MEpedia:About

MEpedia is a crowd-sourced, Wikipedia-style encyclopedia of the news, history, and science of myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) and chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). MEpedia was created in order to collect, in one place, the diverse knowledge scattered throughout the medical, scientific, and patient communities concerning ME, CFS, and related conditions. MEpedia articles are written by many different volunteer contributors from the internet. No one person or organization is the author of MEpedia articles. At MEpedia, the community is the author.

Core principles
Addressing the patient community at its outset, MEpedia announced the following core principles: "A commitment to evidence: That means letting go of certainty and grappling with complexity and contradiction, reporting negative and null results, not simply those that support a given theory.""A commitment to transparency: Transparency means citing every fact – whether a fact is one that has existed in high school biology textbooks dating back to 1930s or is an observation made by “some patients,” it can and should be cited. It also means contextualizing it so that it is easy for a reader to discern the quality of the information. There are differences in the quality of information gleaned from a small study versus a large one; a study that used subjective versus objective measures; a study that used the Oxford Criteria or the Canadian Consensus Criteria; a finding that was found only once or is supported by several studies. That our evidence base is weak after decades of underinvestment in research does not mean that we can’t use it – simply that the limitations must be made abundantly clear.""A broad view: Fortunately, we know a lot more about the immune system, the brain, the gut, the microbiome, the mitochondria, our cell membranes and the role that all of these play in other inflammatory or autoimmune diseases, at least compared to ME or CFS. We can assemble that information and relate it to the studies about ME and CFS we do have.""Room for debate and speculation: That said, so much of what we observe in our own bodies has not been scientifically proven or explained, not in small part because there has been so little research. ... Anecdote has gotten a bad name but an anecdote is a single observation and observations are how we generate testable hypotheses. ... So to allow us to discuss what has not been proven in a way that is difficult to do in a traditional Wikipedia article, we’ve created a category of pages called Medical hypotheses.""Balancing the technical with the basics: While the dream is to have a literature review so accurate, comprehensive, and technical that it can serve as a launching point for new scientists entering the field, those pages on basic science should live alongside pages that any patient at any level of exposure to science can find useful and accessible."

History
MEpedia was launched by Jen Brea of MEAction on December 6, 2015. On May 19, 2018, MEpedia announced that over 30,000 edits had been made to pages. On July 19, 2018, MEpedia announced that the site had reached 5 million views. On June 4, 2019, MEAction announced that the site had surpassed 1000 registered editors.

Funding
As a project of the non-profit group MEAction, MEpedia is supported by donations made to MEAction.

Contact us

 * Email: mepedia@meaction.net

Disclaimer
Please note that MEAction does not explicitly endorse the content of any article. The content of MEpedia articles are the work of individual volunteer contributors from the internet. Also see our general disclaimer.