a Cochrane review from those listed in the table, here, paraphrase its conclusions, and add the summary to a Wikipedia article.
Choose a Cochrane review, search for a relevant Wikipedia article, and post a link to it in the 'suggested articles' column, here.
Choose a Wikipedia article from the 'suggested articles' column, here, and use the adjacent affiliated Cochrane review to enhance it.

Introduction

Cochrane

Cochrane is a global independent network of researchers, professionals, patients, carers, and people interested in health. Cochrane is for anyone who is interested in using high-quality information to make health decisions. Whether you are a doctor or nurse, patient or carer, researcher or funder, Cochrane evidence provides a powerful tool to enhance your healthcare knowledge and decision making.

Cochrane's contributors are affiliated to the organization through Cochrane groups: healthcare subject-related review groups, thematic networks, groups concerned with the methodology of systematic reviews, and regional centres. There is no one place or office that is 'Cochrane'. Our contributors and groups are based all around the world and the majority of our work is carried out online. Each group is a 'mini-organization' in itself, with its own funding, website, and workload. Contributors affiliate themselves to a group, or in some cases several groups, based on their interests, expertise, and/or geographical location.

We do not accept commercial or conflicted funding. This is vital for us to generate authoritative and reliable information, working freely, unconstrained by commercial and financial interests.

Cochrane UK is a regional centre within Cochrane, supporting Cochrane activities in the UK. It is largely supported by the UK Government through the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR). You can find out more about the activities we support by going to our website: ukcc.cochrane.org. The collaboration is committed to working with Wikipedia editors in providing access to reliable high quality medical evidence. This responds to another commitment to finding ways to make information accessible to a broad audience.

Cochrane on Wikipedia

Cochrane and Wikipedia have a partnership for Cochrane to work with Wikipedia medical editors to transform the quality and content of health evidence available online. The partnership, formalized in 2014, supports the inclusion of relevant evidence within all Wikipedia medical articles, as well as processes to help ensure that medical information included in Wikipedia is of the highest quality and as accurate as possible. Trusted, evidence-based research can help people to make informed decisions about their own health care.

New and updated Cochrane Systematic Reviews are published every week. Prior to publication, each new review is discussed at a weekly Analysis of Review Group Output (ARGO) meeting by a group of health and communications specialists at Cochrane UK. During this meeting, reviews can be flagged up as being suitable for reporting on blogs, sharing with the media, as well as being used to improve the evidence-base of articles on Wikipedia.

This project area is where the latter end up. From here, you can click on Reviews & Articles to browse the list of reviews flagged up for Wikipedia since November of 2014, as well as a list of related Wikipedia, and Resources to see a broader list of Wikipedia articles related to medicine, and links to the Wikiproject Medicine manual of style, among other things.

Choice of reviews

While Cochrane Reviews always aim to weigh up the best evidence, their conclusions are not always notable. At times only weak conclusions can be drawn from the evidence, and at others the evidence itself is so weak that conclusions don’t add much to existing guidelines and respected secondary sources.

The reviews selected for this project are ones that are of interest to a UK audience, have relatively strong evidence, and either strongly reinforce or contradict existing conclusions and statements from existing sources. They may also be in notable subject areas, whether common or obscure.

How this project is meant to work

Editors can engage in three different ways. Starting with a wikipedia article and aiming to improve its citations, starting by selecting a new Cochrane review and citing it in a relevant article, or simply spending some time matching listed reviews with articles that you think might be improved with evidence from one of the listed reviews.

1. Starting with an article

Wikipedia articles, especially C-class articles, can benefit greatly from adding or updating citations. Checking the state of existing citations is often the best way to go about improving an article. Look to see if existing citations are either a) primary sources or b) secondary sources (textbooks, systematic reviews) that are more than five years old. After you’ve found an article you want to improve, you can search in various places for reliable secondary sources to cite:

The Cochrane Library (available in the UK for free)
NICE guidelines (in the UK)
An up-to-date medical textbook

Once you find evidence in these sources to support the article text, you may see more information in the source that you think is relevant. Now is your choice to paraphrase this information and add another detailed reference for it. The more quality secondary sources you encounter, the more you will be able to improve the article.

It's best to start off with a review listed on the main Reviews & Articles page, if there is one, and exploring the relevant Cochrane review. Or you could go to the 'resources' page and browse a list of high priority 'C' or 'start' class articles.

2. Starting by selecting a new Cochrane review

The Reviews & Articles tab is a good place to start. You can order the table by review group, perhaps the one relating to your area of special interest. Once you’re familiar with the contents of the review, you can begin searching Wikipedia for the relevant article. Once you find this article, check to see what state it is in and where, if at all, you might be able to add the citation for this Cochrane review. If it reinforces the existing text, add a citation, if it contradicts or adds to this, add a new sentence presenting the evidence in your own words, and add the citation.

3. Editing the table on the Reviews & Articles page

If you don't want to get into the nitty gritty of editing just yet, you can help contribute to the right-hand side of the main table by posting links to Wikipedia articles most relevant to the adjacent Cochrane review. This will make it easier for editors undertaking method one, above.

Using an article's talk page

For both approaches described above, if the article has an active Talk page with several different editors involved, it’s good practice to make the changes you wish to make, then go to the talk page and highlight what you have done and why you have done this. Your changes might be removed by another editor. This is your chance to engage in a discussion about the relevance of the information you have added or changed, and the citation you have used. An argument for removing a Cochrane citation may include the following:

The evidence is so weak it is not likely to guide consensus
The conclusion offered by the Cochrane review is not interesting or clear enough
The quality of the review is in question
Guidelines and general medical consensus outweigh the significance of the contradictory conclusions offered by the review authors
The addition you have made is not relevant to that part of the article

Wikipedia editors differ in their opinion of the relative merits of including and prioritizing Cochrane evidence. On the whole, if it is felt to improve the quality, objectivity, interest, and freshness of the article, it has a good chance of being retained.