Orthopaedia

In keeping with its mission of creating, evaluating, and disseminating new knowledge, the Association has launched a new Web site, Orthopaedia.com. The name Orthopaedia reflects “Orthopaedic + Encyclopaedia.” The name Orthopaedia also echoes the title of Andry’s classic text, the eponymous book of orthopaedics. We think of Orthopaedia as a collaborative orthopaedic knowledge-base: a wiki with the capacity for social networking, blogging, resource sharing, and research collaboration, among other functions.

Wikis
A wiki is a Web site that allows visitors to add, remove, and edit its content. Howard G. “Ward” Cunningham developed the first wiki in 1995, but only recently have wikis proliferated. The most famous wiki is Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia and home to millions of reader-written articles. As a wiki, Orthopaedia sustains a “living textbook” of orthopaedic surgery and musculoskeletal medicine—a reference work under constant revision and improvement. The pages of this living text are subject to modification, but more importantly, readers can post entirely new entries, expanding the table of contents as our knowledge grows.

Pages on Orthopaedia can be read by any visitor, but to help ensure quality, posting (and revising) material is limited to members. Membership, in turn, is open to all physicians, scientists, medical students, and teachers around the world with an interest in musculoskeletal health.

On Orthopaedia, all contributions—additions, deletions and editorial changes—are attributed to the contributor. Signing one’s words should limit the outlandish or offensive: with no cloak of anonymity, self-restraint should reign. Moreover, signatures identify the source of information for readers, who then can credit (or discount) what they read accordingly.