Ganfyd

Ganfyd
Type of site
 Wiki
Available in English
Website Ganfyd.org
Alexa rank Positive decrease 1,760,764 (April 2014)[1]
Commercial No
Registration Required
Launched November 2005

Ganfyd is a medical wiki community and online medical wiki encyclopedia,[2] created in November 2005 by a group of doctors working in the United Kingdom. The site has been the subject of academic exposition into emerging methods of disseminating medical information and more specifically, the restricting of editors within an open collaborative wiki environment.[3][4][5] This model has subsequently been copied by other medical wikis, but some attempts to improve on the model, such as Medpedia have failed. In 2010, Paula Younger noted it as a laudable attempt to make medical information freely accessible and authoritative.[6]

Authorship

Only registered medical practitioners or persons working under their direction, and a small number of invited non-medical specialists, may edit ganfyd articles, and its license specifically prohibits editing by people who are not registered medical practitioners. The intention is to make the articles reliable enough for professional medical use. An audit trail is publicly available for each article.

Registration is by a variety of mechanisms, including a GMC Certificate or equivalent.

History

Ganfyd is intended to become a large online textbook of human medicine. By October 2010 there were over 2,000 page hits a day and it had reached 7,000 topic pages with over double that number of pages including stubs and redirects and 449 editors from six countries (United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland, United States). As of 2016 it has over 10,000 topic pages.

In December 2006, the Ganfyd site was noted as a specific example of a wiki being used as a low cost alternative to commercial point of care tools like UpToDate with the search portal Trip already indexing it.[7] This may be the first example of a medical wiki being indexed by an independent medical search engine.

Meaning

"Ganfyd" is an acronym meaning "Get a note from your doctor."[8] This phrase is known to be used by employers, insurance underwriters, and sports instructors to their respective employees/clients. In some cases, this may be intended to absolve the employer/instructor from liability in the event that the client suffers physical harm.

Some medical practitioners regard this as a cynical use of their time and skill, thus they use the term "ganfyd" pejoratively.

References

  1. ↑ "Ganfyd.org Site Info". Alexa Internet. Retrieved 2014-04-01.
  2. ↑ Ginn S (August 2010). "Evidence based mental health and Web 2.0". Evid Based Mens Health. 13 (3): 69–72. PMID 20682812. doi:10.1136/ebmh.13.3.69.
  3. ↑ Moturu, Sai T.; Liu, Huan; Johnson, William G. (2008-08-20). "Trust Evaluation in Health Information on the World Wide Web". 30th Annual International IEEE EMBS Conference.
  4. ↑ McLean, Rick; Richards, Brian H; Wardman, Janet I (2007-08-06). "The effect of Web 2.0 on the future of medical practice and education: Darwikinian evolution or folksonomic revolution?". Medical Journal of Australia. 187 (3).
  5. ↑ Barskey, Eugene; Giustini, Dean (2007). "Introducing Web 2.0: wikis for health librarians". J Can Health Libr Assoc. 28 (4): 147–150. doi:10.5596/c07-036.
  6. ↑ Younger, Paula (2010). "Beyond Wikipedia: how good a reference source are medical wikis?". Reference Reviews. 24 (1): 7–9. doi:10.1108/09504121011019899.
  7. ↑ Dean Giustini, British Medical Journal, "How Web 2.0 is Changing Medicine"
  8. ↑ Thoeny, Peter; Woods, Dan (2007). Wikis for dummies. New York: Wiley. p. 68. ISBN 0-470-04399-7.
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