Abstract
This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. Introduction: Most medical students use Wikipedia, yet most medical schools do not train students to improve Wikipedia or use it critically. Methods: During academic year 2017 - 2018, the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine, Medical University of South Carolina & University of Central Florida College of Medicine offered credit-bearing Wikipedia-editing courses to 4th year medical students. We sought to assess student experiences across these schools and courses. Results: 78 students participated in the courses, making 3,368 edits, adding 155,100 words to 71 health-related Wikipedia pages. Collectively student contributions were viewed 2,688,500 times (37,866/page) during active dates of each course. Feedback from the 18 students who completed our study survey (23% response rate) reflected that students 1) increased their perception on Wikipedia reliability, 2) increased their ability to practice evidence based medicine, 3) were positively inclined to encourage peers to also edit Wikipedia, and 4) desired to contribute to public good. All students felt they improved their respective articles, and all but one felt that editing Wikipedia was a good investment in the future of healthcare. Despite our low response rate, qualitative comments suggest several students felt their courses impacted their professional identity as future physicians. Conclusions: We encourage the implementation of similar Wikipedia-editing courses across all health professional schools. Study replication will help clarify generalizability of these findings. Standardizing outcome metrics (e.g. impact on students, impact on Wikipedia quality, and impact on readers of Wikipedia) will allow more robust assessment of the impact of Wikipedia-editing courses and assignments across health professional schools globally.
Highlights
Most medical students use Wikipedia, yet most medical schools do not train students to improve Wikipedia or use it critically
Our research was conducted with the explicit permission of the local medical school faculty
All eighteen students felt confident they improved the content of their Wikipedia article and all would recommend their course to other students
Summary
Most medical students use Wikipedia, yet most medical schools do not train students to improve Wikipedia or use it critically. As of March 2017, Wikipedia had nearly 30,000 articles on medical topics in English, and 164,000 in other language Wikipedias (Shafee et al, 2017). These articles are viewed more than 10 million times per day (Shafee, Mietchen and Su, 2017). To protect content from inaccuracies (e.g. vandalism, self-promotion, factually incorrect content), Wikipedia’s quality control processes include the use of watchlists, recent change tracking, bots, special content page protection, filters, blocking, and banning problematic editors (Metcalfe and Powell, 2011). It is fundamentally the work of human volunteer editors that has kept Wikipedia’s content reliable to date
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