Consulting Wikipedia Can Be Harmful for Your Health

We have been talking for a while about how reliable Wikipedia is when it comes to using the popular community-edited encyclopedia and the general opinion is that while you can check a page in Wikipedia if you only want to get basic understanding of a subject, using it as a resource when you want all the facts to be reliable and 100% correct is not exactly advisable - but clicking the links quoted as resources for further knowledge will help you easily find all the information required for yourself.

Today we are getting to know about another potential problem of relying on Wikipedia for certain information from a study focused on use of the public encyclopedia for medications-related information. The conclusion of the study is absolutely predictable: consumers who rely on Wikipedia for information on medications are at risk of potentially harmful drug interactions and adverse affects.

The scientists from the Nova Southeastern University in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, studied Wikipedia entries on 80 drugs after they realized that Wikipedia was often used as a source of information on drugs. This idea for the study was born when the scientists found out that one third of people conducting search for various health-related terms in search engines look for information on over-the-counter or prescription drugs. And I am sure that everyone knows that Wikipedia is often the first line in the search results so this must be where the majority of such users ended. Besides, what can be easier than checking a comprehensive entry on Wikipedia?

As a result of studying the entries for those 80 drugs the scientists reached the conclusion that these entries could not be considered as a reliable source of information about these medications. The reason for the problems is pretty simple: while the scientists have found few factual errors in the entries, the entries still can not be considered as trustworthy because important information is often missing.

For example, some entries did not contain information about possible effects of interactions with other drugs or information on advisability of using a drug for a pregnant woman when in fact it was not advisable. It is understandable that in certain situations omissions of important information can be equally important (and harmful) as factual mistakes. So if a patient decided to choose a medication based on what Wikipedia has to offer only without consulting a doctor, the results will not be predictable and could be harmful.

There is also another factor to consider because of the open nature of Wikipedia - the issue of public editing. The thing is that representatives of a drug company have actually been caught deleting information from entries on the drugs this company manufactures so that the drugs appear to be safe to visitors of the site. And this makes it even more dangerous as you may always land on an entry edited to reflect what some people want you to think of this drug instead of what the reality is.

But the conclusion is nothing new here and we’ve known it for a while: Wikipedia can rarely be trusted as a 100% reliable source of information but can often be a starting point that will show you where to continue your research. The only problem, I think, is that many people arriving to a Wikipedia entry on a certain medication from the Google search results page will not be aware of this lack of reliability but I don’t expect Wikipedia to ever carry a badge “not to be trusted without checking” or something to that effect.