Using Wikipedia as a source of Health Information

Using Wikipedia as a Source of Vaccine Information for our Patients in Health Care Settings Miguel A. Mayer Angela Leis Medical Association of Barcelona (COMB), SPAIN

Summary
Background
Design & Methods
Results
Conclusions

Background
Wikipedia is a Web 2.0 tool
Wikipedia is one of the most popular resources on the Internet (visited by means of search engines)
By and large, different studies show that the quality of health information in Wikipedia is not bad but incomplete

Objective
To determine whether the vaccine information in Wikipedia (in English and Spanish) has enough quality to recommend it to our patients in health care settings

Design & Methods
Observational study
Based on the evaluation of vaccine articles in Wikipedia (in English and in Spanish)
Wiki search engine: Using terms such as “vaccination”, “vaccines”, “vacunas” and “vacunación”
Six articles were included (3 in English and 3 in Spanish )
Variables: article name, quality of information, number of users and changes in the article

Results
It is not always clear which environment the vaccines are recommended or scheduled for
The number of changes varies from tens to hundreds depending on the article
50% editors are robots or anonymous, and around 90% of those identified there is not enough information to know who they actually are
No standard terminologies are used to refer to vaccines

Conclusions
The information about vaccines changes widely in size and detail depending on the topic and the language
It’s a rare event to find or identify health professionals as editors
Wikipedia about vaccines could be useful for general educational purposes but supervised by health professionals
More studies are needed

Contact
Miguel A. Mayer & Angela Leis
e-mail:
[email_address]
[email_address]
Dept. of Web Mèdica Acreditada
http://wma.comb.es

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Using Wikipedia as a source of Health Information

by Miguel Angel Mayer on Sep 23, 2011

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