health and medicine essay wikipedia
The Impact of Wikipedia on Health and Medicine: A Comprehensive Analysis
Wikipedia, by its own account, is “a project to build a free encyclopedia in all languages of the world. Its articles are frequently used as a free and large resource, particularly in the field of medicine. Wikipedia has been noted to be the first/second/third most consulted website for those seeking medical information and it is widely used by both patients and health care professionals. Patients use it as a source of information on topics such as medical conditions, symptoms, diagnosis, and therapy. However, recent research shows that there are concerns about the accuracy and completeness of Wikipedia’s content, and it is considered a source to be used with caution.
Since Wikipedia is commonly used as a source of medical information, it stands to reason that knowledge of its influence on those who read medical information requires a study of their behavior and attitudes. The questions we pose are about the “type” of reader (lay person, health professional, Wikipedia author), their ability to evaluate the quality of the pages, the origins and the uses of their knowledge, and the resulting behaviors and/or attitudes. The answers to these questions can not only generate suggestions for improving the quality of Wikipedia, but also promote the growth of a critical consciousness around Wikipedia, offering health care professional readers a useful tool to relay to their patients. In this way, Wikipedia, despite its limitations as a source of medical information, could be used to encourage patients to interactively search for detailed information about their health and diagnostic-therapeutic paths through useful and accredited websites, and/or, through experts in the field.
Experts investigate how people make decisions about healthcare and how confident they are in such decisions. These studies have collectively found that a lack of confidence in healthcare decisions is not confined to the lay public and shows similarities between different healthcare provider groups. Laypeople appear to believe they have information to make informed choices, but they may not be certain about whether the information provides a reliable basis for making healthcare decisions. Here we provide further evidence of the limitations of Wikipedia in relation to the perceived evidence basis for healthcare choices. However, we provide additional evidence concerning differences between laypeople and healthcare professionals and provide novel evidence concerning the relationships between individuals’ behavior and such confidence.
Responses to the question “How confident are you in making decisions about which medical treatments are best for you?” showed a normal pattern of responses, with a slight skew to the right. Hence, our study shows that the uncertainty seen in exploration-exploitation behavior is reflected in how confident laypeople feel in making healthcare decisions. While our study shows that laypeople are overconfident in relation to the evidence basis for those decisions, the position is more complex than simply pointing the finger of blame at Wikipedia. It illustrates difficulties in decision-making in the real world: in the absence of perfect information—where complex choices require the assimilation of often specialist information—the most expedient choices may result from a biased and narrow view of what is known. In some respects, making quick decisions is preferred: nobody wants health decisions to be delayed until every last piece of research has been conducted and glued together, only for further pieces of primary research to force us to rip the knowledge base to pieces and start over.
Understanding health-related information is important to improve health literacy and make well-informed decisions and improved health outcomes. In actively integrating patients into their healthcare, patient empowerment is considered a goal and a means of achieving these goals. In this direction, several organizations, including the US Institute of Medicine and the Canadian Health Public Library, encourage a more proactive role of patients in curing their health problems by having better access to health information and realistic expectations regarding treatment alternatives. In response to these calls, trustworthy health information on the Internet is within reach of the people who need it. Encouraging patients to seek health information on the Internet can provide an opportunity to increase their engagement in health decision-making and management of their healthcare processes, as well as make the person feel better. It allows people to seek new symptoms, worry about their symptoms, seek new treatment information, gain a sense of empowerment through self-management, and make better choices.
Health information access and use influence people’s health status. Patients who are better informed and actively participate in consultation have good results. In the current information society, the proliferation of the Internet and social media has made it easier for people to disseminate, receive and exchange health information. The World Health Organization study reports that over 70% of Internet users (about 2 billion people worldwide) searched for health information on the Internet during 2012-2013. It is now too expensive for people to access, so Wikipedia has the potential to significantly influence health literacy and patient empowerment. In particular, we hypothesize that encyclopedia will reach and educate more offline populations, allow real-time studying of topics, and form the basis of some eHealth applications.
Wikipedia has attracted attention from professionals in health, medicine, and biomedical research. While there may be potential benefits to leveraging Wikipedia to advance the spirit of the democratization of knowledge, it is important to also consider some of the limitations in facilitating this process. Suggestions have been made to improve health and medical content in Wikipedia, focused on both increasing the accuracy of existing content and creating new content where critical gaps exist.
Researchers have demonstrated the imbalance that exists in the coverage of health topics on Wikipedia. Not only are there significant gaps in the coverage of medical conditions, but the depth of information provided on individual topics may also transcend what most readers desire for individual conditions. Furthermore, the breadth and depth of coverage of these topics revealed the tendency in Wikipedia to bias content toward more comprehensively covered medical conditions, those with negative health outcomes, and infectious diseases. Other limitations identified include instability, coverage, and perspectives. Frequent vandalism in high-profile topics has led to heightened attention and developed interventions for handling high-traffic medical articles on Wikipedia. Finally, the lack of overall diversity in the Wikipedia health information system suggests a challenge to the Wikipedia community to engage volunteer contributors and engage members of underrepresented groups.
The topic of Wikipedia and health has so far been overlooked and may offer useful strategies for connecting researchers and the public. In this comprehensive analysis, we provide guidelines and examples of responsible use of Wikipedia in health and medicine, and generate questions for future research. First and foremost, the community developing Wikipedia can now gain insights into its strengths and weaknesses with regard to health topics. Here are some quick takeaways for contributors to Wikipedia: quality is improving, which means it is becoming a more powerful and trustworthy clinical resource. Second, referencing is relatively easy and is the cornerstone of evaluating the scientific reliability of articles.
The quality of the closed-access articles was found to be significantly higher than those of the open-access group. These results were consistent with similar studies looking at a wide array of topics from different fields, indicating that research results with opposing findings could be directly rebutted, without providing unnecessary lip service to the controversy theory. These results shine a light on one of the important concepts of science that is sometimes overlooked in popular discussions: the scientific consensus. In going forward, it may be important to first address concerns about the low share of the information that is in Wikipedia and the presence and persistence of poor quality information within Wikipedia, as well as understanding how Wikipedia’s use impacts information consumption within indirectly affected populations.
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