Evolution of Wikipedia’s medical content: past, present and future

Abstract

As one of the most commonly read online sources of medical information, Wikipedia is an influential public health platform. Its medical content, community, collaborations and challenges have been evolving since its creation in 2001, and engagement by the medical community is vital for ensuring its accuracy and completeness. Both the encyclopaedia’s internal metrics as well as external assessments of its quality indicate that its articles are highly variable, but improving. Although content can be edited by anyone, medical articles are primarily written by a core group of medical professionals. Diverse collaborative ventures have enhanced medical article quality and reach, and opportunities for partnerships are more available than ever. Nevertheless, Wikipedia’s medical content and community still face significant challenges, and a socioecological model is used to structure specific recommendations. We propose that the medical community should prioritise the accuracy of biomedical information in the world’s most consulted encyclopaedia.

The Most Influential Medical Journals According to Wikipedia: Quantitative Analysis (Preprint)

“…Only about the top half of the articles have citations, which is consistent with previous research [5]. We had two working hypotheses.…”

“…Wikipedia is widely used by healthcare professionals and students as well as by educators, journalists, policy makers and many others [5]. In fact, medical students perform better on tests if they used Wikipedia, when compared to those using a standard medical digital textbooks or a contemporary point-of-care medical website [6].…”

Quantifying Engagement with Citations on Wikipedia

“…A sizeable portion of citations on Wikipedia refer to scientific literature [40]. Consequently, Wikipedia is a fundamental gateway to scientific results and enables the public understanding of science [33,34,38,51,61]. The chance of a scientific reference being cited on Wikipedia varies with the impact factor of the publication venue and its open-access availability [58].…”

DISNET: A framework for extracting phenotypic disease information from public sources

“…Wikipedia contains more than 155,000 articles in the field of medicine [33] and is one of the most widely used medical sources [34] by the general community [32] and also by medical specialists [35], the latter ones having deeply been involved in its enrichment [33] [36]. One of the initiatives is the Cochrane/Wikipedia, which aims at increasing reliability in articles with medical content [37].…”