Seeking Health Information Online: Does Wikipedia Matter?

This article in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (July-August 2009, 16: 4; 471-479), by Michael R. Laurent and Tim. J, Vickers, Faculty of Medicine, Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven, Belgium, "measured Wikipedia's ranking on general Internet search engines by entering keywords from MedlinePlus, NHS Direct Online, and the National Organization of Rare Diseases as queries into search engine optimization software. We assessed whether article quality influenced this ranking. . . . Results: Wikipedia ranked among the first ten results in 71–85% of search engines and keywords tested. Wikipedia surpassed MedlinePlus and NHS Direct Online (except for queries from the latter on Google UK), and ranked higher with quality articles. Wikipedia ranked highest for rare diseases, although its incidence in several categories decreased. . . . Wikipedia articles were viewed more often than MedlinePlus Topic (p = 0.001) but for MedlinePlus Encyclopedia pages, the trend was not significant (p = 0.07–0.10). Based on its search engine ranking and page view statistics, the English Wikipedia is a prominent source of online health information compared to the other online health information providers studied."