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This page is acts as a central access point for press-related queries to WP:MED, as well as to document press coverage and relevant research publications about WP:Med

Research publications[edit]

Media Coverage[edit]

2019

Smith, Timothy M. (28 May 2019). "Using Wikipedia for medical research? What to watch for". American Medical Association.
Podcast: The Super Awesome Science Show- Science in Translation. Interview with Dr. James Heilman March 2019 Globalnews.ca

2018

Murray, Heather (2019). "More than 2 billion pairs of eyeballs: Why aren't you sharing medical knowledge on Wikipedia?". BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine. 24 (3): 90–91. doi:10.1136/bmjebm-2018-111040. ISSN 2515-4478. PMID 30108058. S2CID 52004428.

2017

Liu, Charles (6 February 2017). "Furor in China After Wikipedia Calls Acupuncture "Pseudoscience"". www.thebeijinger.com. Retrieved 7 February 2017.
Bonazzo, John (6 February 2017). "There's a Major War Brewing Over the Acupuncture Wikipedia Page". Observer. Retrieved 7 February 2017.
Kleefeld, John (24 January 2017). "How Students Are Learning Medicine and Collaborative Skills, And Transforming Wikipedia | Educatus". words.usask.ca. Retrieved 25 January 2017.

2016

McCartney, Al (2 December 2016). "Imperial's School of Medicine hosts Wikipedia health hackathon". imperial.ac.uk. Imperial College London. Retrieved 6 December 2016.
McClurg, Lesley; Brooks, Jon (8 November 2016). "Should I Trust Wikipedia With My Health?". NPR. Retrieved 8 November 2016.
Xia, Rosanna (20 September 2016), "College students take to Wikipedia to rewrite the wrongs of Internet science", Los Angeles Times, retrieved 20 September 2016
Rasberry, Lane (17 April 2016). "Wikipedian offer insights into online medical information". HealthLink on Air (Interview). Interviewed by Linda Cohen. Oswego, New York: WRVO. Retrieved 18 April 2016.
Tabaei, Sara (5 April 2016). "Wikipedia Editathon: Touro PT Students Share Health Information Worldwide". Library Blog for the Touro College Community. Touro College Libraries. Retrieved 7 April 2016.
Bastian, Hilda (13 February 2016). "Wikipedia Activism and Diversity in Science". PLOS.

2015

Garnett, Carla (April 24, 2015). "NIH Marks Women's History Month with All-Day Wikipedia Edit". nihrecord.nih.gov. National Institutes of Health. Retrieved 20 January 2017.
Lee, Grace (27 October 2015). "Wikipedia: Health Information Lives Here". www.mailman.columbia.edu. Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. Retrieved 20 January 2017.

2014

The Guardian, "Is Wikipedia a reliable source for medical advice?" (1 June 2014)
Davide Bennato (27 May 2014). "Ricerca e comunicazione amori difficili ma non impossibili" (in Italian). Retrieved 27 May 2014.
Beck, Julie (7 May 2014). "Can Wikipedia Ever Be a Definitive Medical Text?". theatlantic.com. Retrieved 7 May 2014.
Accept It, Wikipedia Is a Public Health Issue. Now Let's Fix It. 3BL Media, 13 December 2013:"Medical articles on Wikipedia receive about 150 million page views per month, and nearly 50% of practicing physicians use Wikipedia as an information source for providing medical care. And while Wikipedia itself has disclaimers that information included on its site may be inaccurate, that doesn’t stop consumers and medical professionals alike from using it as a health source that they consider credible. What should we do? Stop sticking our head in the sand and take accountability to fix this very concerning public health issue.
"I recently spoke with a colleague whose doctor’s medical assistant provided her with incorrect information and referenced Wikipedia as the source. Thankfully, she knew enough to go online herself (not to Wikipedia!) and learned the information was wrong. But, that’s not the case for many consumers. They trust their medical professionals without question, and believe that everything they read online is fact, especially from such a popular site as Wikipedia – never realizing that the information might be inaccurate and sometimes downright dangerous."
Pharma Should Make Better Use of Social Media To Engage Patients and Improve the Use of Medicines. IMS Health, 21 January 2014:"Wikipedia is the single leading source of medical information for patients and healthcare professionals. The top 100 English Wikipedia pages for healthcare topics were accessed, on average, 1.9 million times during the past year. Rarer diseases, which often have fewer available information sources and are less understood by patients and clinicians, show a higher frequency of visits than many more common diseases. In an assessment of 50 major disease-specific Wikipedia articles, the Institute found a strong correlation between page views and medicine use, with online information-gathering occurring throughout the patient journey."
Funny, I Just Read About That Disease! The Boston Globe, 25 January 2014:"For all their training, doctors are just as susceptible to bias as the rest of us—and a recent study of the decision-making of internal medicine residents illustrates why a second opinion can be a good idea. The residents were first presented with the Wikipedia entry for a particular disease and were asked to judge its accuracy. Then they returned to work. Six hours later, in an ostensibly unrelated task, they were presented with a case that had clinical manifestations similar to the disease considered earlier on Wikipedia, but that was actually caused by something different. A significant bias resulted: 'Simply reading about the diseases on the Internet increased by almost 100% the number of cases mistakenly diagnosed as one of those diseases.' The good news is that accuracy returned to normal when the researchers asked the residents to go back over the cases in detail.
"Schmidt, H. et al., 'Exposure to Media Information about a Disease Can Cause Doctors to Misdiagnose Similar-Looking Clinical Cases', Academic Medicine (forthcoming)."
America’s future doctors are starting their careers by saving Wikipedia Quartz, 28 January 2014:"Dr. Amin Azzam, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine. [has] launched an elective for fourth-year medical students that consists solely of editing Wikipedia articles for accuracy. [...] Most of Wikipedia is surprisingly accurate, Azzam said, because it uses the 'wisdom of the crowd' to vet information. But medical pages have catching up to do. 'Medical professionals haven’t been editing Wikipedia,' he said. 'In fact, we were told not to go near it.'"
"Dr. Wikipedia: The 'Double-Edged Sword' Of Crowdsourced Medicine". NPR. 8 February 2014. Retrieved 13 June 2014.:"Azzam is a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. He teaches a course that encourages fourth-year medical students to use their knowledge to improve Wikipedia, one article at a time. The syllabus is, of course, posted on Wikipedia. Students choose one article from the top 100 most-read medical articles on the site and work on it throughout the course. ... They have to make decisions about how to order symptoms and how to remove jargon to make the information understandable. 'It's not just adding references and not just improving the gaps,' Azzam says, 'but thinking about how to make it more readable and more digestible for the people that are reading Wikipedia.'"
"'Wikipedia geeft fout advies over je gezondheid'" ['Wikipedia gives wrong advice about your health']. Het Nieuwsblad (in Dutch). 2 June 2014. Retrieved 13 June 2014.

2013

Osborne, Helen (November 5, 2013). "WikiProject Medicine: What It is, Why It Matters, How Health Literacy Advocates Can Help" (Podcast). Health Literacy Out Loud. (transcript)
Beck, Julia (October 2013). "Should I Be Getting Health Information From Wikipedia?". The Atlantic. Retrieved 11 October 2013.
Sankin, Aaron (October 2013). "Doctors prescribe better editors for Wikipedia - themselves". The Daily Dot. Retrieved 11 October 2013.
Roscorla, Tanya. "Why Medical Schools Add Wikipedia Editing to Curriculum". Retrieved 11 October 2013.
Manu Mathew, Anna Joseph, James Heilman & Prathap Tharyan (October 22, 2013). "COCHRANE AND WIKIPEDIA: THE COLLABORATIVE POTENTIAL FOR A QUANTUM LEAP IN THE DISSEMINATION AND UPTAKE OF TRUSTED EVIDENCE". John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Retrieved 29 October 2013. ((cite web)): |last= has generic name (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
"Wikipedia is the single leading source of medical information for patients and healthcare professionals." IMS Health is distributing a book in exchange for your email address on their sketchy tracking site. In this book there is a ten-page chapter about Wikipedia.

See discussion in popular media about this article
Stephens, Pippa (28 May 2014). "Trust your doctor, not Wikipedia, say scientists". bbc.com. Retrieved 4 June 2014. Kedmey, Dan (27 May 2014). "Don't Trust Wikipedia When It Comes to Your Health, Study Says". time.com. Retrieved 4 June 2014. Gagnon, Tiffany (28 May 2014). "Are Wikipedia Health Tips Making You Sick?". Men's Fitness. Retrieved 4 June 2014. Dillner, Luisa (1 June 2014). "Is Wikipedia a reliable source for medical advice?". theguardian.com. Retrieved 4 June 2014. Chalabi, Mona (28 May 2014). "Dr. Wikipedia Isn't So Smart, But Lots of People Are Visiting Her". FiveThirtyEight. Retrieved 4 June 2014. Philipson, Alice (27 May 2014). "Don't diagnose yourself on Wikipedia, doctors warn - Telegraph". The Daily Telegraph. London. ISSN 0307-1235. OCLC 49632006. Retrieved 4 June 2014. Dearden, Lizzie (27 May 2014). "'Don't use Wikipedia for medical advice', scientists warn after errors found - Health News - Health & Families - The Independent". The Independent. London: INM. ISSN 0951-9467. OCLC 185201487. Retrieved 4 June 2014. Freeman, Sophie (27 May 2014). "90% of Wikipedia medical entries are inaccurate, say experts \| Mail Online". dailymail.co.uk. Retrieved 4 June 2014. Ross, Philip (28 May 2014). "Is Wikipedia Dangerous To Your Health? Study Finds 9 Out Of 10 Health Entries Contain 'Many' Errors". ibtimes.com. Retrieved 4 June 2014. Francis, Anne (30 May 2014). "Using Wikipedia to self-diagnose is dangerous to your health. Here's why". techtimes.com. Retrieved 4 June 2014. Engel, Pamela (27 May 2014). "Don't Rely On Wikipedia To Provide Accurate Medical Information". Business Insider. Retrieved 4 June 2014. Engel, Meredith (27 May 2014). "Wiki weakness: Don't use the site to diagnose yourself, study says". nydailynews.com. Retrieved 4 June 2014. Dahl, Melissa (27 May 2014). "Don't Trust Dr. Wikipedia -- Science of Us". nymag.com. Retrieved 4 June 2014. Chatterjee, Anwesh; Cooke, Robin M.T.; Furst, Ian; Heilman, James (23 June 2014). "Is Wikipedia's medical content really 90% wrong?". cochrane.org. Retrieved 23 June 2014. See also these discussion forums and other commentaries contributors of The New Reddit Journal of Science (27 May 2014). "Trust your doctor, not Wikipedia, say scientists: Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia, contains errors in nine out of 10 of its health entries, and should be treated with caution, a study has said. : science". reddit.com. Retrieved 4 June 2014. `((cite web))`: `\|author=` has generic name (help) staff (2014). "Be wary of Wikipedia, say scientists". The Financial Express. Retrieved 4 June 2014. Hasty, Robert (8 May 2014). "Dr. Robert Hasty - Wikipedia vs. Peer-Reviewed Medical Articles". youtube.com. Retrieved 4 June 2014. Hasty, RT; et al. (May 2014). "Wikipedia vs peer-reviewed medical literature for information about the 10 most costly medical conditions". The Journal of the American Osteopathic Association. 114 (5): 368–73. doi:10.7556/jaoa.2014.035. PMID 24778001. S2CID 40519767.

See discussion in popular media about this article

Stephens, Pippa (28 May 2014). "Trust your doctor, not Wikipedia, say scientists". bbc.com. Retrieved 4 June 2014.
Kedmey, Dan (27 May 2014). "Don't Trust Wikipedia When It Comes to Your Health, Study Says". time.com. Retrieved 4 June 2014.
Gagnon, Tiffany (28 May 2014). "Are Wikipedia Health Tips Making You Sick?". Men's Fitness. Retrieved 4 June 2014.
Dillner, Luisa (1 June 2014). "Is Wikipedia a reliable source for medical advice?". theguardian.com. Retrieved 4 June 2014.
Chalabi, Mona (28 May 2014). "Dr. Wikipedia Isn't So Smart, But Lots of People Are Visiting Her". FiveThirtyEight. Retrieved 4 June 2014.
Philipson, Alice (27 May 2014). "Don't diagnose yourself on Wikipedia, doctors warn - Telegraph". The Daily Telegraph. London. ISSN 0307-1235. OCLC 49632006. Retrieved 4 June 2014.
Dearden, Lizzie (27 May 2014). "'Don't use Wikipedia for medical advice', scientists warn after errors found - Health News - Health & Families - The Independent". The Independent. London: INM. ISSN 0951-9467. OCLC 185201487. Retrieved 4 June 2014.
Freeman, Sophie (27 May 2014). "90% of Wikipedia medical entries are inaccurate, say experts | Mail Online". dailymail.co.uk. Retrieved 4 June 2014.
Ross, Philip (28 May 2014). "Is Wikipedia Dangerous To Your Health? Study Finds 9 Out Of 10 Health Entries Contain 'Many' Errors". ibtimes.com. Retrieved 4 June 2014.
Francis, Anne (30 May 2014). "Using Wikipedia to self-diagnose is dangerous to your health. Here's why". techtimes.com. Retrieved 4 June 2014.
Engel, Pamela (27 May 2014). "Don't Rely On Wikipedia To Provide Accurate Medical Information". Business Insider. Retrieved 4 June 2014.
Engel, Meredith (27 May 2014). "Wiki weakness: Don't use the site to diagnose yourself, study says". nydailynews.com. Retrieved 4 June 2014.
Dahl, Melissa (27 May 2014). "Don't Trust Dr. Wikipedia -- Science of Us". nymag.com. Retrieved 4 June 2014.

Chatterjee, Anwesh; Cooke, Robin M.T.; Furst, Ian; Heilman, James (23 June 2014). "Is Wikipedia's medical content really 90% wrong?". cochrane.org. Retrieved 23 June 2014.

See also these discussion forums and other commentaries

contributors of The New Reddit Journal of Science (27 May 2014). "Trust your doctor, not Wikipedia, say scientists: Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia, contains errors in nine out of 10 of its health entries, and should be treated with caution, a study has said. : science". reddit.com. Retrieved 4 June 2014. ((cite web)): |author= has generic name (help)
staff (2014). "Be wary of Wikipedia, say scientists". The Financial Express. Retrieved 4 June 2014.
Hasty, Robert (8 May 2014). "Dr. Robert Hasty - Wikipedia vs. Peer-Reviewed Medical Articles". youtube.com. Retrieved 4 June 2014.
Hasty, RT; et al. (May 2014). "Wikipedia vs peer-reviewed medical literature for information about the 10 most costly medical conditions". The Journal of the American Osteopathic Association. 114 (5): 368–73. doi:10.7556/jaoa.2014.035. PMID 24778001. S2CID 40519767.

2011

Heilman; et al. (2011). "Wikipedia: A Key Tool for Global Public Health Promotion". Journal of Medical Internet Research. 13 (1): e14. doi:10.2196/jmir.1589. ISSN 1438-8871. PMC 3221335. PMID 21282098.