James M. Heilman (born 1979 or 1980) is a Canadian emergency physician, Wikipedian, and advocate for the improvement of Wikipedia's health-related content. He encourages other clinicians to contribute to the online encyclopedia.[1][2]
With the Wikipedia username Doc James, Heilman is an active contributor to WikiProject Medicine and a volunteer Wikipedia administrator. He was the president of Wikimedia Canada between 2010 and 2013, and founded and was formerly the president of Wiki Project Med Foundation.[3][4][5][6][7] He is also the founder of WikiProject Medicine's Medicine Translation Task Force.[8] In June 2015, he was elected to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees, a position which he held until he was removed on December 28, 2015.[9][10][11] Heilman was re-elected to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees in May 2017.[12][until when?]
Heilman is a clinical assistant professor at the department of emergency medicine at the University of British Columbia,[13][14] and the head of the department of emergency medicine at East Kootenay Regional Hospital in Cranbrook, British Columbia, where he lives.[1][15]
Born in 1979 or 1980,[15] Heilman was born and raised in rural Saskatchewan.[16] He graduated from the University of Saskatchewan in 2000 with a Bachelor of Science degree in anatomy, and he subsequently earned his medical degree there in 2003.[1] He then completed his family medicine residency in British Columbia from 2003 to 2005.[16] Heilman currently holds a certificate of added competency in emergency medicine with the College of Family Physicians of Canada.[17]
Heilman worked at Moose Jaw Union Hospital, a hospital in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, until 2010, when he began working at East Kootenay Regional Hospital,[1][18] where, in October 2012, he was appointed head of the department of emergency medicine.[1] In 2014, he told the Cranbrook Daily Townsman that the emergency department at East Kootenay saw an average of 22,000 patients each year.[19]
As of May 2014, Heilman was working on a study with Samir Grover, of the University of Toronto, which would assign medical students to take a test using either Wikipedia or medical textbooks to determine which is more accurate.[20] Later that year, Heilman co-authored a version of the Wikipedia article for dengue fever in the peer-reviewed journal Open Medicine.[21] Heilman also worked on a study with Microsoft which found that in the three countries where the 2013–2016 Ebola outbreak had the largest impact, Wikipedia was the most popular source for information about the disease.[22] In 2015, Heilman and Andrew West published a study which found that the number of Wikipedia editors who focused on editing medical articles decreased by 40 per cent from 2008 to 2013.[23] These results, together with other detailed analyses about the production and consumption of medical content on Wikipedia, were published by the Journal of Medical Internet Research in 2015.[24]