Radlines:About
Radlines (at radlines.org) is an online source for radiologists. It is an international, non-profit, open access, ad-free, MediaWiki-based online source that is editable by doctors, as well as selected administrators, while everyone is welcome to leave comments and suggestions at talk pages. The mission of Radlines is to gather the most relevant information in radiology and make it quickly accessible on the Internet free of charge, without ads, in perpetuity.
Contents
Participation
Editors of articles must be doctors of medicine, or have formal expertise in radiology by other means. The Discussion pages, on the other hand, are editable by everyone, even without logging in, for comments and suggestions. Newcomers start participating by completing a form, at:
- Form: Application for Editor status (link)
This will be reviewed by the board, and will generally be approved within a day during European daytime for radiologists or radiology trainees with a Doctor of Medicine degree. It does not require attaching any credentials such as a medical diploma. Yet, all edits made by the user are tracked in the MediaWiki software, and upon any irregular behavior, an investigation will be performed wherein the user may be requested to provide identification and credentials to the board. Failure to provide those items may result in that edits made by that user will be reverted. Thus, the activity of an editor is the main "job interview" in order to contribute. A possible adverse effect of this system is that the board may not know for certain whether an editor is actually a doctor or not, as long as she/he claims to be a doctor and edits like one. Yet, the quality of the content is thereby practically the same.
An Editor may still use an anonymous username, but real names must be used in the author lists at the top of articles, see Radlines:Authorship.
Radlines may cooperate with other radiology-related organizations such as societies and hospitals, but is not directly affiliated with any such organization. Rather, it forms a community where individual doctors from all over the world can participate, regardless of memberships or affiliations with other organizations.
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 quickly 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
Radiologists should thereby be able to find an article about the type of image they have at hand through as little as 2 clicks, with no need to login, and no distracting ads.
Further information: Editorial guidelines.
What Radlines is NOT
- Radlines is NOT a place to cut and paste copyrighted material, see Radlines:Copyright
- Radlines is NOT a place to promote own research, websites or organizations
- Radlines is not a mirror or a repository of images or media files: Uploads need to be relevant in the course of work for a radiologist, and must be properly integrated in its context, see Radlines:Editorial guidelines
- Radlines is NOT a place for editors who are protective of their prose: The project is collaborative, which means that other editors may edit, move and sometimes even remove the content
- Radlines is NOT a place to get personal medical advice, see Radlines:Disclaimer
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.
Radlines also has less restrictive licensing of its content. 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 a greater amount of scholarly websites around the world. Further information: Radlines:Copyright
Also, Radiopaedia has limited ability for finding content by hierarchical browsing. Although it has a sorting of articles by "Section" or "System", each of these categories contains hundreds to thousands of articles (Example), with limited ability to conveniently find the most relevant content unless knowing the specific article title beforehand. Radlines, on the other hand, allows for browsing by anatomy, modality and visible findings, allowing readers to find the relevant information even without knowing the names for the radiologic findings at hand beforehand, nor which conditions are causing them. Further information: Editorial guidelines: Inter-article structure
| 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 |
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.
- 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. Otherwise, Radlines shares Wikipedia's feature of having most images uploaded to the shared database Wikimedia Commons [1] (see also Radlines:Upload), making such images readily available for both Radlines and other online sources.
Organization
Radlines is a member wiki of Prowikis, which is a non-profit organization aimed at the creation and technical maintenance of profession-specific wikis.
- Further information: Prowikis
Editors
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Dr Mikael Häggström is from Uddevalla, Sweden, and graduated from Uppsala University, Faculty of Medicine in 2013. He attended radiology residency at the radiology department at the NU Hospital Group between November 2016 and August 2019.
History
Radlines was created April 10, 2018 by Mikael Häggström, during his radiology residency in Sweden. He is also 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, 2018.
| Milestone | Date | Article |
|---|---|---|
| 100 pages | August 2, 2018 | Pelvic bones [2] |
| 200 pages | January 12, 2019 | Ultrasonography of hydronephrosis [3] |
See also
Social media pages:
References
- ↑ . Our Businesses. Investling.com. Retrieved on 2018-05-14.
