Patholines:About

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Patholines (at Patholines.org) is an online source for pathologists. 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 Patholines is to gather the most relevant information in everyday pathology practice and make it quickly accessible on the Internet free of charge, without ads, in perpetuity.

Participation

Editors of articles must be doctors of medicine, or have formal expertise in pathology 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 creating an account at:

This provides a username, but to make edits to articles, newcomers also need to specify their professional status at:
- Form: Application for Editor status (link)
This will be reviewed within a few days for applying pathologists or pathology 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 Patholines:Authorship.

Patholines may cooperate with other pathology-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

The layout of Patholines aims to represent the real situations that a pathologist will have, and contain what should be done therein. Articles in Patholines can be directly found by search engine, either by the internal search box at top, or external ones. In addition, each article subject is connected with the main page through a series of pages, which are based on visual findings, so that pathologists can quickly use the appearance or other distinction of the sample at hand in order to find what to report on it.

Pathologists 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 Patholines is NOT

  • Patholines is NOT a place to cut and paste copyrighted material, see Patholines:Copyright
  • Patholines is NOT a place to promote own research, websites or organizations
  • Patholines is not a repository of pathology-related images or text: Uploads need to be relevant in the course of work for a pathologist, and must be properly integrated in its context, see Patholines:Editorial guidelines
  • Patholines 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
  • Patholines is NOT a place to get personal medical advice, see Patholines:Disclaimer

Differences from Wikipedia

  • Wikipedia is a general encyclopedia that does contain extensive information in pathology, but does not focus on presenting the information in an optimally concise way for pathologists in the course of their work. Otherwise, Patholines shares Wikipedia's feature of having most images uploaded to the shared database Wikimedia Commons [1] (see also Patholines:Upload), making such images readily available for both Patholines and other online sources.

Differences from Pathology Outlines

Pathology Outlines contains comprehensive and at the same time useful information about a vast number of pathology diseases and conditions. Patholines, on the other hand, contains more succinct information about what to do in the most common situations encountered as a pathologist. Because real cases do not have the names of their diagnoses written on them, the basic structure of Patholines is instead focused on a location and a specific specimen type, such as a hysterectomy, and aims to direct the reader into being able to do the proper grossing and subsequent microscopic diagnosis from there.

Organization

Patholines 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

Mikael Häggström at pathology in 2019 (crop).jpg

Mikael Häggström

Dr Mikael Häggström grew up in Uddevalla, Sweden, and graduated from Uppsala University, Faculty of Medicine in 2013. He is currently a resident physician at the pathology department at Danbury Hospital, Connecticut.

History

Patholines main page on September 3, 2019.

See also

Social media pages:

References