Ganfyd
| Web address | Ganfyd.org |
|---|---|
| Commercial? | No |
|
Type of site
|
Wiki |
| Registration | Required |
| Available in | English |
| Launched | November 2005 |
|
Alexa rank
|
 1,760,764 (April 2014[update])[1] |
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 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).
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
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
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- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
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- ↑ Dean Giustini, British Medical Journal, "How Web 2.0 is Changing Medicine"
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
External links
- Official website
- Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
