User:Hydra Rain

Nuša

Hello and Welcome to my Userpage. :)

This User page was initially created for the UCL research activities for the duration of January- September 2012. The study was approved by Wikimedia Research Committee and UCL Ethics Committee.

My name is Nuša Farič (PhD) and I have carried out two research projects on Wikipedia's health content. The first was a study on "Motivations for Contributing to Health-Related Articles on Wikipedia: An Interview Study" (2013) and a postdoc project on "Quality of Male and Female Medical Content on English-Language Wikipedia: A Quantitative Content Analysis" (2024), both published in JMIR. In the first study, I was interested to characterize editors (Wikipedians) of health-related Wikipedia pages and to find out more about their editorial motivations and editorial experiences. In the second study, I wanted to learn if there were any biases in terms of coverage of health content on the English-language WP between the sexes. Studies were presented at the Medicine 2.0 conference, Wikimania London (2014) and Wikimania Katowice (2024).

Study 1: Farič N, Potts HW. Motivations for Contributing to Health-Related Articles on Wikipedia: An Interview Study. J Med Internet Res 2014;16(12):e260. doi: 10.2196/jmir.3569 PMID: 25498308 PMCID: 4275502

Objectives: Wikipedia is the largest free online encyclopaedia and it is of the most requested, accessed and consulted sources of health information in the world. The current English Wikipedia contains 4.1 million articles with over 25,000 articles pertaining to health. The aim of this study was to characterise individuals involved in the editorial process of building health-content on Wikipedia and explore the underlying motivations for their contributions. Design: Quantitative and qualitative approaches were employed, guided by the Grounded Theory framework of Glaser and Strauss (1967). Method: Thirty-two Wikipedians with a history of health-related edits completed a questionnaire and 16 were interviewed face-to-face, online via Skype, or online via e-mail. Interviews were transcribed and analysed following the Glaserian paradigm. Results: Wikipedians in this study were identified as health professionals, professionals with specific health-interests, patients and students. Their motivations for editing health-related content formed five over-arching categories: Education, Help, Responsibility, Fulfilment and Positive Attitude to Wikipedia. An additional factor, Hostility, was identified that negatively affected Wikipedians’ motivations. Conclusions: Wikpedia’s health-related content is built by a similar proportion of health-specialists and lay people of varying editorial skills. There is an urgent need for a greater editorial involvement in the context of Wikipedia’s health-related content. The implications of the study are discussed in the proposed motivational model.

Study 2: Quality of Male and Female Medical Content on English-Language Wikipedia: A Quantitative Content Analysis. J Med Internet Res 2024. (forthcoming)

Background: Wikipedia (WP) is the largest online free encyclopedia and the seventh most visited website in the world, containing over 45,000 freely accessible English-language medical articles, accessed nearly 1.6 billion times per year. Concerns have been expressed about the balance of content related to biological sex on WP. Objectives: The aim was to categorize the top 1,000 most read (most popular) English-language health WP articles for June 2019 according to the relevance of the article topic to each sex and quality. Methods: In the first step, WP articles were identified using “WikiProject Medicine Popular pages”. These were analyzed on 13 factors including total views, article quality, and total number of references. In the second step, two general medical textbooks were used as comparators to assess whether WP’s spread of articles was typical in comparison to the general medical coverage. Based on the article’s content, we proposed criteria with five categories: 1 - ‘exclusively female’, 2 - ‘predominantly female but can also affect males’, 3 - ‘not-sex-specific/neutral’, 4 - ‘predominantly male but can affect females’ and 5 - ‘exclusively male’. Results: 933/1,000 (93.3%) WP health articles were not-sex-specific and 67/1000 (6.7%) were sex-specific. There was no statistically significant difference in the number of reads per month between the sex-specific and not-sex-specific articles. Coverage of female topics was higher (4.7%) than male topics (1.5%). This difference was also observed for the two medical textbooks where 91.1% of content was not-sex-specific, with female topics accounting for 7.8%, and male topics for 1.8% (no statistically significant difference, Fisher exact P=.081). Female category articles were ranked higher on the WP medical topic importance list (top, high, or mid importance) compared with male category articles (borderline for statistical significance, Fisher exact P=.05). Female articles had a higher number of total and unique references, a slightly higher number of page watchers, pictures, and available languages, but somewhat lower number of edits compared with male articles (all these were statistically non-significant). Conclusions: Across several metrics, a sample of popular WP health-related articles for both sexes had comparable quality. The higher ‘exclusively female’ coverage compared to ‘exclusively male’ health articles in WP articles is similar to the two medical textbooks and can be explained by the inclusion of sections on obstetrics and gynecology (e.g., pregnancy, childbirth, menopause), which are more numerous than health topics concerning the male reproductive system. However, this is unlike the imbalance seen among biographies of living people, where about 77% pertain to males. Although this study included a small sample of sex-specific articles, the spread of WP articles may reflect the readership and the needs of the population, at a given time. Further study of a larger sample of WP articles would be valuable.

If you require some additional information or a copy of this study please contact the researcher Nuša Farič at nusa.faric.11ucl.ac.uk. If you have other concerns or questions and wish to contact someone other than the researcher, please contact Dr Henry Potts at h.pottsucl.ac.uk or visit Dr Potts' UCL page. Dr Potts is supervising the project; he also has a Wikipedia account as User:bondegezou. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any other questions.