ArticleJournal of medical Internet research2018
Effects of Contributor Experience on the Quality of Health-Related Wikipedia Articles.
Article in Journal of medical Internet research, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Quality of Male and Female Medical Content on English-Language Wikipedia: Quantitative Content Analysis.Journal of medical Internet research · 2024Article
- Patient-Reported Outcomes in a Nationally Representative Sample of Older Internet Users: Cross-sectional Survey.JMIR aging · 2021Article
- Situating Wikipedia as a health information resource in various contexts: A scoping review.PloS one · 2020Article
- Association of Online Learning Behavior and Learning Outcomes for Medical Students: Large-Scale Usage Data Analysis.JMIR medical education · 2019Article
- The Most Influential Medical Journals According to Wikipedia: Quantitative Analysis.Journal of medical Internet research · 2019Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
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Abstract
backgroundConsulting the Internet for health-related information is a common and widespread phenomenon, and Wikipedia is arguably one of the most important resources for health-related information. Therefore, it is relevant to identify factors that have an impact on the quality of health-related Wikipedia articles.
objectiveIn our study we have hypothesized a positive effect of contributor experience on the quality of health-related Wikipedia articles.
methodsWe mined the edit history of all (as of February 2017) 18,805 articles that were listed in the categories on the portal health & fitness in the English language version of Wikipedia. We identified tags within the articles' edit histories, which indicated potential issues with regard to the respective article's quality or neutrality. Of all of the sampled articles, 99 (99/18,805, 0.53%) articles had at some point received at least one such tag. In our analysis we only considered those articles with a minimum of 10 edits (10,265 articles in total; 96 tagged articles, 0.94%). Additionally, to test our hypothesis, we constructed contributor profiles, where a profile consisted of all the articles edited by a contributor and the corresponding number of edits contributed. We did not differentiate between rollbacks and edits with novel content.
resultsNonparametric Mann-Whitney U-tests indicated a higher number of previously edited articles for editors of the nontagged articles (mean rank tagged 2348.23, mean rank nontagged 5159.29; U=9.25, P<.001). However, we did not find a significant difference for the contributors' total number of edits (mean rank tagged 4872.85, mean rank nontagged 5135.48; U=0.87, P=.39). Using logistic regression analysis with the respective article's number of edits and number of editors as covariates, only the number of edited articles yielded a significant effect on the article's status as tagged versus nontagged (dummy-coded; Nagelkerke R
conclusionsOur findings indicate an effect of contributor experience on the quality of health-related Wikipedia articles. However, only the number of previously edited articles was a predictor of the articles' quality but not the mere volume of edits. More research is needed to disentangle the different aspects of contributor experience. We have discussed the implications of our findings with respect to ensuring the quality of health-related information in collaborative knowledge-building platforms.
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