Introduction The European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA) launched OSHwiki in August 2014 with the aim of being an authoritative source of information that supports government, policy-makers, employers’ organisations and workers’ representatives around Europe on all aspects of workplace health and safety.

Methods OSHwiki is a dynamic multilingual collaborative web platform based on the wiki concept providing users a new way of networking with the global OSH community and allowing them to collaborate in creating and sharing knowledge on occupational safety and health. It assures quality by restricting authorship to nominated members of the OSH community, providing those authors with recognition of their knowledge.

Results Following a feasibility study carried out to assess the advantages and drawbacks of OSHwiki, the results have shown that the current format does not realise its full potential. The strengths are primarily associated with the high degree of reliability of the OSHwiki content. However the main weaknesses are associated with the low visibility of OSHwiki in the OSH Community.

Conclusions By using this approach, EU OSHA has been able to maintain current information online on a wide spectrum of OSH topics in a number of different languages and is now looking at how to fulfil its full potential through Wikipedia.