"But doctor, it says so on Wikipedia!"
A study published earlier this year ("Seeking Health Information Online: Does Wikipedia Matter?") in the Journal of Medical Informatics Association found that Wikipedia ranked in the top ten search results for health-related topics 71-85% of the time, depending on which search engine and keywords were used. This came as little surprise. The reliability of the information available, however, has always depended on the knowledge and rigor of Wikipedia's contributors and editors.
Wikipedia has now taken an important step toward improving the quality of the health information its millions of users access. A couple of weeks ago, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, announced a partnership "to make health and science information more accessible and reliable." Sue Gardner, executive director of the Foundation, explains: "With the broad range of experts from [NIH], we see a great opportunity for increasing the quality of all health-related information on Wikipedia, benefitting users of Wikipedia from all over the world."
A year of television = 2000 Wikipedias
My colleague Jason Tester pointed out (ultimately via Boing Boing) a post by Clay Shirky that helps answer a question that often comes up about collaborative media. As Jason put it, "Often when I give talks illustrated with examples like Wikipedia, delicious, Flickr, etc, to largely non-tech audiences (HR for example) someone will ask 'Where do people find the time?' or the less thoughtful 'Is this just about nerds in basements?'"
Clay points out two things. First, that a lot of time that goes into writing blogs, adding content to wikis, mashing things up on Google Earth, etc., is taken from other activities like television-watching. He notes that Americans watch something like 200 billion hours of television a year.
That's an amazing amount of time, and when you can take little bits of your time and spend them on projects that other people can also spend little bits of time on, it adds up pretty quickly.
- Alex Soojung-Kim Pang's blog
- Login to post comments
-
