Generally, more people turn to Wikipedia for rare diseases than common conditions. The top five conditions looked up on the site over the past year were: tuberculosis, Crohn’s disease, pneumonia, multiple sclerosis, and diabetes. Patients tend to use Wikipedia as a “starting point for their online self education,” the report says. It also found a “direct correlation between Wikipedia page visits and prescription volumes.”
We already knew that more and more people were turning to the Internet in general and Wikipedia specifically for health information, and we could hardly stop them if we tried.
Being crowd-sourced, the information may well be neutral, but is it accurate? Knowing that doctors, too, are using these resources raises old concerns about the quality of information that comes up when you type your condition into Google.
But doctors are aware of this, and an effort called Wikiproject Medicine is dedicated to improving the quality of medical information on Wikipedia. The IMS report looked at changes to five articles—diabetes, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, breast cancer and prostate cancer—and found them to be in a state of constant flux. Those articles were changed, on average, between 16 and 46 times a month. But one of the major contributors to those articles was Dr. James Heilman, the founder of Wikiproject Medicine’s Medicine Translation task force.
“This task force’s goal is getting 200 medical articles to a good or featured status (only 0.1 percent of articles on Wikipedia have this status), simplifying the English and then translating this content to as many languages as possible,” the report says. “The aim is to improve the quality of the most read medical articles on Wikipedia and ensure that this quality will reach non-English speakers.”…”