Department of Medicine, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Bethesda, United States.
Lane Medical Library, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, United States.
Elife. 2020 Mar 6;9:e52426. doi: 10.7554/eLife.52426.
Articles on Wikipedia about health and medicine are maintained by WikiProject Medicine (WPM), and are widely used by health professionals, students and others. We have compared these articles, and reader engagement with them, to other articles on Wikipedia. We found that WPM articles are longer, possess a greater density of external links, and are visited more often than other articles on Wikipedia. Readers of WPM articles are more likely to hover over and view footnotes than other readers, but are less likely to visit the hyperlinked sources in these footnotes. Our findings suggest that WPM readers appear to use links to external sources to verify and authorize Wikipedia content, rather than to examine the sources themselves.
维基百科上关于健康和医学的文章由维基医学项目（WPM）维护，被健康专业人士、学生和其他人员广泛使用。我们将这些文章与维基百科上的其他文章进行了比较，并比较了读者对它们的参与度。我们发现，WPM 文章篇幅更长，外部链接密度更大，访问量也高于维基百科上的其他文章。WPM 文章的读者比其他读者更有可能悬停并查看脚注，但不太可能访问这些脚注中的超链接来源。我们的研究结果表明，WPM 的读者似乎使用外部链接来验证和授权维基百科的内容，而不是检查这些来源本身。
