James Heilman*, University of British Columbia, Wiki Project Med Foundation, Cranbrook, Canada Track: Practice Presentation Topic: Wikis Presentation Type: Oral presentation Submission Type: Single Presentation Building: Sheraton Maui Resort Room: A - Wailuku Date: 2014-11-14 02:00 PM – 02:45 PM Last modified: 2014-09-04

If you are the presenter of this abstract (or if you cite this abstract in a talk or on a poster), please show the QR code in your slide or poster (QR code contains this URL).

Wikipedia in January of 2014 was referred to as “the single leading source of medical information for patients and healthcare professionals” by the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics. It is a source of information for 50% to 70% of physicians in clinical practice and has also been reported as the single most used resource by medical students.

Wikipedia is a multilingual, online, open source encyclopedia which anyone can edit, at least certain parts of it and initially. It is available in 286 languages and is made up more than 30 million articles which cover medicine along with nearly everything else. While some is known about the amount of content, readership, editor numbers and quality of Wikipedia as a whole. Less is known about these aspect for the subsection of content which is specifically medical in nature. This applies to both English and even more so to the other 285 languages.

In our analysis we found that Wikipedia has a lot of medical content (more than 150,000 articles); however, a majority of these occur in a small subset of languages. Readership is significant and yes Wikipedia may be the single leading source of healthcare information. Editor numbers are surprisingly small in comparison. We are also working on the question, does search language affect what people care about?