Wikipedia Is NOT A Doctor — And A Study Confirms It

For the study, researchers identified the “10 costliest conditions in terms of public and private expenditure” — which included diabetes, back pain, lung cancer and major depressive disorder — and compared the content of Wikipedia articles about those conditions to peer-reviewed medical literature. Two randomly assigned investigators found that 90 percent of the articles contained false information, which could affect the diagnosis and treatment of diseases.

Now for those of you who are saying that it’s not the doctors themselves checking Wikipedia, you’d be wrong. According to a pair of studies from 2009 and 2010, “70% of junior physicians use Wikipedia in a given week, while nearly 50% to 70% of practicing physicians use it as an information source in providing medical care.”

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