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July 2020

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Medical knowledge on Wikipedia

July 15, 2020 Video: YouTube

Wikipedia for health information - Situating Wikipedia as a health information resource
 
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By Denise Smith (McMaster University, Health Sciences Library & Western University, Faculty of Information & Media Studies)
Wikipedia is the most frequently accessed web site for health information, but the various ways users engage with Wikipedia’s health content has not been thoroughly investigated or reported. This talk will summarize the findings of a comprehensive literature review published in February. It explores all the contexts in which Wikipedia’s health content is used that have been reported in academic literature. The talk will focus on the findings reported in this paper, the potential impact of this study in health and medical librarianship, the practice of medicine, and medical or health education.
  • D.A. Smith (2020). "Situating Wikipedia as a health information resource in various contexts: A scoping review". PLoS ONE. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0228786


COVID-19 research in Wikipedia
By Giovanni Colavizza (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)
Wikipedia is one of the main sources of free knowledge on the Web. During the first few months of the pandemic, over 4,500 new Wikipedia pages on COVID-19 have been created and have accumulated close to 250M pageviews by early April 2020.1 At the same time, an unprecedented amount of scientific articles on COVID-19 and the ongoing pandemic have been published online. Wikipedia’s contents are based on reliable sources, primarily scientific literature. Given its public function, it is crucial for Wikipedia to rely on representative and reliable scientific results, especially so in a time of crisis. We assess the coverage of COVID-19-related research in Wikipedia via citations. We find that Wikipedia editors are integrating new research at an unprecedented fast pace. While doing so, they are able to provide a largely representative coverage of COVID-19-related research. We show that all the main topics discussed in this literature are proportionally represented from Wikipedia, after accounting for article-level effects. We further use regression analyses to model citations from Wikipedia and show that, despite the pressure to keep up with novel results, Wikipedia editors rely on literature which is highly cited, widely shared on social media, and has been peer-reviewed.
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