Reader engagement with medical content on Wikipedia

• Main Authors: Lauren A Maggio, Ryan M Steinberg, Tiziano Piccardi, John M Willinsky
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: eLife Sciences Publications Ltd 2020-03-01
• Series: eLife
• Subjects: Wikipedia; meta-research; scholarly communication; bibliometrics; medicine
• Online Access: https://elifesciences.org/articles/52426

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.