User blog:Heffdoc/The birth of 'Bias wiki'!

Dear fellow EBM enthusiasts, I returned from Evidence Live 2018 fired up with enthusiasm and energy! The Catalogue of Bias workshops had fired me up: partly because it was a fascinating project, and partly because I thought I might be bable to contribute in a tangible way.

The Catalogue of Bias (CoB) is a project aiming to codify all the known biases that can affect research planning, implementation, analysis and dissemination. Once these biases are defined and understood, and people understand how they work, there is a sporting chance that the incidence of bias can be reduced, and ideally eliminated.

At the second workshop Carl Heneghan and David Nunan from the CEBM explained how the project had been started up by a small number of people in house. A website was set up and the first group of biases were added. However, this was time consuming work for a small team with many other commitments, and there was no budget to employ someone to undertake the further development of the website: adding topics, writing the relevant text, honing the house style, and working out how best to collate and present the content.

In the ensuing discussion, it was suggested that a wiki would be a great way to achieve the task; effectively crowd sourcing the work. It could be done remotely, at whatever time (and in whatever time zone), any mistakes could be rectified as the work progressed, and there would be an audit trail to provide some project governance.

Having had experience as a Wikipedia editor, I felt that this was a task that should be fairly straightforward to do. Even if all 350-odd biases mentioned in one paper were added, this was a relatively trivial task, from an information management viewpoint. At worst, one person could complete it within a year, doing one entry a day. With a crowd of focused, experienced collaborators, the task might be finished in weeks. If a community of (even only a few) people became well engaged, there could be a collegial approach to the work, continuing the positive energy experienced at the workshops.

On the train on the way home, I looked up how to set up a wiki, and what free platforms were about. Having read several reviews, I decided that Wikia was probably the best - not least since it had been recommended by several different reviewers. When I returned home, although tired from the conference I signed up for a Wikia account and started setting up.

There was certainly a bit of a learning curve, and being tired I decided to sleep on it. The following morning I had to dog-sit while my wife had a meeting, so I was able to put the time to good use - by lunchtime the basic framework was in place. I added pages for the 36 biases currently on the CoB website. Thereafter, it was a matter of setting up pages for the remaining biases from the 72 described by Sackett in his original paper on the subject in 1979 (the year I graduated!). The Index of biases is a useful place to find things if you're finding it difficult to navigate.

Now, over to you...!

Heffdoc (talk) 15:05, June 21, 2018 (UTC)