To improve the quality of available information on Wikipedia, fifty percent of physicians look up conditions on the website and some are editing articles themselves, the Atlantic reported.
Even though we have constantly been warned by both teachers and bosses to avoid Wikipedia and not trust the source of information, we still rely on the website.
According to the Atlantic, one in three Americans have tried to diagnose a medical condition with the help of the Internet, and a new report said doctors are just as drawn to Wikipedia's flickering flame.
According to the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics' "Engaging patients through social media" report, Wikipedia is the top source of healthcare information for both doctors and patients.
Fifty percent of physicians use Wikipedia for information, especially for specific conditions.
More than common conditions, more people turn to Wikipedia for rare diseases. Tuberculosis, Crohn's disease, pneumonia, multiple sclerosis, and diabetes are the top five conditions looked up on the website over the past year.
Patients tend to use Wikipedia as a "starting point for their online self-education," the report said. It also found a "direct correlation between Wikipedia page visits and prescription volumes."
It is a known fact that most people turn to the Internet and Wikipedia specifically to look up health information.
"Wikipedia entries often appear highest in the results pages of various search engines and the public perception of Wikipedia being a legitimate source of information has increased dramatically in recent years," the report reads. "For healthcare in particular, patients are concerned about the validity and neutrality of the information they seek out, and Wikipedia increasingly meets this need, providing supplemental information to that which they receive from clinicians."
"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," the Atlantic reported.
"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, the Atlantic reported.
"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 said. "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."
