Motivations for contributing to health-related articles on Wikipedia: an interview study

Sharing health information across online platforms: A systematic review

Advanced Web 2.0 communication technologies have facilitated health-related information (HRI) sharing on the Internet. Especially, the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns around the world have forced more people to turn to the Internet for HRI. A better understanding of users' sharing content and sharing behavior can help communicators improve health literacy, raise community awareness, and facilitate social support exchanges. This paper reports the results of a systematic review of online HRI sharing literature, including key research topics, theories and methods used in past studies, and key factors of sharing behavior across online platforms. Following the PRISMA procedure for a systematic review, 58 articles were identified and analyzed using keyword matching, thematic analysis, and expert review. Guided by the platform theory, our findings differentiated five types of online platforms that differently influenced online users' sharing content and sharing purposes, including micro-blogs, social network sites, online health communities, social question and answer sites, and Wikis. The findings also clarify five main research topics and applicable theories used in each topic, including personal health sharing, health-related knowledge sharing, general health message diffusion, outcomes of HRI sharing, and exploratory research. Key factors of sharing behavior and potential sharing outcomes are also reviewed and summarized in the research framework developed from the motivation theory. Our study contributes to the understanding of online sharing behavior and provides implications for health communicators to develop effective health campaigns. Potential research directions are also identified and discussed.

Public Awareness of the Fencing Response as an Indicator of Traumatic Brain Injury: Quantitative Study of Twitter and Wikipedia Data

BACKGROUND

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a disruption in normal brain function caused by an impact of external forces on the head. TBI affects millions of individuals per year, many potentially experiencing chronic symptoms and long-term disability, creating a public health crisis and an economic burden on society. The public discourse around sport-related TBIs has increased in recent decades; however, recognition of a possible TBI remains a challenge. The fencing response is an immediate posturing of the limbs, which can occur in individuals who sustain a TBI and can be used as an overt indicator of TBI. Typically, an individual demonstrating the fencing response exhibits extension in 1 arm and flexion in the contralateral arm immediately upon impact to the head; variations of forearm posturing among each limb have been observed. The tonic posturing is retained for several seconds, sufficient for observation and recognition of a TBI. Since the publication of the original peer-reviewed article on the fencing response, there have been efforts to raise awareness of the fencing response as a visible sign of TBI through publicly available web-based platforms, such as Twitter and Wikipedia.

OBJECTIVE

We aimed to quantify trends that demonstrate levels of public discussion and awareness of the fencing response over time using data from Twitter and Wikipedia.

METHODS

Raw Twitter data from January 1, 2010, to December 31, 2019, were accessed using the RStudio package academictwitteR and queried for the text "fencing response." Data for page views of the Fencing Response Wikipedia article from January 1, 2010, to December 31, 2019, were accessed using the RStudio packages wikipediatrend and pageviews. Data were clustered by weekday, month, half-year (to represent the American football season vs off-season), and year to identify trends over time. Seasonal regression analysis was used to analyze the relationship between the number of fencing response tweets and page views and month of the year.

RESULTS

Twitter mentions of the fencing response and Wikipedia page views increased overall from 2010 to 2019, with hundreds of tweets and hundreds of thousands of Wikipedia page views per year. Twitter mentions peaked during the American football season, especially on and following game days. Wikipedia page views did not demonstrate a clear weekday or seasonal pattern, but instead had multiple peaks across various months and years, with January having more page views than May.

CONCLUSIONS

Here, we demonstrated increased awareness of the fencing response over time using public data from Twitter and Wikipedia. Effective scientific communication through free public platforms can help spread awareness of clinical indicators of TBI, such as the fencing response. Greater awareness of the fencing response as a "red-flag" sign of TBI among coaches, athletic trainers, and sports organizations can help with medical care and return-to-play decisions.

Library instruction and Wikipedia: investigating students' perceived information literacy, lifelong learning, and social responsibility through Wikipedia editing

Objectives:

This article presents a multiyear pilot study delineating practical challenges, solutions, and lessons learned from Wikipedia editing experiences with first-year medical students at the John A. Burns School of Medicine at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. The purpose of our project was to determine the feasibility and effectiveness of Wikipedia editing to improve information literacy and lifelong learning skills and to investigate aspects of social responsibility in first-year medical students.

Methods:

Lessons were provided through a combination of in-person and online instruction via the WikiEdu learning management system (LMS). Students next selected a health-related Wikipedia article to edit. After the editing experience, structural completeness data were collected from the WikiEdu LMS. Feedback was collected via an anonymous retrospective pre-post survey to assess the students' attitudes toward their perceived information literacy skills and the social responsibility of improving Wikipedia articles. Nonparametric tests were conducted to compare pre versus post outcomes.

Results:

Fifty-seven (79%) participants in the 2018 cohort and forty-nine (64%) participants in the 2019 cohort completed the retrospective pre-post survey. In both cohorts, respondents showed statistically significant increases (p<.05) in self-rating of all ten domains of information literacy and social responsibility after completing the program.

Conclusions:

This study showed that medical students are competent editors of Wikipedia and that their contributions improve both the quality of the articles and their own perceived information literacy. Additionally, editing medicine-related articles provides an opportunity to build students' social responsibility by improving content on an open platform that reaches millions each day.

Readability and quality of Wikipedia articles on pelvic floor disorders

INTRODUCTION AND HYPOTHESIS

This study is aimed at evaluating the readability and quality of Wikipedia articles on pelvic floor disorders (PFD) and comparing their content with International Urogynecological Association patient education leaflets.

METHODS

Readability was assessed using six different readability scales, including the Simple Measure of Gobbledygook (SMOG) Index, which is considered superior for scoring healthcare information. Quality was assessed by three female pelvic medicine and reconstructive surgery fellows using the modified DISCERN instrument. DISCERN is validated to evaluate the quality of written consumer health information; it was subsequently modified by health education researchers to enable the evaluation of Wikipedia articles.

RESULTS

We evaluated 30 Wikipedia articles that correlated with 29 International Urogynecological Association leaflets. The mean SMOG score of the Wikipedia articles was 12.0 ± 2.1 (12th-grade reading level) whereas the mean SMOG score of the International Urological Association (IUGA) leaflets was 3.4 ± 0.3 (third-grade reading level, p < 0.001). The mean modified DISCERN score of the Wikipedia articles was 34.43 ± 5.90 (moderate quality); however, the mean modified DISCERN score of the IUGA literature was 45.02 ± 1.36 (good quality, p < 0.001).

CONCLUSIONS

Wikipedia articles on PFD are neither readable nor reliable: they require a 12th-grade-level education for comprehension and are merely rated moderate in quality. In comparison, IUGA leaflets require a third-grade education for comprehension and are rated good in quality. Urogynecological providers should provide appropriate health education materials to patients, as Wikipedia is both a popular and sometimes inaccurate resource for patients.

Evaluation of the Liver Disease Information in Baidu Encyclopedia and Wikipedia: Longitudinal Study

Background

The internet has changed the way of people acquiring health information. Previous studies have shown that Wikipedia is a reasonably reliable medical resource, and it has been ranked higher than other general websites in various search engines. Baidu Encyclopedia is one of the most popular encyclopedia websites in China. However, no studies have shown the quality of the content provided in the Baidu Encyclopedia.

Objective

This study aimed to evaluate the quality of liver disease information provided by Wikipedia (in English) and Baidu Encyclopedia (in Chinese) and to perform a comparison of the quality and timeliness of the articles published in these two encyclopedias. Moreover, a 3-year follow-up study was conducted to compare if the information in both these websites was updated regularly over this period.

Methods

We searched for information on liver diseases by using the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems 10th Revision Version 2016 codes on Wikipedia (in English) and Baidu Encyclopedia (in Chinese). The quality of the articles was assessed using the DISCERN instrument, which consists of 3 sections. We recorded the latest editing date of the webpages and calculated the date interval to evaluate the update timeliness of these websites.

Results

We found 22 entries on liver diseases in Baidu Encyclopedia and 15 articles in Wikipedia between September 15, 2016, and September 30, 2016, and we found 25 entries in Baidu Encyclopedia and 16 articles in Wikipedia between September 15, 2019, and September 30, 2019. In section 1 of the DISCERN instrument, the mean (SE) scores of Baidu Encyclopedia entries were significantly lower than those of Wikipedia articles. In section 2 and section 3 of the DISCERN instrument, the DISCERN scores of Baidu Encyclopedia entries were lower than those of Wikipedia articles, but the differences were not statistically significant. The total DISCERN scores of Baidu Encyclopedia entries were significantly lower than those of Wikipedia articles. The update interval of the entries in Baidu Encyclopedia was found to be significantly longer than that of the articles in Wikipedia.

Conclusions

This study shows that the quality of articles and the reliability of the research content on liver diseases in Wikipedia are better than those of the entries in Baidu Encyclopedia. However, the quality of the treatment choices provided in both Wikipedia and Baidu Encyclopedia is not satisfactory. Wikipedia is updated more frequently than Baidu Encyclopedia, thereby ensuring that the information presented has the most recent research findings. The findings of our study suggest that in order to find accurate health information, it is important to seek the help of medical professionals instead of looking for a prescription amid the confusing information provided on the internet.

Privacy Protection in Online Health Communities: Natural Experimental Empirical Study

Background

An online health community (OHC) is a novel sharing channel through which doctors share professional health care knowledge with patients. While doctors have the authority to protect their patients’ privacy in OHCs, we have limited information on how doctors’ privacy protection choices affect their professional health care knowledge sharing with patients.

Objective

We examined the relationship between privacy protection and professional health care knowledge sharing in OHCs. Specifically, we examined the effects of privacy protection settings in an OHC on doctors’ interactive professional health care knowledge sharing and searching professional health care knowledge sharing (two dimensions of professional health care knowledge sharing). Moreover, we explored how such effects differ across different levels of disease stigma.

Methods

We collected the monthly panel data of 19,456 doctors from Good Doctor, one of the largest OHCs in China, from January 2008 to April 2016. A natural experimental empirical study with difference-in-difference analysis was conducted to test our hypotheses. The time fixed effect and the individual fixed effect were both considered to better identify the effects of a privacy protection setting on professional health care knowledge sharing. Additionally, a cross-sectional analysis was performed for a robust check.

Results

The results indicate that the privacy protection setting has a significant positive effect on interactive professional health care knowledge sharing (β=.123, P<.001). However, the privacy protection setting has a significant negative effect on searching professional health care knowledge sharing (β=–.225, P=.05). Moreover, we found that high disease stigma positively impacts the effect of privacy protection on interactive professional health care knowledge sharing (coefficients are in the same valence) and negatively impacts the effects of privacy protection on searching professional health care knowledge sharing (coefficients are in the reverse valence).

Conclusions

Privacy protection has a bilateral effect on professional health care knowledge sharing (ie, a positive effect on interactive professional health care knowledge sharing and a negative effect on searching professional health care knowledge sharing). Such bilateral switches of professional health care knowledge sharing call for a balanced state in conjunction with practical implications. This research also identifies a moderate effect of disease stigma on privacy protection settings and professional health care knowledge sharing.

Situating Wikipedia as a health information resource in various contexts: A scoping review

BACKGROUND

Wikipedia's health content is the most frequently visited resource for health information on the internet. While the literature provides strong evidence for its high usage, a comprehensive literature review of Wikipedia's role within the health context has not yet been reported.

OBJECTIVE

To conduct a comprehensive review of peer-reviewed, published literature to learn what the existing body of literature says about Wikipedia as a health information resource and what publication trends exist, if any.

METHODS

A comprehensive literature search in OVID Medline, OVID Embase, CINAHL, LISTA, Wilson's Web, AMED, and Web of Science was performed. Through a two-stage screening process, records were excluded if: Wikipedia was not a major or exclusive focus of the article; Wikipedia was not discussed within the context of a health or medical topic; the article was not available in English, the article was irretrievable, or; the article was a letter, commentary, editorial, or popular media article.

RESULTS

89 articles and conference proceedings were selected for inclusion in the review. Four categories of literature emerged: 1) studies that situate Wikipedia as a health information resource; 2) investigations into the quality of Wikipedia, 3) explorations of the utility of Wikipedia in education, and 4) studies that demonstrate the utility of Wikipedia in research.

CONCLUSION

The literature positions Wikipedia as a prominent health information resource in various contexts for the public, patients, students, and practitioners seeking health information online. Wikipedia's health content is accessed frequently, and its pages regularly rank highly in Google search results. While Wikipedia itself is well into its second decade, the academic discourse around Wikipedia within the context of health is still young and the academic literature is limited when attempts are made to understand Wikipedia as a health information resource. Possibilities for future research will be discussed.

DISNET: a framework for extracting phenotypic disease information from public sources

Background

Within the global endeavour of improving population health, one major challenge is the identification and integration of medical knowledge spread through several information sources. The creation of a comprehensive dataset of diseases and their clinical manifestations based on information from public sources is an interesting approach that allows one not only to complement and merge medical knowledge but also to increase it and thereby to interconnect existing data and analyse and relate diseases to each other. In this paper, we present DISNET (http://disnet.ctb.upm.es/), a web-based system designed to periodically extract the knowledge from signs and symptoms retrieved from medical databases, and to enable the creation of customisable disease networks.

Methods

We here present the main features of the DISNET system. We describe how information on diseases and their phenotypic manifestations is extracted from Wikipedia and PubMed websites; specifically, texts from these sources are processed through a combination of text mining and natural language processing techniques.

Results

We further present the validation of our system on Wikipedia and PubMed texts, obtaining the relevant accuracy. The final output includes the creation of a comprehensive symptoms-disease dataset, shared (free access) through the system's API. We finally describe, with some simple use cases, how a user can interact with it and extract information that could be used for subsequent analyses.

Discussion

DISNET allows retrieving knowledge about the signs, symptoms and diagnostic tests associated with a disease. It is not limited to a specific category (all the categories that the selected sources of information offer us) and clinical diagnosis terms. It further allows to track the evolution of those terms through time, being thus an opportunity to analyse and observe the progress of human knowledge on diseases. We further discussed the validation of the system, suggesting that it is good enough to be used to extract diseases and diagnostically-relevant terms. At the same time, the evaluation also revealed that improvements could be introduced to enhance the system's reliability.

The Impact of Topic Characteristics and Threat on Willingness to Engage with Wikipedia Articles: Insights from Laboratory Experiments

A growing body of research aims to identify the factors that motivate people to make contributions in Wikipedia. We conducted two laboratory experiments to investigate the connections between topic characteristics, perception of threat, and willingness to engage with Wikipedia articles. In Study 1 (N = 83), we examined how topic familiarity, topic controversiality, and mortality salience influenced participants' willingness to engage with Wikipedia articles. We presented the introduction parts of 20 Wikipedia articles and asked participants to rate each article with respect to familiarity and controversiality. In addition, we experimentally manipulated participants' level of mortality salience in terms of the amount of threat they experienced when reading the article. Participants also indicated their willingness to engage with a particular article. The results revealed that familiar and controversial topics increased the willingness to engage with Wikipedia articles. Although mortality salience increased accessibility of death-related thoughts, it did not result in any changes in people's willingness to work with the articles. The aim of Study 2 (N = 90) was to replicate the effects of topic characteristics by following a similar procedure. We additionally manipulated uncertainty salience by assigning participants to three experimental conditions: uncertainty salience, certainty salience, and non-salience. As expected, familiar and controversial topics were of high interest in terms of willingness to contribute. However, the manipulation of uncertainty salience did not yield any significant results despite the emergence of negative emotional states. In sum, we demonstrated that topic characteristics were factors that substantially influenced people's willingness to engage with Wikipedia articles whereas perceived threat was not.

Evolution of Wikipedia's medical content: past, present and future

As one of the most commonly read online sources of medical information, Wikipedia is an influential public health platform. Its medical content, community, collaborations and challenges have been evolving since its creation in 2001, and engagement by the medical community is vital for ensuring its accuracy and completeness. Both the encyclopaedia’s internal metrics as well as external assessments of its quality indicate that its articles are highly variable, but improving. Although content can be edited by anyone, medical articles are primarily written by a core group of medical professionals. Diverse collaborative ventures have enhanced medical article quality and reach, and opportunities for partnerships are more available than ever. Nevertheless, Wikipedia’s medical content and community still face significant challenges, and a socioecological model is used to structure specific recommendations. We propose that the medical community should prioritise the accuracy of biomedical information in the world’s most consulted encyclopaedia.

Professional Use of Social Media by Pharmacists: A Qualitative Study

Background

Social media is frequently used by consumers and health care professionals; however, our knowledge about its use in a professional capacity by pharmacists is limited.

Objective

Our aim was to investigate the professional use of social media by pharmacists.

Methods

In-depth semistructured interviews were conducted with practicing pharmacists (N=31) from nine countries. Interviews were recorded, transcribed verbatim, and thematically analyzed.

Results

Wikipedia, YouTube, and Facebook were the main social media platforms used. Professional use of social media included networking with peers, discussion of health and professional topics, accessing and sharing health and professional information, job searching, and professional promotion. Wikipedia was the participants’ first choice when seeking information about unfamiliar topics, or topics that were difficult to search for. Very few pharmacy-related contributions to Wikipedia were reported. YouTube, a video-sharing platform, was used for self-education. University lectures, “how-to” footage, and professionally made videos were commonly watched. No professional contribution was made to YouTube. Facebook, a general social networking site, was used for professional networking, promotion of achievements, and job advertisements. It also afforded engagement in professional discussions and information sharing among peers.

Conclusions

Participants used social media in a professional capacity, specifically for accessing and sharing health and professional information among peers. Pharmacists, as medicines experts, should take a leading role in contributing to health information dissemination in these user-friendly virtual environments, to reach not only other health care professionals but also health consumers.

Get the Diagnosis: an evidence-based medicine collaborative Wiki for diagnostic test accuracy

BACKGROUND

Despite widespread calls for its use, there are challenges to the implementation of evidence-based medicine (EBM) in clinical practice.

METHODS

In response to the challenges of finding timely, pertinent information on diagnostic test accuracy, we developed an online, crowd-sourced Wiki on diagnostic test accuracy called Get the Diagnosis (GTD, http://www.getthediagnosis.org).

RESULTS

Since its launch in November 2008 till October 2015, GTD has accumulated information on 300 diagnoses, with 1617 total diagnostic entries. There are a total of 1097 unique diagnostic tests with a mean of 5.4 tests (range 0-38) per diagnosis. 73% of entries (1182 of 1617) have an associated sensitivity and specificity and 89% of entries (1432 of 1617) have associated peer-reviewed literature citations. Altogether, GTD contains 474 unique literature citations. For a sample of three diagnoses, the search precision (percentage of relevant results in the first 30 entries) in GTD was 100% as compared with a range of 13.3%-63.3% for PubMed and between 6.7% and 76.7% for Google Scholar.

CONCLUSION

GTD offers a fast, precise and efficient way to look up diagnostic test accuracy. On three selected examples, GTD had a greater precision rate compared with PubMed and Google Scholar in identifying diagnostic test information. GTD is a free resource that complements other currently available resources.

Wikipedia and medicine: quantifying readership, editors, and the significance of natural language

Background

Wikipedia is a collaboratively edited encyclopedia. One of the most popular websites on the Internet, it is known to be a frequently used source of health care information by both professionals and the lay public.

Objective

This paper quantifies the production and consumption of Wikipedia’s medical content along 4 dimensions. First, we measured the amount of medical content in both articles and bytes and, second, the citations that supported that content. Third, we analyzed the medical readership against that of other health care websites between Wikipedia’s natural language editions and its relationship with disease prevalence. Fourth, we surveyed the quantity/characteristics of Wikipedia’s medical contributors, including year-over-year participation trends and editor demographics.

Methods

Using a well-defined categorization infrastructure, we identified medically pertinent English-language Wikipedia articles and links to their foreign language equivalents. With these, Wikipedia can be queried to produce metadata and full texts for entire article histories. Wikipedia also makes available hourly reports that aggregate reader traffic at per-article granularity. An online survey was used to determine the background of contributors. Standard mining and visualization techniques (eg, aggregation queries, cumulative distribution functions, and/or correlation metrics) were applied to each of these datasets. Analysis focused on year-end 2013, but historical data permitted some longitudinal analysis.

Results

Wikipedia’s medical content (at the end of 2013) was made up of more than 155,000 articles and 1 billion bytes of text across more than 255 languages. This content was supported by more than 950,000 references. Content was viewed more than 4.88 billion times in 2013. This makes it one of if not the most viewed medical resource(s) globally. The core editor community numbered less than 300 and declined over the past 5 years. The members of this community were half health care providers and 85.5% (100/117) had a university education.

Conclusions

Although Wikipedia has a considerable volume of multilingual medical content that is extensively read and well-referenced, the core group of editors that contribute and maintain that content is small and shrinking in size.