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© 2020. This work is published under http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ (the “License”). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.

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.

Details

Title
Reader engagement with medical content on Wikipedia
Author
Maggio, Lauren A; Steinberg, Ryan M; Piccardi Tiziano; Willinsky, John M
University/institution
U.S. National Institutes of Health/National Library of Medicine
Publication year
2020
Publication date
2020
Publisher
eLife Sciences Publications Ltd.
e-ISSN
2050084X
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
2384745117
Copyright
© 2020. This work is published under http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ (the “License”). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.