Figure 1.
Pharmacological information of randomly selected curricular drugs was retrieved form two standard textbooks of general pharmacology for five different categories (indication, mechanism of action, adverse effects, pharmacokinetics and contraindications). The textbook data overlap served as point of reference for the corresponding drug articles in Wikipedia. The analysis was performed separately for the German and English language version of Wikipedia and textbooks.
Figure 2.
Accuracy and completeness of drug information in Wikipedia.
Analysis of (A) accuracy and (B) completeness of the German (left panel) and English (right panel) language Wikipedia in comparison to textbooks. Accuracy was defined as the degree of closeness to the pharmacological information of the textbooks overlap. Completeness was defined as percentage of pharmacological statements of the textbook overlap present in the respective Wikipedia articles. Box plots showing median, first and third quartile with whiskers depicting the 5% and 95% percentile. In (A), statistical outliers are shown as black dots. Note that some box plots appear as vertical lines due to high accuracy scores and low variability of data. IND, indication; MA, mechanism of action; AE, adverse effects; PK, pharmacokinetics; CI, contraindications.
Figure 3.
Analysis of article references in Wikipedia.
(A) German language version of Wikipedia (n = 100), (B) English language version of Wikipedia (n = 20). Box plots depict the 5–95% percentile.
Figure 4.
Readability was assessed using the Amstad readability index (RAmstad) and the Erste Wiener Sachtextformel (R1. WSTF). The scale of RAmstad is from 0 (very difficult) to 100 (easy to read), for R1. WSTF from 4 (easy to read) to >12 (very difficult). n = 10.
Table 1.
Descriptive statistics of edits and editors of drug articles in Wikipedia.