Libre Pathology
Onlinepathology is a wiki to collect all things pathology. The audience is anyone that wants to know more about pathology.
An effort is made to formulate things so that the public at large, medical students and other physicians can gain greater insight into the fascinating world of pathology.
Motivation
With a few exceptions, pathology journals and textbooks are pay-per-view. Imagine a world in which pathology knowledge is accessible to every person on the planet with an internet connection. Patients and other physicians would have a chance to see for them self the challenges pathologists deal with. Medical students would see a vibrant specialty that is evolving with progress in medicine and, in fact, a driver of progress.
Second, good pathology textbooks are few. Most are laden with dense text and impractical when looking down the microscope. The philosophy seems wrong -- the emphasis is on making dense text.
The philosophy here is deliver the goods straight and give a differential and images or at least links to some. Tables are considered highly desirable and decision trees useful. Dense text is seen as a weakness. The philosophy is in line with that in engineering, where it said that the textbook writers are paid by the figure and table.
The task taken up here is no small one and it is challenging as pathologists not only often disagree on whether a certain feature is present, but also on whether it important or even relevant to the diagnosis! Psychiatrists, in this respect, have to be envied, they at least agree on the criteria... and just argue whether they are present in a given case or not.
History
This project grew out the need to pass an exam and a realization that nuggets of wisdom scribbled down on a piece of paper are never to be found when needed most.
The finding little bits of information thing, in a pile of it, was a problem where the solution was already out there (it is called a database), and some guys had already made a really niffy interface using PHP, and then built one of the biggest damn web sites out there (Wikipedia). Thus, MediaWiki, the software that runs Wikipedia, was the obvious choice.
So, this was essentially a set of study notes. The guy that started it passed that exam and then another one. Then, he realized the wiki is sort of useful... but could get even better with the help of others.
Milestones
- First edit - 12 May 2010.
- One thousand entities in the diagnosis category - 8 June 2012.
- The thousandth entry was ovarian serous borderline tumour.
- Five hundred content pages - 6 August 2012.
- The five hundredth page was MEDITECH.
- Twenty thousand edits - 23 January 2013.
- The twenty thousandth edit was on Medical lung diseases.
- First image (from the instant commons) - 12 May 2013.
- Seven hundred content pages - 28 September 2013.
- One thousand two hundred entities in the diagnosis category - 3 January 2014.
- One thousand content pages - 18 February 2014.
- The thousandth entry was high-grade prostatic intraepithelial neoplasia.
- Five thousand pages - 19 February 2014.
- The five thousandth page was Case 54.
- Total page views over 100,000 - 21 February 2014.
