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Wikipedia Medical Articles Found To Have High Error Rate
Rambo Tribble (1273454) writes "A group of researchers publishing in the Journal of the American Osteopathic Association found that 90% of the Wikipedia articles they sampled contained errors regarding common medical conditions. Unsurprisingly, they recommend your General Practitioner as a more reliable source, while noting, '47% to 70% of physicians and medical students admitting to using [Wikipedia] as a reference.' At issue in the study is the small sample size the researchers used: 10 medical conditions. There are also ongoing efforts to improve the quality of Wikipedia's articles. According to a Wikipedia spokesman, '... especially in relation to health and medicine.' The BBC has more approachable coverage."
[Citation Needed]
But also, Osteopathy leaps a bit toward the âoealternative medicineâ side of things, it wouldnâ(TM)t surprise me if Osteopaths have some issues with medical articles based on more traditional medicine.
Having said that, how dare these quacks question the accuracy of Wikipedia! Donâ(TM)t they know they can run the gantlet of snooty Uber Editors with âoeownership issuesâ and correct these articles themselves? Of course you can be banned doing thatâ¦
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
...Wikipedia has been a massive success but has always had immense flaws, the greatest one being that nothing it publishes can be trusted. This, you might think, is a pretty big flaw. There are over 21million editors with varying degrees of competence and honesty. Rogue editors abound and do not restrict themselves to supposedly controversial topics, as the recently discovered Hillsborough example demonstrates....
I am shocked. Shocked. No one would use a widely accessed platform to push a POV nor would it be adequately vetted by professionals for accuracy and completeness and edits limited to trusted sources. Add in that their are many more people who think they are experts that aren't and it is a wonder that Wikipedia's accuracy is above 0%.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
A /. article mentions that Wikipedia has an error in 90% of medical articles /. itself has an error in x% of news items posted here /. has a 0% error rate...
Now, keep in mind that
So, the actual error rate of Wikipedia medical articles should be (1-x/100)*90 % shouldnt it?
Assuming it is actually 90% would lead to the conclusion that
Like I am going to accept wisdom from a bunch of osteopaths???
Yes, I get that no article on Wikipedia is going to be 100% accurate, but this study is just plain bunk.
First off, they mention that they had "experts" review 10 articles for the most expensive-to-treat medical issues. They have all kinds of mathematical figures, but nowhere do they actually list key things like:
- Who was it that reviewed each article?
- Were they an expert in that field, or an osteopath?
- Which "peer-reviewed sources" were they using?
- How did they determine mistakes?
None of these questions are answered in the "methods" section of their paper. Further, their OWN SOURCES dispute what they found. For instance, they link to http://jop.ascopubs.org/content/7/5/319.abstract?ijkey=428353f0b3eb338fad1bf0f79139dd275c7670fe&keytype2=tf_ipsecsha , a study that looked at cancer information on Wikipedia versus information in a maintained professional database on the same subject. What did they find?
"Conclusion: Although the wiki resource had similar accuracy and depth as the professionally edited database, it was significantly less readable. Further research is required to assess how this influences patients' understanding and retention. "
This sounds like bunk to me.
I am a physician, and I admit that I use it on an irregular basis. But let's keep this in context. I don't look up how to diagnose or treat conditions. I do use it to look up obscure things, as well as review anatomy. Information that either is just for personal knowledge that is not critical to management (example: what is the name of the nerve that innervates the serratus anterior?), or information that is hard to get wrong (example: what are the muscles of the knee called? I once had to look up VMO because I could not remember what the "O" stood for). Even then, if it makes even a small difference, I always look it up further in a medical resource. So I am one of the 47-70% of physicians who look up facts in wikipedia. I don't think that is a bad thing.
these criticisms of wikipedia are ignorant and useless to profitable discussion
it shows an inherent misunderstanding of how citations work *AND* how the internet works
not every sentence must be cited by a peer reviewed journal...ever...anywhere...only some law briefs go to that length & a human may or may not ever read it
science is NOT a citation competition, nor is it a pedantry pageant
the 90% figure is bullshit stats conjuring...where are the examples?
what's there threshold for "error"?
they only looked at *10 articles*
and they DO NOT, repeat, DO NOT identify side by side the "bad" knowledge of wikipedia and their correct source
all we get is this admission, which confirms all my criticisms, from TFA:
so no consistent definitions of terms or standards were used, at all...
this is crap science....[citation needed]
Thank you Dave Raggett
Using percentages when speaking of a sample size of...god damn 10 conditions....is just really effing stupid and looks like it was specifically meant as click-baiting. The honest way of saying this would have been simply "The researchers sampled 10 conditions on Wikipedia and found that 9 of them were incorrect." See? No alarmist "90%omgomgworld'sgoingtoburn" bullshit there.
Now, call me back when the sample size is actually worth a damn. 10 conditions out of all the bajillion different ones mentioned on Wikipedia is simply too little to draw any sort of meaningful rule about the quality of them all.
I'd be interested to see a similar review of sites such as WebMD. Is this only a Wikipedia issue?
Sent from my TARDIS
Seriously - how many physicians, even among the specialists, keep themselves up to date on the latest research? Many of them do, many of them are passionate, geeky about what they do, and in their spare time they'll be reading up on the latest research, they'll go to conferences, etc., like a passionate geeky programmer would. But many, and i'd say most, just don't. Their knowledge is whatever they were taught. And that wasn't necessarily the state of the art at the time they graduated - that depends on how up to date their *teachers* were.
So, yeah, wikipedia might be misleading; it might be out of date in certain places - in many places, even. But i don't necessarily think your physician will be more up to date. And i'm not sure how to fix that, either, because they *should* be!
The only useful comparison would be against a print-edition encyclopedia. What percentage of medical articles in a typical encyclopedia contain errors? The other thing is, just because it contains "an error" doesn't mean it isn't useful. We get through most days with a fairly flawed view of reality (most of us anyway).
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
For a few years I maintained a sizeable collection of Wikipedia articles. I was very meticulous in checking all of the data, trying to use only the best sources and citing them all, per section of each sentence if necessary. However, it was a constant battle to keep others from adding anything from dubious information found in newspaper articles ("Somebody printed it, so it must be true!") to subtle attempts at vandalism (e.g. changing 501 mg to 502 mg for no reason). Many poor articles are eventually raised up to a certain level, but over time the good ones are also erroded to a point where they contain many more errors than expected. Other than relying on armies of experts (who often receive little respect) to constantly police their articles, Wikipedia has no mechanisms to prevent this from happening. It's a fundamental problem for them, but one which they can do little about without changing their most basic policies.
IMHO the article written is not of publishable quality. (The journal it *did* get published in has a very low impact factor of 1.3.) It's badly written, poorly supported, and subject to substantial methodological errors.
Each subject comparison is based entirely on the subjective evaluation of a random med student. It doesn't seem like they even provided them with standard protocols. They just assumed that any discrepancies represented factual errors in the wikipedia article. They didn't make comparison to other sources or even internal to the literature.
It would be lovely if they would actually include some of the assertions they evaluated. But frankly I would put infinitely more faith in the Wikipedia articles cited than this particular report. Certainly they represent better and more substantial writing.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
It's not Lupus! (for the House fans in the audience)
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...Many articles published in medical journals are also wrong. What about the never-ending debate about X being good for you, then bad, then good again, where X = coffee, butter, etc.?
in residency, and yes, from time to time I'll look up something on wikipedia on my phone for a quick overview if its a condition I'm not familiar with, or is outside my specialty, and I'm rounding or otherwise away from a computer. However, I don't use it for treatment or diagnostic purposes; there exist much better, peer reviewed sources for that, which I will happily access from a computer. That being said, I'd say a large amount of the wikipedia articles tend to be pretty decent, and at least sound as if they've been written by someone with some sort of formal medical treatment. They get the quick and dirty job done about 75% of the time for me.
While the results of this particular study may be questionable, it's annoying to see how many comments dismiss the study out of hand just because it was performed by osteopathic physicians. I can't speak for the rest of the world, but in the US, "Doctor of Osteopathic" has a specific meaning - they are legitimate physicians whose training differs from that of allopathic physicians in philosophy rather than in medical knowledge or practice.
The only medical distinction between a "traditional" MD and a DO is that a DO undergoes an 8 week course in osteopathic manipulative treatment (OMT), which is a specific therapy for lower back pain, and which NIH studies have shown to be "mildly to moderately effective." Other than that, medical training between the two branches is indistinguishable.
There's a common quip about quack medicine: "What do you call alternative medicine when it gets scientifically verified? Medicine." I find it comforting that at least one group of (former) quacks in the US actually took that sentiment to heart. Now if only chiropractors and homeopaths would do the same...
That the article doesn't actually give any examples of what the errors were, nor attempt to assess whether they were material errors or trivial? The methodology is admirably explicit on the science and completely opaque on the cognitive method used by the not especially eminent physicians to determine whether an assertion was accurate or inaccurate in either the Wikipedia article or the medical literature equivalent.
Seems pretty dubious to me!
Better known as the PDR, anytime your Doctor says excuse me for a bit. The chances are very great they are flipping through a PDR trying to find the "right pill/treatment" for you.
If your Google the PDR you get link after link of how reliable it is on, all but the first hit.
http://www.personalconsult.com... and it nails the problem with the PDR.
"The PDR is merely a drug's package insert. It is a FDA regulated article limited to merely the research submitted to the FDA typically to get a product approved for sale to you. Sometimes the information is from research from after the drug is out and being used by patients--new issues or problems arise. Period. It offers little else!" (edited "FDAÑtypically to FDA typically")
If I gave that to kids with psychosis, I would have vomiting and stuporous patients. Continuing to follow the PDR would be cruelty." ...
"In no way does the PDR describe nor purport to describe the standard of care. Half the prescriptions in the nation are written off label. In other words, doctors think of useful and helpful ways which have not been approved by the massive FDA, you know, the ones who shut down Canadian drug stores in the USA.
If a doctor fails to place patients on a medication for the non-approved PDR indication, but the custom is that most doctors do, the doctor is clearly outside the standard of care. Thus quoting the PDR as authoritative represents the failure to comply with half of the standard of care in the US.
Some doctors would testify that limiting oneself to PDR approved indications and dosage is quackery that should result in the loss of license, as a threat to the health of the public. Half the customary prescribed treatment would be missed by this doctor."
http://www.personalconsult.com...