… and Dr. Wikipedia is wrong. Or, at least, that’s what most of the popular media coverage of this study perpetuated.
Given estimates of Wikipedia utilization for medical advice range from 40-70% of physicians, this group thought it important to undertake a comparison of Wikipedia articles with peer-reviewed references for accuracy. Looking at ten Wikipedia articles representative of the top ten most costly healthcare conditions, two reviewers compared declarative statements from the Wikipedia article to those cited by a reference source – limited, unfortunately, to only those articles cited by UpToDate. In the end, the reviewers generally found a good deal that was similar between Wikipedia and UpToDate – but also a great deal that was not fully supported by peer-reviewed references.
Reviewers were generally in agreement over which facts from Wikipedia were unsupported, but not entirely. And, of course, UpToDate and its references are hardly the definitive source of medical fact. However, it’s probably fair to say – physicians ought to exercise a substantial level of caution when considering basing patient care off Wikipedia.
“Wikipedia vs Peer-Reviewed Medical Literature for Information About the 10 Most Costly Medical Conditions”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24778001