The majority of people in the United States use the internet as a source of health information. The third most common activity for information seeking online is looking up health or medical information. One 2013 study suggested that 22% of healthcare searches online direct users to Wikipedia. Wikipedia was described in 2014 in a report published by IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics as "the leading single source" of healthcare information for patients and healthcare professionals. According to the same report, 50% of U.S. physicians that go online for professional purposes are using Wikipedia to access information. These facts were referenced on page 17 from the same research report published by IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics on "Engaging Patients Through Social Media," and were recirculated further in popular media outlets and peer-reviewed articles. The IMS report provides a citation to an undated research report in "Taking the Pulse" by Manhattan Research, which is unavailable using most library research databases In July 2014, Wikipedia's medical content in all languages was viewed more often than any other popular healthcare website, including the
NIH,
WebMD,
Mayo Clinic,
NHS,
WHO, and
UpToDate. Some doctors have described their use of Wikipedia as a "guilty secret".
General public A 2015 study compared the popularity of Wikipedia's articles on ten of the most common neurological disorders over a 90-day period from April 2014 to July 2014; it found that there was no relationship between the incidence or prevalence of a neurological disorder and the number of page views it received. For example, Wikipedia's article on
multiple sclerosis was far more popular than its articles on more common disorders like
migraine,
epilepsy, or
stroke. The authors theorized that this might be due to the increasing prevalence of
MRI scans, which has led to an increase in incidental findings of
white matter lesions. Although most of these lesions have nothing to do with multiple sclerosis, they may lead patients, relatives, and even physicians to perform Internet searches on "multiple sclerosis", which may lead them to the Wikipedia article.
Medical students Wikipedia's health information has been described as "transforming how our next doctors learn medicine". Various commentators in health education have said that Wikipedia is popular and convenient for medical students. A 2013 study done at a single Australian medical school showed that 97% of students used Wikipedia to study medicine, with the most common reasons being ease of access and ease of understanding. There was no relationship between a student's year in medical school and his or her use of Wikipedia, but students further along in medical school were less likely to use Wikipedia as their first resource, only resource, or most common resource; they were also more likely to perceive Wikipedia as unreliable. In 2013,
UCSF School of Medicine began to offer fourth-year medical students a month-long elective centered around improving Wikipedia's health-related articles. Between 2013 and 2015, 43 students took part in the course and chose a single health-related article to work on. A study of their contributions by UCSF faculty found that the students expanded their articles, added higher-quality sources, removed lower-quality sources, and improved readability. The study's authors argued that medical schools should encourage students to contribute to Wikipedia, both to improve the quality of its content and to enable students to become better health care educators. A 2013 study of a particular group of veterinary students found that the majority of these students sought and found medical information on Wikipedia. A 2015 study of five European medical schools found that students who used Wikipedia for general information were more likely to use it to look up medical information. 16% of students used Wikipedia often for general information, 60% sometimes, and 24% rarely. 12% of students used Wikipedia often for medical information, 55% sometimes, and 33% rarely. Almost all of the students (97%) found inaccurate information on Wikipedia at least once, but less than 20% of them corrected it. A 2015 study of medical students at
Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada, found that they ranked Google and Wikipedia highly for their accessibility, understandability, and usefulness but ranked PubMed higher for accuracy and trustworthiness. A 2017 study of online resource use by first-year medical students at
Melbourne Medical School found that they used the school's online learning platform most often (daily) and used Google and Wikipedia slightly less often (approximately daily). The students considered the learning platform to be most useful, followed by Google and Wikipedia, which they considered slightly less useful than the learning platform but significantly more useful than Facebook or
Google Scholar. They also considered the learning platform to be the most reliable and considered Google and Wikipedia to be significantly less reliable, although they frequently used both websites as a starting point for finding information. A 2017 study of resources used by medical students during their general surgery
clerkship at the
University of Florida College of Medicine found that review books were the most commonly used type of study resource, followed by the Internet. Wikipedia was the third-most commonly used resource and the most commonly used Internet resource. The study found no correlation between the type of resource used and students' performance on the
NBME surgery subject exam.
Residents A 2009 study of Internet use by 35
junior doctors in the United Kingdom found that 80% of them used Google and 70% of them used Wikipedia to look up medical information at least once a week, while only 30% used
PubMed. Google and Wikipedia were primarily used for background reading, while PubMed and other "best evidence" websites were used to answer specific questions for clinical decision-making. A 2015 survey of psychiatry residents at
Harvard Medical School found that they used online resources twice as often as they used printed resources. The three most commonly used resources were UpToDate, PubMed, and Wikipedia. UpToDate was the most used resource and was considered to be the most trustworthy, while PubMed was the second most used resource and was highly rated as a source of personal learning. Wikipedia was the third most used resource and received the highest ranking for ease of use; however, it was considered the least trustworthy.
Physicians and other health professionals A 2013 study of 500 European physicians, most of whom were from Austria and Switzerland, found that general search engines like Google were the most popular type of online medical resource, followed by medical research databases like PubMed, followed in third by Wikipedia. 56% of physicians in training (residents) reported using Wikipedia, versus only 37% of physicians who had already completed their training. A 2014 study of 259 health professionals in Spain found that while 53% of them used the
Spanish Wikipedia to look up medical information during work, only 3% of them considered it reliable and only 16% recommended it to their patients. Only 16% had ever edited a Wikipedia article; the most common reasons for not doing were that they did not consider themselves an expert (51%), they preferred to blog or publish peer-reviewed articles (21%), and they were concerned that someone would undo any contributions they made (17%).
Researchers of
Wikidata medical information Wikipedia and Wikidata are interconnected projects within the Wikimedia ecosystem. Wikidata contains structured data of medical information which is useful in itself, and which also informs information in Wikipedia.
Impact on psychological tests In 2009 a doctor and Wikipedia editor,
James Heilman, incorporated
public domain images of the
Rorschach test into Wikipedia. Psychologists complained that the increased public exposure to these tests devalued their clinical utility, and that public health was harmed as a result. ==Nature of contributors==