ArticleeLife2020
Reader engagement with medical content on Wikipedia.
Article in eLife, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Implementing a Spanish Wikipedia elective for medical students.Journal of the Medical Library Association : JMLA · 2026Article
- Strategies for crowdsourcing hearing health information: a comparative study of educational programs and volunteer-based campaigns on Wikimedia.BMC public health · 2024Article
- Article
- Citation needed? Wikipedia bibliometrics during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.GigaScience · 2022Article
- Diagnosis of Taenia solium infections based on "mail order" RNA-sequencing of single tapeworm egg isolates from stool samples.PLoS neglected tropical diseases · 2021Article
- Developing a scalable framework for partnerships between health agencies and the Wikimedia ecosystem.Research ideas and outcomes · 2021Article
- Article
- Wikipedia: A Medical Student Educational Project to Edit Wikipedia in Preparation for Practicing Evidence-Based Pain Medicine.Journal of medical education and curricular developmentArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
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.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.