Radlines:About
Radlines is an online open-access source for radiologists.
Content structure
Articles in Radlines can be directly found by search engine, either by the internal search box at top, or external ones. In addition, each article subject should be connected with the main page through a series of pages, so that a radiologist can find their way to it by appearance or other distinction of the condition. For example, Pneumonia on a chest X-ray should be found by the following sequence:
- Main --> Thorax --> Chest radiograph --> Consolidation on chest radiograph --> Pneumonia
Further information: Editorial guidelines.
Differences from Radiopaedia
Radlines is in most ways a non-profit and ad-free alternative to Radiopaedia, which is currently the most comprehensive wiki-based reference work in radiology. Radiopaedia is a "business" owned by Investling.com,[1] making profit by advertising and paid subscription. Radlines, on the other hand, is able to run on donations and volunteer time alone.
Furthermore, Radiopedia by default uses the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license, which makes the material ineligible for integration into for example Wikimedia projects including Wikipedia. The "NonCommercial" part is contradictory to the business nature of the site. Content in Radlines, on the other hand, is by default licensed as Attribution 4.0 International license, which will allow the content to be used by more scholarly websites around the world.
| Radiopaedia | Radlines | |
|---|---|---|
| Non-profit | No | Yes |
| Ads or paid subscription | Yes | No |
| Financial statement | Secret | Open |
| Default license | BY-NC-SA 3.0 | BY 4.0 |
An issue restricting the diagnostic utility of Radiopaedia is the prevalence of long lists of causes for findings, without any straightforward explanation of how to distinguish each item. In Radlines, it is mandatory to describe how each cause is distinguished, see Editorial guidelines - no lists of causes.
Radiopaedia started out in the same (but older versioned) WikiMedia system before switching to a separate platform, but MediaWiki has since evolved substantially, including support for scrollable stacks to display for example CT scans, and VisualEditor for editing without needing to learn wiki coding.
Differences from other radiology-related sources
- wikiradiography.net is a free website for radiographers, sonographers and students of those professions, rather than radiologists.
- Wikipedia is a general encyclopedia that does contain extensive information in radiology, but does not focus on presenting the information in an optimally concise way for radiologists in the course of their work.
History
Radlines was created April 10, 2018 by Mikael Häggström, who is a radiology resident in Sweden, a frequent Wikipedia editor (Wikipedia presentation), and also creator and editor-in-chief of WikiJournal of Medicine. The project was started as "Radviser" on Miraheze, a free MediaWiki host, but moved to Civihosting servers on May 13. It was renamed to "Radlines" on May 23.