Special report
Towards "Health Information for All": Medical content on Wikipedia received 6.5 billion page views in 2013
- Editor's note: this article originally appeared on the blog of The London School of Economics and Political Science. It is reprinted here with the permission of the authors.
Recently we published “Wikipedia and Medicine: Quantifying Readership, Editors, and the Significance of Natural Language” in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR). Some of the key-findings include:
- Medical content received about 6.5 billion page views in 2013. This was extrapolated from empirical per-article “desktop” traffic data plus project-wide mobile estimates.
- Wikipedia appears to be the single most used website for health information globally, exceeding traffic observed at the NIH, WebMD, WHO etc.
- Wikipedia’s health content is more than 1 billion bytes of text across more than 255 natural languages (equal to four times the size of the 32-volume Encyclopedia Britannica).
- Nearly 1 million references support this content and the number of references has more than doubled since 2009, with citation density outpacing raw byte growth.
- Article access patterns are heavily language-dependent, i.e., most topics show substantially differing popularity ranks across Wikipedia’s different natural language versions.
- The core community of editors numbers less than 300, having shrunk significantly over the last 5 years.
- The core community is about 50% health care providers; 85% have completed a university degree; 50% have more than one university degree.
The paper contains many more data-driven insights we encourage readers to investigate. Equally important, this evidence provides us further motivation to expand translation of medical content across natural languages, continue to improve the quality of medical content, and identify partnerships and fundraising opportunities that will allow us to overcome current challenges.
