The next time you read a health-related article on Wikipedia, it might have been improved through a new collaboration between the National Institutes of Health and the Wikimedia Foundation.

Ten experienced Wikipedia volunteers visited the NIH headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland, last week to train the scientists there on how to use and contribute to the world's de facto outboard brain. It was the first "Wikipedia Academy" to take place in the United States.

"One of our goals is to increase the scientists' understanding of Wikipedia and the established practices and procedures that have evolved over the years," said Frank Shulenberg, who organized the academy as head of public outreach for the Wikimedia Foundation. "They need some instructions about what's going on and why Wikipedia culture is like it is."

While the subject experts have epigenetics and infectious-disease outbreaks down cold, they don't really know the complex social dynamics of the site's thousands of contributors.

Wikipedia, by virtue of its massive and open collaboration process, is often seen as the best example of crowdsourcing. Thousands of people write, edit and source the articles that 300 million people a month look to for accurate information. The academy event aims to bring more subject experts to what has become the de facto storehouse for human knowledge.

To open-government advocates, NIH's move represents an important step toward recognizing how to reach people online.

"NIH could have gone the typical route and warned the public against using unreliable sources for information, but they get it: That's not going to happen," wrote Matthew Barton at the Personal Democracy Forum. "Wikipedia is going to stay popular, so it's vital that it provides correct information."

In science, Wikipedia's bigger issue might not be accuracy. As our own Thomas Goetz pointed out last year, the site doesn't always have the most accessible articles on complex topics.

Still, having more people who actually know what they are talking about contributing to the site's articles can't be a bad thing.

"I think the main point is that [the NIH] recognizes what a great opportunity for doing outreach Wikipedia is," Shulenberg said. "If you contribute to Wikipedia, you reach a large audience and we all want health-related information that's reliable."

See Also:

Image: A beautiful visualization of science-related Wikipedian activity from A Beautiful WWW.

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal's Twitter, Google Reader feed, and green tech history research site; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.**