Wikimedia Med/Letters

Wiki Medicine Letters are off-wiki written communication which start a public dialogue between some organization and the Wikipedia community which is interested in health topics. The motive behind this project is to meet the demand of organizations to participate in Wikipedia somehow.

General conflict of interest information

English Wikipedia hosts many discussions about dealing with conflict of interest, and whenever an organization seeks to engage Wikipedia all involved parties should be aware of the history of conflict of interest discussions.

Wikipedia:Plain and simple conflict of interest guide
Wikipedia:Conflict of interest
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-10-01/Paid editing, and note also other op-eds about paid editing
Wikipedia:WikiProject Cooperation is perhaps the most developed of projects for interaction between organizations and Wikipedia, and see especially Wikipedia:WikiProject Cooperation/Paid Editor Help

Letter templates

Most letter templates are a variation of this format:

Interested health organizations

Hello,

I am a volunteer who edits Wikipedia and a member of a volunteer organization called Wiki Medicine. Some of us at our project page have been talking about your organization! Please visit [[here]] if you would like to see the live conversation.

We recognize that your organization is critical in sharing information on the topic of X and are all fans of your work. At the same time, we have been looking at the Wikipedia articles related to that same topic and made a list of them [[here]], including X, Y, Z. In our conversation, we began discussion how useful it would be to the world if anyone at your organization would be willing to learn Wikipedia for the purpose of promoting the development of Wikipedia articles in that field. Since Wikipedia is the world's most popularly consulted source of information for X, and since you have as part of your mission the goal of educating the public about X, we thought we would ask if anyone at your organization would like to collaborate with us in developing some Wikipedia articles on X.

When you reply to me I need to share your reply with others under a copyright license which is compatible for upload to Wikimedia, so please only send me a letter or email which I can post publicly for the world to see forever under a Creative Commons attribution license. I will post your reply on the conversation page under the online copy of this letter in the timeline which is documenting our discussion so that everyone can see. It would be useful to our community if you included permission to re-share your response in your letter.

Conflict-of-interest editor of Wikipedia

Hello,

I am a volunteer who edits Wikipedia and a member of a volunteer organization called Wiki Medicine. Some of us at our project page have been talking about your organization! Please visit [[here]] if you would like to see the live conversation.

We noticed that someone was editing the Wikipedia article on Organization and they seemed not to understand Wikipedia community guidelines because the changes they proposed to the article were self-promotional with respect to your organization. Wikipedia is a community space and not an advertising distribution service, and the person developing the article seemed not to understand this.

I am writing to ask if anyone at your organization would like to learn Wikipedia. We would be happy to direct you to tutorials, especially if you would be willing to edit articles in your field and not only come here to promote your organization.

When you reply to me I need to share your reply with others under a copyright license which is compatible for upload to Wikimedia, so please only send me a letter or email which I can post publicly for the world to see forever under a Creative Commons attribution license. I will post your reply on the conversation page under the online copy of this letter in the timeline which is documenting our discussion so that everyone can see. It would be useful to our community if you included permission to re-share your response in your letter.

Improper re-use of Wikimedia content

Hello,

I am a volunteer who edits Wikipedia and a member of a volunteer organization called Wiki Medicine. Some of us at our project page have been talking about your organization! Please visit [[here]] if you would like to see the live conversation.

We noticed that your publication is re-using copyrighted Wikimedia content improperly. We saw this [[here]] and [[here]] is the source of that content on Wikipedia.

I am writing to ask if anyone at your organization would like to learn Wikipedia so that you can avoid encroaching on our work's copyright. We would be very happy to teach you how to comply with the terms of Wikimedia licensing. We would also be happy to direct you to tutorials, especially if you would be willing to edit articles in your field and not only come here to promote your organization.

When you reply to me I need to share your reply with others under a copyright license which is compatible for upload to Wikimedia, so please only send me a letter or email which I can post publicly for the world to see forever under a Creative Commons attribution license. I will post your reply on the conversation page under the online copy of this letter in the timeline which is documenting our discussion so that everyone can see. It would be useful to our community if you included permission to re-share your response in your letter.

Best practices

When sending an organization off-Wikipedia email or paper letters, make a note that you are doing so (perhaps here in this project) and request that the organization agree to let you share their reply under a Wikimedia-compatible license.
Seek to post all text communication on-wiki to create a permanent public record.
Wait two weeks without getting a reply before forwarding the same letter to other people in the organization.

Complaints in queue

Do you know of any organizations which have plagiarized Wikimedia health content? Post your cases here! When there are enough of them then we will come up with a process for managing them.