Should everyone be allowed to edit?

This is a crucial question for any medical wiki. David Rothman, an information service specialist and an authority on medical wikis has said in an interview recently:

“If a middle-schooler foolishly uses Wikipedia as his/her only source for a class report and gets the birth date of Josef Stalin wrong because someone added it incorrectly, little real harm is done- but medical information is used by medical professionals and healthcare consumers to make potentially life-changing decisions. The consequences of inaccurate information could be extremely harmful.”

The main challenge for new wikis dealing with narrow scientific and specialist areas like echocardiography is to attract enough users with the motivation to contribute. Many of these users will be dissuaded by the need to prove their credentials before being given the right to contribute. Restricting the editing rights to known users is possible in wikis with hundreds of users, but difficult in sub-specialty wikis. I wonder what others think about this.

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Wiki Echo

The cost of medical text books can be prohibitive. A quality text book on echocardiography like
Feigenbaum's costs more than a month's salary for a medical resident in the developing part of the world - not to mention the budget of a medical student.

Medical Wikis can be a powerful tool to bridge this divide and a Wiki on cardiac sonography can be quite useful to physicians, cardiac sonographers, medical students, residents and fellows alike.
The use of medical Wikis can be a powerful tool for physicians in practice, fellows, residents, and medical students. A community of medical providers from all over the world discussing and publishing on medical related topics will become an invaluable resource for a physician in the future.

There can be a lot of obstacles to overcome including:
1. Building a community of users who will regularly contribute to the wiki.
2. Keeping the sites free of vandals, advertisers and spammers.
3. Ensuring that patient confidentiality is not compromised whenever any cases are published.

We aim to surmount all this and publish high quality articles on different aspects of echocardiography.