It’s not a terribly profound paper – along the lines of “we did this and we liked it” sort of thing – but it is a relevant educational application of wikis in medicine.
The BIDMC Internal Medicine department undertook an initiative to essentially convert all their little handbooks and service guides to an online reference. They chose the wiki interface so anyone could update information or add pages while allowing updates to be tracked and rolled back as necessary. They promoted it during their intern orientation and made a significant effort both to get people to update it and use it. And, for the most part, they were successful. Most residents (92%) thought it was useful, it was mostly used to find phone numbers and rotation specific clinical information, and, overall, about half of the PGY-2 and -3s updated the site during the 2009-10 year.
It probably takes a lot of effort and requires just the right collaborative environment, but there are a lot of residencies, departments, or other clinical organizations that could also probably benefit from something similar – particularly if there are a lot of rotating students/residence between difference services or sites.
“Adoption of a wiki within a large internal medicine residency program: a 3-year experience”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22140210
The EM residents have their own too along similar lines. It's definitely worth while. -Matt, BIDMC EM Intern