Saturday, June 11, 2011

The Trouble with Wikipedia as a Source for Medical Information « Laika's MedLibLog

Do you ever use Wikipedia? I do and so do many other people. It is for free, easy to use, and covers many subjects.

But do you ever use Wikipedia to look up scientific or medical information? Probably everyone does so once in a while. Dave Munger (Researchblogging) concluded a discussion on Twitter as follows:

"Wikipedia's information quality is better than any encyclopedia, online or off. And, yes, it's also easy to use".

Wikipedia is an admirable initiative. It is a large online collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia written by contributors around the world.
But the key question is whether you can rely on Wikipedia as the sole source for medical, scientific or even popular information.

Well, you simply can't and here are a few examples/findings to substantiate this point.

More ...

http://laikaspoetnik.wordpress.com/2009/09/14/the-trouble-with-wikipedia-as-a-source-for-medical-information/