NIOSH Collaborates With Wikipedia In New Communications Effort

NIOSH has been using what it calls a “Wikipedian-in-Residence” in collaboration with

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online encyclopedia project Wikipedia. The collaboration makes NIOSH just the second federal agency to work with the user-editable site, the fifth-largest in the world.

The reason behind the collaboration is that Wikipedia has a much larger reach than NIOSH and by lending its resources to the encyclopedia, the agency hopes to provide greater access to its vast resource of safety and health information. The “Wikipedian-in-Residence” is tasked with improving areas of the site that would benefit from more information as well as creating new articles. Resources used to do this include literature reviews, epidemiological research and chemical data. In addition, images from NIOSH’s collection are available in the free image repository Wikimedia Commons.

Read more about the collaboration at the NIOSH Science Blog.