Almost everyone who uses the Internet surely knows about Wikipedia, the largest online collaborative encyclopedia. It seems like the Wikipedia project is on an inspiration for another project. Today, a consortium of medical schools and organizations has announced Medpedia, a website which aims to become the largest online health encyclopedia.

The site will be free and many organizations will contribute seed content free of copyright restrictions. Officially the site will be released at the end of this year, but a preview version is already available at www.medpedia.com

Among the organizations who are participating to create this project are Harvard Medical School, Stanford School of Medicine, the University of California Berkeley School of Public Health and the University of Michigan Medical School.

Each of this organizations will contribute in different ways. For example Harvard Medical School will publish content to uneditable areas that members of their faculty have created as part of a medical school wide effort, while University of Michigan Medical School will encourage members of their faculty to edit Medpedia as individuals.

Medpedia is supported also by the American College of Physicians (ACP), the Oxford Health Alliance (OxHA.org), the Federation of Clinical Immunology Societies, (FOCIS), and the European Federation of Neurological Associations (EFNA).

The final aim of Medpedia is to create an individual page for the more than 30,000 known diseases and conditions, the more than 10,000 drugs being prescribed and the thousands of medical procedures being performed.

The articles from Medpedia will be written to be easily understand by the general public, but each page will have a “Technical” area for professionals.

In anticipation of its launch later in 2008, today Medpedia is calling for the world's qualified M.D.s, biomedical research Ph.D.s, and clinicians to go to www.medpedia.com to apply to become Editors of content.

Only licensed medical professionals and organizations in good standing who are screened through a rigorous internal review process will be approved to provide and edit information.