Work

Reader engagement with medical content on Wikipedia

Year: 2020

Type: article

Abstract: Articles on Wikipedia about health and medicine are maintained by WikiProject Medicine (WPM), and are widely used by health professionals, students and others. We have compared these articles, and reader engagement with them, to other articles on Wikipedia. We found that WPM articles are longer, possess a greater density of external links, and are visited more often than other articles on Wikipedia. Readers of WPM articles are more likely to hover over and view footnotes than other readers, but are less likely to visit the hyperlinked sources in these footnotes. Our findings suggest that WPM readers appear to use links to external sources to verify and authorize Wikipedia content, rather than to examine the sources themselves.

Source: eLife

DOI: 10.7554/elife.52426

Authors: Lauren A Maggio, Ryan M Steinberg, Tiziano Piccardi, John M Willinsky

Institutions: Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Stanford Medicine, Stanford University, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Language: English

Topic: Wikis in Education and Collaboration

Subfield: Communication

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $2,500

Funder: École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne