Medpedia.com is a collaborative medical wiki project of a number of notable healthcare organizations to create the most comprehensive global medical resource.  Some of the organizations involved include Harvard Medical School, the Stanford School of Medicine, Berkeley School of Public Health, University of Michigan Medical School, the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health and the Federal Drug Administration.

Announced on Wednesday, Medpedia stresses that its focus on healthcare makes it substantively different than the popular collaborative encyclopedia Wiikipedia: "Medpedia is focused 100% on health, medicine and the body, whereas less than 2% of Wikipedia’s content is related to health and medicine."

The Medpedia team also notes that editing pages and adding content will be driven by having participants submit copyright-free material:

In the spirit of building this collaborative resource, forward thinking institutions have contributed seed content to the main wiki pages and released that content from copyright restrictions so that it can be freely editable by the Medpedia community of Editors.

While the website won't launch until late 2008, a preview is currently available.  In the interim, the project is asking for contributions from the medical community (Requirements - editors must have an M.D. or Ph.D in a biomedical field or medical credentials).  Organizations that submit material in this pre-launch phase of the website will get added to the Medpedia Record of Merit page.  A document that answers sets of frequently asked questions is available.


Source: Medpedia.com.