Scientists say Wikipedia contains errors in 9 out of 10 of its health entries

[Kraftwerk]

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.

Scientists in the US compared entries about conditions such as heart disease, lung cancer, depression and diabetes with peer-reviewed medical research.

They said most articles in Wikipedia contained "many errors".

....

Open-access 'concerns'

The online encyclopaedia is a charity, and has 30 million articles in 285 languages.

It can be edited by anybody, but many volunteers from the medical profession check the pages for inaccuracies, said Wikimedia UK.

The open-access nature has "raised concern" among doctors about its reliability, as it is the sixth most popular site on the internet, the US authors of the research, published in the Journal of the American Osteopathic Association, said.

Up to 70% of physicians and medical students use the tool, they say.

....

Full Article

The Peer-Reviewed Study

 

[ComputerMKII]

Doctor-GAF threads > Wikipedia

 

[AlexMogil]

Hospitals hand patients Wiki articles on discharge.

No lie.

 

[Graphics Horse]

Hospitals hand patients Wiki articles on discharge.

No lie.

Which kinds of discharge?

 

[$200]

Bit misleading. "Contains errors in nine out of 10 of its health entries" isn't the same as saying 90% of the articles are wrong. A long article with a few typos would still be considered as one that contains errors..

 

[ZombieSupaStar]

What if they only allowed vetted legit Doctors to edit those kind of articles. Like you would need credentials etc.

 

[The Elite]

I assume these scientists had the errors corrected.

 

[dark_chris]

Which kinds of discharge?

A sexual discharge! ;D

 

[Heshinsi]

If health care professionals are constantly checking wiki to see how accurate it is, why are they not fixing the errors when they catch them?

 

[Nesotenso]

I assume these scientists had the errors corrected.

yeah correct the errors. wikipedia is a good starting point and nothing more.

 

[Dan]

But how big are the errors?

Also, surely doctors and medical professionals have better sources for information... right?

 

[Woorloog]

Pretty sure Wikipedia has disclaimers it should not be used for medical advice (or judicial advice).

 

[Stumpokapow]

I would assume that 9/10 medical journals also contain errors; the question is the magnitude of the error, the impact of the error, how avoidable the error would have been, whether or not a professional using Wikipedia would notice the error, and if the error comes from outdated information, inaccurate information, or things made up out of whole cloth.

 

[Matugi]

The fault lays in generalizations. Wikipedia does a good job of covering the basics for the layperson but it's limited in that it often disregards new research in favor of old, even if that new research has consensus. Some of the stuff I've researched in a lit-review sense(a lot of nutrition-based stuff) is inaccurate on Wikipedia, and all I did was just read papers.

 

[Delta Assault]

That's why you use WebMD, duh.

 

[Klendathu Club Owner]

9 out of 10 Wikipedia entries in general contain errors. If everbody can contribute then there's bound to be a lot of bullshit included.

 

[Napoleonthechimp]

Yeah, no shit. If a medical student is found to be copying information from Wikipedia then discipline them and/or fail them. I'm not a medical student but that is precisely what they did when I was a student.

 

[Goro Majima]

That's why you use WebMD, duh.

It's probably cancer. Maybe Diabetes.

That's the only answer that thing gives.

 

[SquiddyCracker]

The open-access nature has "raised concern" among doctors about its reliability, as it is the sixth most popular site on the internet, the US authors of the research, published in the Journal of the American Osteopathic Association, said.

Osteopathy is a type of complementary and alternative medicine.

Get the fuck out of here.

 

[railGUN]

My dad's advice for all things medical - "put polysporin on it"

 

[Stumpokapow]

Get the fuck out of here.

If your issue is that you don't believe that Osteopathy qualifies as CAM: Osteopathy wasn't one of the articles chosen for examination, but osteopathy also is a CAM. Just because ODs require med school training and than an OD isn't a CAM practitioner, doesn't mean that the practice of manual osteopathy itself, particularly by non-OD osteopathic practitioners, doesn't constitute CAM.

If your issue is that you don't like this journal, because you Wikipedia'd that Osteopathy was CAM, then you're ignoring the fact that the American Osteopathic Association is not a CAM association, it's an association of ODs. To become an OD, you need to go through the entire med school curriculum. In all states you are licensed to practice as a physician and a doctor. It also includes the traditional CAM osteopathy technique, but most ODs do not use CAM osteopathy in practice.

Maybe don't go from "i read the headline of this article" to "i wikipediad a word and read the first sentence" to "these guys are wrong".

 

[-COOLIO-]

I would assume that 9/10 medical journals also contain errors; the question is the magnitude of the error, the impact of the error, how avoidable the error would have been, whether or not a professional using Wikipedia would notice the error, and if the error comes from outdated information, inaccurate information, or things made up out of whole cloth.

yup

 

[Chumly]

I would assume that 9/10 medical journals also contain errors; the question is the magnitude of the error, the impact of the error, how avoidable the error would have been, whether or not a professional using Wikipedia would notice the error, and if the error comes from outdated information, inaccurate information, or things made up out of whole cloth.

Exactly. I need more information to come to a better conclusion but I have found that the whole Wikipedia is wrong is usually blown out of proportion and contains relative minor errors if it does have errors.

Does the article give any examples of errors in health sections?

 

[Jackben]

Haven't read the whole paper yet, but I believe the peer reviewed study I linked gives al the link to the wiki articles they tested.

.

 

[Kraftwerk]

Exactly. I need more information to come to a better conclusion but I have found that the whole Wikipedia is wrong is usually blown out of proportion and contains relative minor errors if it does have errors.

Does the article give any examples of errors in health sections?

Haven't read the whole paper yet, but I believe the peer reviewed study I linked gives al the link to the wiki articles they tested.

 

[Acorn]

Wikipedia isn't meant to be exhaustive or perfect. It's a crowd sourced general overview of pretty much anything.

 

[ReAxion]

Get the fuck out of here.

I would imagine they could find a great number of "errors" then.

 

[ConfusingJazz]

I would assume that 9/10 medical journals also contain errors; the question is the magnitude of the error, the impact of the error, how avoidable the error would have been, whether or not a professional using Wikipedia would notice the error, and if the error comes from outdated information, inaccurate information, or things made up out of whole cloth.

Pretty much my thought when I saw the thread title.

I would think attributing a similar but still incorrect hormone to a health issue is less of a problem then with wrong or outdated and potentially harmful medical advice.

 

[Thorakai]

I hope they corrected those errors then.

 

[injurai]

Wikipedia isn't meant to be exhaustive or perfect. It's a crowd sourced general overview of pretty much anything.

Not to mention the medical field is woefully under researched and misunderstood by even the most practiced of doctors. And it's not like the best of the best are even peer reviewing Wikipedia. It's all trickle down knowledge and the medical community is particularly bad at disseminating and cross referencing it's publications. Let alone control testing being a nightmare to garner accurate exhaustive and conclusive test results on just about every front.

 

[WedgeX]

Get the fuck out of here.

DOs have the exact same training as MDs plus more hours on musculoskeletal system. Its not a crazy part of medicine.

The journal article doesn't actually list the assertions that wiki makes that are in error, just the number of times that they occur. I mean, their "errors" include:

A perplexing finding in our study was that most of the dissimilar assertions found by the reviewers failed to demonstrate discordance. A reporting bias may have plausibly occurred: each article reviewer was either an internal medicine resident or a rotating intern physician at the time of the review and may not have believed that every assertion was worth reporting. For example, the diabetes mellitus Wikipedia article stated that it is a condition in “which a person has high blood sugar.” One reviewer might have accurately recorded this statement as an assertion, whereas another might have assumed the statement to be common knowledge and erroneously not recorded it as an assertion. These incongruent criteria for assertions may explain the difference found between reviewers.

So how "badly" is wiki doing?

 

[Stet]

If your issue is that you don't believe that Osteopathy qualifies as CAM: Osteopathy wasn't one of the articles chosen for examination, but osteopathy also is a CAM. Just because ODs require med school training and than an OD isn't a CAM practitioner, doesn't mean that the practice of manual osteopathy itself, particularly by non-OD osteopathic practitioners, doesn't constitute CAM.

If your issue is that you don't like this journal, because you Wikipedia'd that Osteopathy was CAM, then you're ignoring the fact that the American Osteopathic Association is not a CAM association, it's an association of ODs. To become an OD, you need to go through the entire med school curriculum. In all states you are licensed to practice as a physician and a doctor. It also includes the traditional CAM osteopathy technique, but most ODs do not use CAM osteopathy in practice.

Maybe don't go from "i read the headline of this article" to "i wikipediad a word and read the first sentence" to "these guys are wrong".

I said god damn.

 

[Vincent Alexander]

I hope they corrected those errors then.

Agreed. If you know there is widely disseminated, false information out there that could be doing more harm than good, then someone needs to help fix it. Because guess what? Wikipedia isn't going away.

 

[Defuser]

Probably almost every wikipedia health entry all points to cancer.

 

[Kraftwerk]

If your issue is that you don't believe that Osteopathy qualifies as CAM: Osteopathy wasn't one of the articles chosen for examination, but osteopathy also is a CAM. Just because ODs require med school training and than an OD isn't a CAM practitioner, doesn't mean that the practice of manual osteopathy itself, particularly by non-OD osteopathic practitioners, doesn't constitute CAM.

If your issue is that you don't like this journal, because you Wikipedia'd that Osteopathy was CAM, then you're ignoring the fact that the American Osteopathic Association is not a CAM association, it's an association of ODs. To become an OD, you need to go through the entire med school curriculum. In all states you are licensed to practice as a physician and a doctor. It also includes the traditional CAM osteopathy technique, but most ODs do not use CAM osteopathy in practice.

Maybe don't go from "i read the headline of this article" to "i wikipediad a word and read the first sentence" to "these guys are wrong".

I wanna have your babies.

 

[DJ_Lae]

Looks like they selected 10 Wikipedia pages, 10 physicians/interns, and assigned them each two wikis to review (so each page was checked twice).

They also had to identify every statement in the wiki and manually check it for accuracy via peer-reviewed documents. Would be interesting to see how the peer-reviewed documents fared, as if they were reviewed by two people like in this study, who knows.

The poor bastards, that sounds tedious as all hell. I hope they actually submitted changes to any errors they caught.

Wikipedia was apparently 100% accurate for concussions and similar trauma.

 

[heyf00L]

9 out of 10 GAF thread titles have a grammatical error, too.

 

[SquiddyCracker]

If your issue is that you don't believe that Osteopathy qualifies as CAM: Osteopathy wasn't one of the articles chosen for examination, but osteopathy also is a CAM. Just because ODs require med school training and than an OD isn't a CAM practitioner, doesn't mean that the practice of manual osteopathy itself, particularly by non-OD osteopathic practitioners, doesn't constitute CAM.

If your issue is that you don't like this journal, because you Wikipedia'd that Osteopathy was CAM, then you're ignoring the fact that the American Osteopathic Association is not a CAM association, it's an association of ODs. To become an OD, you need to go through the entire med school curriculum. In all states you are licensed to practice as a physician and a doctor. It also includes the traditional CAM osteopathy technique, but most ODs do not use CAM osteopathy in practice.

Maybe don't go from "i read the headline of this article" to "i wikipediad a word and read the first sentence" to "these guys are wrong".

I admit that I made a rash judgement based on an incorrect understanding of osteopathy, thank you for correcting me.

 

[Ovid]

For quick health related inquires I use Wikipedia. For real info I go to Mayo Clinic or any other peer reviewed source.

I'm also not a big fan of WebMD.

Wikipedia isn't meant to be exhaustive or perfect. It's a crowd sourced general overview of pretty much anything.

Exactly. For what it is it's pretty reliable. You just shouldn't use it as your only source of information.

 

[Vincent Alexander]

My least favorite part of college was every single semester, every damn class, going through the syllabus, and having the professors make snarky jabs at Wikipedia. "I could go on there and write the 1st President was Bill Gates". OKay, buddy...

 

[Arkos]

So my rash doesn't mean I'm growing an extra foot?

 

[Diddy Kong]

I admit that I made a rash judgement based on an incorrect understanding of osteopathy, thank you for correcting me.

 

[Courage]

I'm glad the DO hate was promptly silenced.

 

[Cow Mengde]

Shit, I could get a job as a doctor then.

 

[snoopeasystreet]

Good thing I get all my medical advice from yahoo answers.

 

[ampere]

If they had time to look for errors on Wikipedia hopefully they fixed the errors. That's the whole point of it being open to edits.

That being said, of course you should consult your doctor about health issues.

 

[SRG01]

The journal article doesn't actually list the assertions that wiki makes that are in error, just the number of times that they occur. I mean, their "errors" include:

So how "badly" is wiki doing?

Well, to be fair, there are way more than just assertions listed on Table 2.

 

[Chariot]

nine out of 10

This really bugs me. "9 out of 10" or "nine out of ten", but this is just ugly.

 

[Architect]

I would assume that 9/10 medical journals also contain errors; the question is the magnitude of the error, the impact of the error, how avoidable the error would have been, whether or not a professional using Wikipedia would notice the error, and if the error comes from outdated information, inaccurate information, or things made up out of whole cloth.

Agreed. Just read the study, it doesn't say much about the recorded inaccuracies aside from stating that they do not include errors of omission.

It would have helped to have the errors broken down by some sort of severity matrix. As of now we don't know how relevant these mistakes are.

 

[IAmtheFMan]

Meh.

This was a pretty poorly designed study. Very low powered (2 reviewers only), no reporting as to the discordant assertions and what the nature of those were, use of interns instead of higher level physicians etc.