Abstract
Barnes et al. recently reported on the quality of information on bipolar disorder on the Internet [1]. As the authors note, websites are now a major source of information about mental disorders, but they contain information of variable quality, have trouble providing locally relevant information, and are hard to keep up to date due to the rapid expansion in knowledge. A potential solution to the out-of-datedness and limited coverage of information websites is the wiki. A wiki is a type of software that allows the creation of collaborative websites, with the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) being the best known example. The large number of contributors allows wikis to be constantly updated and errors rapidly corrected. We note that in the study carried out by Barnes et al. Wikipedia was ranked joint sixth for quality out of 15 websites evaluated. This is consistent with an independent study that compared the quality of science articles in the Encyclopaedia Britannica with those in Wikipedia. Results showed numerous errors in both but that the difference in accuracy was not particularly great [2].
In order to explore the potential of wiki guides as providers of information about mental health problems we have established Mental Health Wiki (www.mentalhealthwiki.org), a collaborative Web guide to these disorders. In order to ensure that Mental Health Wiki provides high-quality information, permission to contribute to Mental Health Wiki is limited to professionals and patient and carer advocates. A formal evaluation of Mental Health Wiki will be conducted, examining the level of use and comparing the quality of information with other sources such as conventional websites and textbooks.
We invite contributions to Mental Health Wiki from health professionals, academic researchers, patient and carer advocates, and health service administrators.