WikiMSK:WikiMSK at one year

From WikiMSK

WikiMSK at one year

1st June 2021

WikiMSK launched a year ago on 13th June 2020. I presented the website at the NZAMM conference in Wellington in October to very positive reception. Although there are 15 registered users, there is still only one primary content writer (myself). WikiMSK needs writers and peer reviewers from the NZAMM and AAMM to achieve its goals. We have between 150-300 content pages depending on how they are counted. Page views have been growing continuously. In the month of May 2021 we had 3,041 unique page views. The most popular pages are Cluneal Nerve Pain, Slipped Rib Syndrome, TMJ Pain, Cauda Equina Syndrome, and Dermatomes. Only 12% of users are from New Zealand and 5% from Australia. The United States makes up the biggest user base at 50%. Most of the work gone into the website thus far has been spent setting the general framework for article creation and editing. WikiMSK runs on MediaWiki, an open source wiki software that runs Wikipedia and countless other wikis. While it is very customisable and powerful, out of the box it is extremely basic and not very user friendly, and doesn't have many simple quality of life features that are common in content management systems such as Wordpress. In order to better achieve the goals of WikiMSK heavy customisation has been necessary. While some customisations have been relatively straightforward, others have required a large amount of time debugging and testing. There is currently no funding to hire a professional developer, and support is very limited from the open source community. There have been failed experiments which are too numerous to list. I suspect the website as it stands now would have cost about $15,000 to set up if it was outsourced to a New Zealand developer. Here are some of the software customisations achieved thus far:

  • Creation of a training portal with protected access through AccessControl depending on the NZAMM status of the user.
  • Breadcrumbs at the top of articles to allow easier navigation through Breadcrumbs2
  • Simpler category exploration through CategoryTree
  • Tracking of user contributions with a scoring system using ContributionScores
  • Notification and alerts system through Echo
  • Video embedding such as Youtube videos through EmbedVideo
  • Graphing and visualisation tools through Graph and Mermaid respectively
  • Creation of a case histories section using HeaderTabs to allow the user to go through cases step by step
  • Google analytics to allow monitoring and planning through HeadScript, we are getting about 20 unique visitors a day.
  • Clickable skeleton in the front page using ImageMap
  • Easier article creation in the "Create a new article" link using InputBox
  • Latest articles feature in the main page using Intersection
  • Mark up editor customisation using MsUpload, and MsWikiEditor
  • Mark up editor easier referencing of journal articles using PubmedParser
  • View PDFs right in the article using EmbedPDF
  • Popup boxes when hovering over articles using PopUps and TextExtracts
  • Popup boxes when hovering over references using a custom gadget from Wikipedia
  • MCQ tool using Quiz
  • Latest journal articles section by using RSS and TwitterTag
  • Visual editor providing the user with a visual way of editing articles instead of the markup editor
  • Easier template searching and interpretation using TemplateData
  • Shorter URLs
  • Skin using Medik with heavy customisations (1000 lines of custom CSS code), with a secondary optional skin called Citizen.
  • Custom namespaces
  • Show article quality markers on each item in a category using a gadget.
  • A large number of templates to provide things like the various infoboxes, red flag box, practice point box, reliable sources box, custom table of contents, navigation bars, image licensing information, and much more.
The following further features are desired but are not possible at this time either due to limitations of the server or limitations in my own skill. Therefore the following features will require donations.
  • Installation of citoid - automatic reference generator in VisualEditor using things like the ISBN and PMID
  • Installation of elastica and cirrus search - a much more powerful search tool.
  • Modification of the discussions pages to make it more intuitive to use by using StructuredDiscussions.
  • Installation of Cargo, PageForms, and VEforAll to allow even easier article creation and editing.
  • Caching
  • Custom tool in a central dashboard tool for easier monitoring of the quality control process.
Some of the general policy and website structural implementations achieved so far
  • Server space generously donated by Ellerslie Medical Centre.
  • Affiliated with the New Zealand Association of Musculoskeletal Medicine
  • Quality control and peer review process
  • Account eligibility and access level policy
  • Privacy, copyright, patient information policies and general disclaimers
  • Implementation of website structure using portals
  • User guide

Jeremy Steinberg (talk)


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