With the backing of some top medical schools, a foundation is calling on physicians and scientists to help them build a huge online encyclopedia of medicine, called Medpedia. Today the Medpedia Foundation raised the curtain slightly on their Web site, giving prospective collaborators a peek.
This sounds a lot like the medical version of the Wex project at LII, a nifty effort at building a collaborative, open law dictionary and encyclopedia. For some reason, Wex was never heralded in a press release like this:
Nor does Wex have direct support from “Harvard Medical School, Stanford School of Medicine, the University of California Berkeley School of Public Health, the University of Michigan Medical School and dozens of health organizations around the world” as Medpedia does. I certainly hope it lives up to its press release.
Anyway, it does make me wonder why more law schools don’t support efforts like Wex directly. Time and energy put into making more legal information freely available would be a great investment in our communities and may even result in a greater demand for legal services by a more informed public.