Abstract
The article on Wikipedia by Metcalfe and Powell 1 was both interesting and informative. The authors argue that although Wikipedia is the most frequently used online educational resource, it is often poorly structured. We cannot disagree with that and can further add that the website's articles are nowhere close to being comprehensive. But we have often found that Wikipedia was the ‘top hit’ when performing a search on Google for many things and therefore convenient for quick reference. We decided to put this to a small test for medical terms.
We chose five common cardiac diagnoses namely angina, acute coronary syndrome, aortic stenosis, congestive heart failure and infective endocarditis, and found that Wikipedia was amongst the top three hits for all these and the #1 hit for two of them. Next we searched for five less common cardiac diagnoses including takotsubo syndrome, long QT syndrome, left ventricular aneurysm, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, and arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy, and to our surprise found that Wikipedia was #1 hit for the first three and #2 hit for the other two. The most interesting thing was with the newer cardiac treatments and technologies namely prasugrel, dabigatran, implantable cardioverter defibrillator, drug-eluting stent and left atrial appendage closure device, all of which brought up Wikipedia as the #1 search result. The search terms were used exactly as quoted.
This has profound implications not just for patients looking for further information about their conditions and treatments but even for doctors. During a busy clinic or on-call, the quest for instant enlightenment is very likely to lead doctors to Wikipedia. This would therefore reinforce the authors' conclusion that the time for us healthcare professionals to engage with this web resource cannot be riper. However, when making contributions or amendments to resources, doctors and academics must pay more attention to detail, consult scientific peer-reviewed published literature and aim to be impartial. If we invest time on this web resource today, we may in the future have a substantial amount of free, constantly updated medical literature under a single umbrella.
Footnotes
Competing interests
None declared