Wiki[Alt]Med Project

Wiki[Alt]Med is an interdisciplinary research project based at the Universities of Manchester and Edinburgh, UK, which received funding from The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) between September 2021 and August 2023. The project explores the mediation and negotiation of (alternative) medical knowledge in the English-language Wikipedia using a corpus-based methodology. 

Once complete, the project corpus will be available to download from this site. More information about the corpus can be found here.

Please also see the pages dedicated to our project's publications and other activities.

Project abstract

In 2005, the WHO called a meeting of policymakers, health care providers, academic researchers, civil society representatives and other stakeholders to attempt to address a critical challenge facing the future development of evidence-based medicine, namely, the ‘know-do’ gap. This gap was defined as the gap between what is known and what is done, between the latest medical evidence and its application by healthcare professionals and patients around the world. At this meeting, ‘Knowledge Translation’ (KT) was introduced as a solution to the problem, a means of bridging the divide between the worlds of research and of its implementation. The concept of KT has subsequently soared in popularity, becoming a pervasive keyword in modern medical discourse (Barwick et al 2020).

The aim of this project is to explore how a theoretical and methodological perspective grounded in the humanities field of translation studies can inform and extend current debates in the medical sciences related to KT. Drawing on recent exploratory work published by Ackerley (2017), Engebretsen et al. (2017) and Ødemark et al. (2021), it highlights how the concept of translation has largely been take for granted in much of the KT literature, and that discussions of KT consequently rest on a series of problematic assumptions regarding the nature of knowledge, how it is communicated across texts and between communities, and the extent to which transformation is an inevitable outcome of translation processes. The project also shows how KT research has generally adopted an unnecessarily restrictive view of the aims and focuses of this scholarly domain, and how a translation studies-inspired perspective can help draw attention to important aspects of KT as a textual, social, cultural and political practice which have otherwise been largely overlooked.

As a case study with which to illustrate the value of translation studies theories and methods in the study of medical KT, the project focuses on Wikipedia, the user-generated online encyclopedia, which – since it was first launched in 2001 – has quickly become the leading single source of health-related information available online but whose significance in today’s KT landscape has yet to be fully explored (Heilman and West 2015). As a number of studies have shown, Wikipedia is frequently consulted by patients seeking to find out more about their symptoms, diagnosis and treatment, but also by qualified physicians and medical students attempting to review the latest scientific evidence (Heilman and West 2015; Maggio et al. 2020; Hughes et al. 2009; Allahwala et al. 2012). It has also been identified by the Cochrane Review organisation as a “powerful public knowledge translation platform” (Cochrane 2023), that is, an important means through which the latest medical research can be communicated to patients and healthcare practitioners with the aim of improving health outcomes worldwide. Some of the KT practices taking place in Wikipedia are therefore driven by institutionally-backed initiatives such as the Cochrane-Wikipedia partnership, but the open-editing ethos of Wikipedia means that these ‘official’ forms of KT must often work alongside – and sometimes in direct tension with – what we might term ‘citizen-led’ acts of KT, performed by actors positioned beyond the mainstream medical establishment. This includes self-declared 'Skeptics' seeking to defend the walls of medical science from the outside, as well as practitioners and advocates of alternative systems of medicine and healthcare such as Traditional Chinese Medicine, Homeopathy and Ayurveda. The Wiki[Alt]Med project explores both the institutionally-led and citizen-led KT practices taking place in Wikipedia, introducing theories and methods from translation studies to inform and develop the analysis.

A key output of the project is the Wiki[Alt]Med corpus, a large collection of English-language Wikipedia content on topics relating to mainstream and alternative medicine. This constitutes the first publicly available corpus of Wikipedia's encyclopedia articles to be constructed according to thematic criteria, opening up new opportunities for research at the intersection of health humanities, media studies and corpus-based discourse analysis. The Wiki[Alt]Med corpus is also novel for its inclusion of the Wikipedia platform's 'Talk Pages' which serve as discussion forums for Wikipedians to debate potential changes to the encyclopedia's mainspace content. As the project hopes to demonstrate, large-scale corpus-led analysis of these paratextual conversations can provide powerful insight into the challenges faced by the Wikipedia community whilst attempting to represent the sum of all medical knowledge. 

Project team

PI: Dr Henry Jones, University of Manchester (contact email: henry.jones(at)manchester.ac.uk)

Co-I: Dr Shane Sheehan, University of Edinburgh

Co-I: Dr Saturnino Luz, University of Edinburgh

Project partners

This project draws on methodologies, networks and expertise developed during the following projects:

• Genealogies of Knowledge project (2016-2020), University of Manchester, PI: Prof. Mona Baker.

• Oslo Medical Corpus project (2020-present), University of Oslo, PI: Prof. Eivind Engebretsen.

Funding support

This project was funded by The Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK [ref. AH/V013203/1].