Investigation of Women’s Health on Wikipedia—A Temporal Analysis of Women’s Health Topic

Abstract

New health-related concepts, terms, and topics emerge, and the meanings of existing terms and topics keep changing. This study investigated and explored the evolutions of the women’s health topic on Wikipedia. The creation time, page views data, page edits data, and text of historical versions of 207 women-health-related entries from 2010 to 2017 on Wikipedia were collected. Coding, subject analysis, descriptive and inferential statistical analysis, and Self-Organizing Map and n-gram approaches were employed to explore the characteristics and evolutions of the entries for the women’s health topic. The results show that the number of the women-health-related entries kept increasing from 2010 to 2017, and nearly half of them were related to the supports and protection of women’s health. The total number of page views of the investigated items increased from 2011 to 2013, but it decreased from 2013 to 2017, while the total number of page edits stayed stable from 2010 to 2017. Growing subjects were found during the investigated period, such as abuse and violence, and family planning and reproduction. However, the entries related to the economy and politics were diminishing. There was no association between the internal characteristic evolution and the external popularity evolution of the women’s health topic.

Wikipedia page views for health research: a review

“…Wikipedia page views were most commonly combined with Google data (e.g., Google Trends, Google Analytics) ( n = 16, 55.17%), followed by Twitter data (e.g., Twitter mentions) ( n = 5, 17.24%), and Pubmed and Medline ( n = 4, 13.79%). The reviewed studies also combined Wikipedia page views with other internet data, including online news, Youtube, Reddit, and Wikipedia Edit data (Sciascia and Radin, 2017 ; Gozzi et al, 2020 ; Szmuda et al, 2020 ; Wang and Zhang, 2020 ).…”

“…The specific topics explored by the reviewed studies included Dementia (Brigo et al, 2015 ; Alibudbud, 2023b ), fencing response (Roe et al, 2023 ), tumors (e.g., pancreatic tumors, brain tumors, colorectal cancer) (Naik et al, 2021 ; Mondia et al, 2022 ; Gianfredi et al, 2023 ), substance use disorder (Alibudbud and Cleofas, 2022 ), epilepsy (Brigo et al, 2015 ; Okumura et al, 2016 ), schizophrenia (Adams et al, 2020 ), diabetes mellitus (Potapov et al, 2021 ), pain (e.g., migraine, low back pain, inflammation, sciatica) (Brigo et al, 2015 ; Szmuda et al, 2020 ; Ciaffi et al, 2021 ; Potapov et al, 2021 ), cardiovascular diseases (Potapov et al, 2021 ), gastrointestinal conditions (Potapov et al, 2021 ), dermatological agents (Potapov et al, 2021 ), viral infections (e.g., coronavirus, COVID-19, influenza, Chikungunya) (Laurent and Vickers, 2009 ; Mahroum et al, 2018 ; Provenzano et al, 2019 ; Qiu et al, 2019 ; Gozzi et al, 2020 ; O'Leary and Storey, 2020 ; De Toni et al, 2021 ; Gianfredi et al, 2021 ; Rutovic et al, 2021 ; Storey and O'Leary, 2022 ), autoimmune conditions (e.g., Systemic Lupus Erythematosus) (Sciascia and Radin, 2017 ) various medications (e.g., Abacavir, Zidovudine) (Sciascia and Radin, 2017 ; Apollonio et al, 2018 ; Darrow and Borisova, 2022 ), different diets (e.g., vegetarian) (Nucci et al, 2021 ), frostbite (Laurent and Vickers, 2009 ), hypothermia (Laurent and Vickers, 2009 ), carbon monoxide poisoning (Laurent and Vickers, 2009 ), hyperthermia (Laurent and Vickers, 2009 ), sunburn (Laurent and Vickers, 2009 ), insect bites (Laurent and Vickers, 2009 ), and women's health-related topic (e.g., discrimination) (Wang and Zhang, 2020 ). Therefore, the reviewed studies have been predominantly used in understanding health information utilization for various communicable and non-communicable diseases.…”

“…For example, the studies of Apollonio et al ( 2018 ) and Weiner et al ( 2019 ) showed that educational activities could be supplemented by having students edit Wikipedia pages and using their page views as activity indicators. Interestingly, the study by Wang and Zhang ( 2020 ) also used Wikipedia page views to explore the evolution of a particular health topic, Women's health.…”

Machine Learning and IoT Applied to Cardiovascular Diseases Identification Through Heart Sounds: A Literature Review

“…In recent years, there has been a growing trend towards the application of Information Communication Technologies (ICT) in various topics in the health area [1][2][3][4]. Health Informatics (HI) has occupied a strategic role in society, generating relevant impacts on economic and human aspects.…”