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Pharmacy students can improve access to quality medicines information by editing Wikipedia articles.

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND:Pharmacy training programs commonly ask students to develop or edit drug monographs that summarize key information about new medicines as an academic exercise. We sought to expand on this traditional approach by having students improve actual medicines information pages posted on Wikipedia. METHODS:We placed students (n = 119) in a required core pharmacy course into groups of four and assigned each group a specific medicines page on Wikipedia to edit. Assigned pages had high hit rates, suggesting that the topics were of interest to the wider public, but were of low quality, suggesting that the topics would benefit from improvement efforts. We provided course trainings about editing Wikipedia. We evaluated the assignment by surveying student knowledge and attitudes and reviewing the edits on Wikipedia. RESULTS:Completing the course trainings increased student knowledge of Wikipedia editing practices. At the end of the assignment, students had a more nuanced understanding of Wikipedia as a resource. Student edits improved substantially the quality of the articles edited, their edits were retained for at least 30 days after course completion, and the average number page views of their edited articles increased. CONCLUSIONS:Our results suggest that engaging pharmacy students in a Wikipedia editing assignment is a feasible alternative to writing drug monographs as a classroom assignment. Both tasks provide opportunities for students to demonstrate their skills at researching and explaining drug information but only one serves to improve wider access to quality medicines information. Wikipedia editing assignments are feasible for large groups of pharmacy students and effective in improving publicly available information on one of the most heavily accessed websites globally.

SUBMITTER: Apollonio DE

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6245851 | biostudies-other | 2018 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other

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Pharmacy students can improve access to quality medicines information by editing Wikipedia articles.

Apollonio Dorie E DE Broyde Keren K Azzam Amin A De Guia Michael M Heilman James J Brock Tina T

BMC medical education 20181120 1

<h4>Background</h4>Pharmacy training programs commonly ask students to develop or edit drug monographs that summarize key information about new medicines as an academic exercise. We sought to expand on this traditional approach by having students improve actual medicines information pages posted on Wikipedia.<h4>Methods</h4>We placed students (n = 119) in a required core pharmacy course into groups of four and assigned each group a specific medicines page on Wikipedia to edit. Assigned pages had ...[more]

PMID: 30454046

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Project description:BACKGROUND:Consulting the Internet for health-related information is a common and widespread phenomenon, and Wikipedia is arguably one of the most important resources for health-related information. Therefore, it is relevant to identify factors that have an impact on the quality of health-related Wikipedia articles. OBJECTIVE:In our study we have hypothesized a positive effect of contributor experience on the quality of health-related Wikipedia articles. METHODS:We mined the edit history of all (as of February 2017) 18,805 articles that were listed in the categories on the portal health & fitness in the English language version of Wikipedia. We identified tags within the articles' edit histories, which indicated potential issues with regard to the respective article's quality or neutrality. Of all of the sampled articles, 99 (99/18,805, 0.53%) articles had at some point received at least one such tag. In our analysis we only considered those articles with a minimum of 10 edits (10,265 articles in total; 96 tagged articles, 0.94%). Additionally, to test our hypothesis, we constructed contributor profiles, where a profile consisted of all the articles edited by a contributor and the corresponding number of edits contributed. We did not differentiate between rollbacks and edits with novel content. RESULTS:Nonparametric Mann-Whitney U-tests indicated a higher number of previously edited articles for editors of the nontagged articles (mean rank tagged 2348.23, mean rank nontagged 5159.29; U=9.25, P<.001). However, we did not find a significant difference for the contributors' total number of edits (mean rank tagged 4872.85, mean rank nontagged 5135.48; U=0.87, P=.39). Using logistic regression analysis with the respective article's number of edits and number of editors as covariates, only the number of edited articles yielded a significant effect on the article's status as tagged versus nontagged (dummy-coded; Nagelkerke R2 for the full model=.17; B [SE B]=-0.001 [0.00]; Wald c2 [1]=19.70; P<.001), whereas we again found no significant effect for the mere number of edits (Nagelkerke R2 for the full model=.15; B [SE B]=0.000 [0.01]; Wald c2 [1]=0.01; P=.94). CONCLUSIONS:Our findings indicate an effect of contributor experience on the quality of health-related Wikipedia articles. However, only the number of previously edited articles was a predictor of the articles' quality but not the mere volume of edits. More research is needed to disentangle the different aspects of contributor experience. We have discussed the implications of our findings with respect to ensuring the quality of health-related information in collaborative knowledge-building platforms.

Dataset Information

Pharmacy students can improve access to quality medicines information by editing Wikipedia articles.

Publications

Pharmacy students can improve access to quality medicines information by editing Wikipedia articles.

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