CZ:Charter drafting committee/Position statements/Robert Badgett

I am an professor of medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, Texas. My interest is in information retrieval. I have had a number of jobs in medical publishing including:

• Teaching information retrieval and meta-analysis in the Cochrane Collaboration
• Chairing the committee that developed and oversaw the first two years of peer review of UpToDate. (1999-2001)
• Web development for the Annals of Internal Medicine (2001-2008)
• Web development for the Journal of the American Medical Association (2008 - present)
• Developer and maintainer of the federated medical search engine SUMSearch (1998 - present)

Regarding my experience with wikis:

• I teach evidence base medicine to senior medical students by having them write evidence-based edits (details). I have tried Eduzendium for this project, but was not successful and so all students used wikipedia.
• I have developed a biomedical citation formatter for wikis.

I think that my experience in knowledge management in medicine provides me an excellent background for wikis because:

• MEDLINE is 16 million articles with over a half million added per year
• One-third of even the highest impact research studies have results that are eventually attenuated or refuted (Ioannidis, 2005)
• Conflict of interest and other challenging, disruptive forces are very prevalent

Goals for CZ:

• Funding
• Increase number of authors
• Making writing easier to do. Eventually a wysiwyg edit interface is needed.
• Improve the approvals process by hybridizing the draft system with trust metrics. An example of trust methods is at wikigenes (details).
• Improve the use of templates and bots to reduce work required by humans.

For more about me, see http://medinformatics.uthscsa.edu/ and my CV.