In Second Life, my name is Perplexity Peccable. In Real Life I am a medical librarian and internet researcher, teaching emerging technologies and information skills courses for health care practitioners and students at the University of Michigan. I have a special interest in consumer health. When UM built a team to enter Second Life, I began trying to visit as many health-themed SIMs and groups as I could. It was quickly obvious that this is too big a job for any one person!

I was talking one day with Prijian Toland, who agreed, and we started to divide up duties. PT created a structure for notecards we would use to keep info on our visits, and we started visiting, collecting info and sharing it with each other, and refining the structure being used. I began collecting snapshots of sites visited and putting them in a Flickr set. A couple months later, it becames obvious that notecards and Flickr were an awkward way to do this, and that two of us were not enough!

We decided to create a wiki and try to get other people involved. The entry structure is based on PTs original notecard structure, which has been enriched to incorporate options made possible by the wiki application. Little by little, I am adding the Flickr pics, and trying to take more as other people add new SIMs and groups.

I cannot express how delighted I am with the expertise and contributions that have come to the SLHealthy wiki! I am in awe. From that ad hoc beginning, we now have several writers on the wiki, including a preponderance of medical librarians like myself, but also representing clinicians and practitioners as well as health care advocates and consumers.