Wikipedia Could Promote Health Education Worldwide

Doctors, scientists, and medical students who write the Wikipedia medical articles are calling on their peers to join them in their efforts to provide the sum of all medical knowledge free to the world at large.

A new paper written by members of the WikiProject Medicine--which coordinate and discusses the English-language Wikipedia's medical content--discusses the intricacies, strengths, and weaknesses of Wikipedia as a source of health information, and compares it with other medical wikis. Based on a review of existing studies of Wikipedia's medical content, the paper concludes that Wikipedia has articles on an incredibly wide range of medical topics with few factual errors, although most of the articles are only in the earliest stages of development, and the readability needs to be improved.

Although critics have questioned Wikipedia's open editorial policy, and examples of errors have been widely published, the authors point out that the encyclopedia has developed multiple strategies to prevent damage to its articles, including the use of vandalism fighting software, automated correction scripts, page protection, edit filters, blocking, and banning. They also argue that the possibilities to use Wikipedia as a tool for worldwide health promotion are underestimated, citing its unique global reach and examples of how the Internet encyclopedia is used in humanitarian projects.

The editorial group extended an invitation to 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. Physicians may contribute to Wikipedia for several reasons, including the intellectual challenge to summarize a medical topic for the general public, the satisfaction that comes from editing an important source of medical information, and watching the articles grow and rise among Google results, often outperforming review articles in leading medical journals. The viewpoint paper was published on January 31, 2011, in the peer-reviewed Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR).

"With more than 20,000 articles on health and more than 6,000 drug-related articles, there has never been more freely accessible health information on the Internet thanks to Wikipedia. But now we need more experts to expand these articles and to make them more accessible to the general public at the same time," said corresponding author Michaël Laurent, MD, of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium).

Since WikiProject Medicine was founded in April 2004, more than 200 editors (ranging from laypeople and students to doctors, nurses, and professors) have registered at the virtual "doctor's mess," where Wikipedia's medical content is discussed and coordinated. Over the years, the project has developed guidelines about writing good medical articles and finding reliable medical references.

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