Improving the Quality of Consumer Health Information on Wikipedia: Case Series

Shira Schecter Weiner · Jill Horbacewicz · Lane Rasberry · Yocheved Bensinger-Brody

32 citations0/0 files storedJournal of Medical Internet Research

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Wikis in Education and Collaboration Health Literacy and Information Accessibility Social Media in Health Education

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Wikipedia is one of the most consulted health resources in the world. Since the public is using health information from Wikipedia to make health care decisions, improving the quality of that health information is in the public interest. The open editable content design of Wikipedia and quality control processes in place provide an opportunity to add high-value, evidence-based information and take an active role in improving the health care information infrastructure. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this project was to enhance Wikipedia health pages using high-quality, current research findings and track the persistence of those edits and number of page views after the changes to assess the reach of this initiative. METHODS: We conducted Wikipedia Editathons with 3 different cohorts of Physical Therapy (PT) students to add high-quality health information to existing Wikipedia pages. Students synthesized best evidence information and updated and/or corrected existing Wikipedia entries on specific health pages. To evaluate the impact of these contributions, we examined two factors: (1) response to our contributions from the Wikipedia editing community, including number and type of subsequent edits as well as persistence of the student contributions and (2) number of page views by the public from the time of the page edits. RESULTS: A total of 98 PT students in 3 different cohorts engaged in Editathons, editing 24 health pages. Of the 24 edits, 22 persisted at the end of the observation period (from time of entry to May 31, 2018) and received nearly 8 million page views. Each health page had an average of 354,724 page views. CONCLUSIONS: The Wikipedia Editathon is an effective way to continuously enhance the quality of health information available on Wikipedia. It is also an excellent way of bridging health technology with best-evidence medical facts and disseminating accurate, useful information to the public.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 32 citations exist upstream.

References

2015Wikipedia and Medicine: Quantifying Readership, Editors, and the Significance of Natural Language 2016Why Medical Schools Should Embrace Wikipedia: Final-Year Medical Student Contributions to Wikipedia Articles for Academic Credit at One School 2017Evolution of Wikipedia’s medical content: past, present and future

Cited by

2021Wikipedia in Health Professional Schools: from an Opponent to an Ally 2022Wikinformetrics: Construction and description of an open Wikipedia knowledge graph data set for informetric purposes 2021Library instruction and Wikipedia: investigating students’ perceived information literacy, lifelong learning, and social responsibility through Wikipedia editing

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.