Other

Dermatology students improve Wikipedia entries on skin disease

A group of medical students recruited to improve Wikipedia articles on skin-related diseases, saw millions more views of those stories following their editing, highlighting the value of expert input on the popular web encyclopedia.

Health

Most Wikipedia health articles contain errors

(HealthDay)—Ninety percent of health articles on Wikipedia contain errors, according to a new study published in the May issue of the Journal of the American Osteopathic Association.

Diseases, Conditions, Syndromes

Tracking flu levels with Wikipedia

Can monitoring Wikipedia hits show how many people have the flu? Researchers at Boston Children's Hospital, USA, have developed a method of estimating levels of influenza-like illness in the American population by analysing ...

Other

How to create useful knowledge from pure data

Imagine a hospital where patient data from numerous sources is made accessible to ward physicians with the help of hyperlinks and intelligent indexing. Imagine a healthcare system that hands its patients – not an envelope ...

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Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a free, web-based and collaborative multilingual encyclopedia, born in the project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its name is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning "quick") and encyclopedia. Wikipedia's 13 million articles (2.9 million in the English Wikipedia) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone who can access the Wikipedia website. Proposed by Richard Stallman, it was launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, it is currently the most popular general reference work on the Internet.

Critics of Wikipedia accuse it of systemic bias and inconsistencies, and allege that it favors consensus over credentials in its editorial process. Wikipedia's reliability and accuracy are also an issue. Other criticisms center on its susceptibility to vandalism and the addition of spurious or unverified information, though scholarly work suggests that vandalism is generally short-lived.

Jonathan Dee, of The New York Times, and Andrew Lih, in the 5th International Symposium on Online Journalism, have cited the importance of Wikipedia not only as an encyclopedic reference but also as a frequently-updated news resource because of how quickly articles about recent events appear.

When Time magazine recognized You as its Person of the Year for 2006, acknowledging the accelerating success of online collaboration and interaction by millions of users around the world, it cited Wikipedia as one of three examples of Web 2.0 services, along with YouTube and MySpace.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA