The Changing Climate of Wikipedia in Vascular Surgery Medical Education: A Comparative Study.

Journal: 2020/May - JMIR medical education

ISSN: 2369-3762

Abstract:

Medical students commonly refer to Wikipedia.org as their preferred online resource for medical information. The quality and readability of articles about common vascular disorders on Wikipedia has not been evaluated or compared against a standard textbook of surgery.Aims of this study are to: (1) Compare the quality of Wikipedia.org articles to equivalent chapters in a standard undergraduate medical textbook of surgery; (2) Identify any errors of omission in either resource; (3) Compare the readability of both resources using validated ease-of-reading and grade-level tools.Using the Medical Council of Canada's Objectives of the Qualification Examination, eight fundamental topics of vascular surgery were chosen. These topics were located on Wikipedia.org through its native search engine, and equivalent chapters were marked in Schwartz Principles of Surgery 9th edition. Two medical learners assessed these passages on their original platforms and independently compared Wikipedia.org and Schwartz Principles of Surgery in terms of readability, quality, and errors of omission. Readability was evaluated using multiple validated scoring systems to asses for reading ease and grade level of the articles. Quality was evaluated using the DISCERN questionnaire, and errors of omission were evaluated using a standardized scoring system designed by the authors.The articles from Wikipedia have an average Flesch Reading Ease score of 30.5 (Interquartile range; IQR 13.6) compared to Schwartz with a score of 20.2 (IQR 8.4), which suggests that Wikipedia is significantly easier to read (p = 0.032). The average calculated grade levels of the Wikipedia articles by all grade level indices was 14.2 (IQR 1.6), while Schwartz had an average grade level of 15.9 (IQR 0.9), with p = 0.019. The quality of the text was also assessed using the DISCERN tool, which resulted in average scores of 52.9 (IQR 15.9) for Wikipedia and 71.4 (IQR 3.3) for Schwartz, suggesting that Schwartz has higher quality compared to Wikipedia (p = 0.002). Finally, Wikipedia articles scored an average of 12.5 (IQR 8.5) on the errors of omission scale, while Schwartz scored an average of 21.3 (IQR 1.4), suggesting that there were fewer errors of omission in the surgical textbook (p = 0.008).Online resources are increasingly easier to access but can vary in quality. Based on this comparison, the authors of this study recommend the use of vascular surgery textbooks as a primary source of learning material due to greater consistency in quality and fewer errors of omission. Wikipedia can be a useful resource for quick reference, particularly due to its ease of reading, but its vascular surgery articles require further development.

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