Introduction The Internet has become the important health information resource for patients, health providers and the general public. Wikipedia a collaboratively written web-based encyclopaedia has become the dominant online reference work. Wikipedia ranks as the eighth most accessed Web site on the internet. Wikipedia is the number one driver (after organic search) of visitors to the NIOSH (USA) web site. This workshop is structured to provide a basic understanding of Wikipedia to familiarise health professionals on how to use Wikipedia to disseminate and track important occupational safety and health information to a large global audience.

Methods The curriculum for this workshop is guided by the results of an investigation of how traffic to Wikipedia articles correlated with traffic to the main selected web sites and how page view statistics compared to organic search and other web site drivers. We compared Wikipedia’s occurrence, mean position to other Web sites, and examined which factors influence Web site ranking. In addition, key edit factors, long-tail search results, comparison of edits to premier web pages and other key factors were examined. A key part of this workshop will be the appropriate use of metrics and tracking to guide outcomes and impact.

Results By developing and implementing a carefully crafted online strategy Wikipedia edits have become a major source of driving searchers of occupational safety and health information to the NIOSH Web site.

Conclusion The rank of a Web site among search engines results depends on factors such as the search engine algorithm and search engine optimizations strategies (SEO), which aim to influence rankings. This workshop is structured to address the important factors that need to be a key part of your Wikipedia editing strategy to optimise algorithm mediation of traffic to your information.