I am mostly working from home this month (I still have clinic a few days per week) with the goal of answering one question: Is Wikipedia accurate? Wikipedia is easily one of the most polarizing sources for information available, especially in academia. Teachers hate it and students love it and most people have formed some opinion on the site. I admittedly love the web site and the whole concept behind the site and have developed a formal plan to answer the question of Wikipedia's reliability as a source of information.
As far as I know, every medical resident in the country has to participate in a research project during the course of their residency. The requirements for my project were quite broad. It has to be academic and focus on some aspect of medicine. That was the only requirement. As I said, I use Wikipedia quite frequently and some of my colleagues even make fun of me for doing so. I decided to focus on this amazing source of information to determine how accurate (or inaccurate) the information contained on the site actually is. In the coming posts I will explain how I went about answering this question. Stay tuned. The results might surprise you.