Wikipedia: A Key Tool for Global Public Health Promotion

Abstract

The Internet has become an important health information resource for patients and the general public. Wikipedia, a collaboratively written Web-based encyclopedia, has become the dominant online reference work. It is usually among the top results of search engine queries, including when medical information is sought. Since April 2004, editors have formed a group called WikiProject Medicine to coordinate and discuss the English-language Wikipedia’s medical content. This paper, written by members of the WikiProject Medicine, discusses the intricacies, strengths, and weaknesses of Wikipedia as a source of health information and compares it with other medical wikis. Medical professionals, their societies, patient groups, and institutions can help improve Wikipedia’s health-related entries. Several examples of partnerships already show that there is enthusiasm to strengthen Wikipedia’s biomedical content. Given its unique global reach, we believe its possibilities for use as a tool for worldwide health promotion are underestimated. We invite the medical community to join in editing Wikipedia, with the goal of providing people with free access to reliable, understandable, and up-to-date health information.

Wikipedia and the Humanities in Higher Education: Past Time to Renegotiate the Relationship

“…In their 2011 peer-reviewed article for the Journal of Medial Internet Research, James M. Heilman et al [11] examined the -intricacies, strengths, and weaknesses of Wikipedia as a source of health information.‖ Finding that -Wikipedia has evolved into an important medical resource for the general public, students, and health care professionals,‖ Heilman et al [11] further recommended that that medical schools should -challenge their students not only to read Wikipedia's articles critically, but also to rewrite, discuss, critique, and improve them.‖ In other words, contributing to Wikipedia should become an established part of the medical school curriculum. No ambiguity or half-measures here.…”

Wikipedia as Informal Self-Education for Clinical Decision-Making in Medical Practice

“…In other words, they did exactly as suggested by Wikipedia's own article on reliability: they used Wikipedia as a starting point, bearing in mind that it is a general reference work and one needs to check facts and be aware that mistakes and omissions can occur [40]. However, it is well-known that text books and peer-reviewed articles can be out of date before they are even published and therein lies both a strength and a weakness of Wikipedia: it can be updated swiftly [40], but this may be with errors at times. As is shown by Wakefield et al's 1998 article on an alleged causal link between MMR triple vaccine and autism [41], it is not unknown for a peer-reviewed article to present conclusions which are simply not supported by the evidence provided.…”

“…It goes almost without saying that a major attraction of Wikipedia is the fact that one can find there material on just about anything and this is equally true in topics in healthcare. An exception however concerns drug dosages as mention of these is specifically discouraged in the Wikipedia style manual for drug articles as such information is rarely within the scope of a general encyclopaedia and corruption of this information could result in serious harm [40].…”

“…A way forward from this would be for medical schools, rather than to eschew, spurn and denigrate Wikipedia as a source of medical and health information, to embrace it fully and to encourage their students not only to consult Wikipedia critically but also to amend and correct entries and to rewrite, discuss, critique, and improve them [40]. This has been the case in Dentistry in the University of Dundee in Scotland where, under the guidance of a recent dentistry graduate and with 1 Ganfyd is an acronym for get a note from your doctor.…”

“… Used as starting point rather than endpoint  Never made clinical decisions based only on Wikipedia  Always used with/compared to other credible or peer-reviewed sources/cross referenced  Concordance or otherwise with what the respondent already knows  Not assumed to be 100% accurate so always keep a critical approach  Information generally accurate/high quality  References to peer-reviewed papers followed up  Own papers cited on Wikipedia Notwithstanding the obvious danger of there being confirmation bias, it would seem that our respondents generally applied the same criteria as Wikipedia applies to itself [17,18,40,50]. They tend to exhibit caution over Wikipedia entries, exactly as Wikipedia suggests should be the case .…”