gms | German Medical Science

Background: The online resource Wikipedia is increasingly used by undergraduate medical students for knowledge acquisition and learning [1]. However, the lack of a formal editorial review and the heterogeneous expertise of contributors often results in skepticism by lecturers if Wikipedia should be recommended to students as an information source.

Objective: The aim of this study was to systematically analyze the accuracy and completeness of drug information in Wikipedia in comparison to standard textbooks of pharmacology.

Methods: Drug specific information of 60 randomly selected curricular drugs was extracted from two German standard textbooks of pharmacology [2], [3]. Five different categories (indication, mechanism of action, pharmacokinetics, adverse effects, contraindications) were analyzed. The data intersection of the textbooks was compared to the German version of Wikipedia [http://de.wikipedia.org] and accuracy and completeness of each category evaluated.

Results: The overall score of the drug information obtained through Wikipedia was 82.7% with regard to completeness and 99.5% with regard to accuracy when compared to standard textbooks. Table 1 [Tab. 1] depicts the results of Wikipedia in each category. The textbook data intersection was set to 100%.

Summary and Conclusions: This is the first study to systematically assess completeness and accuracy of drug-related information derived from Wikipedia in comparison to standard textbooks of pharmacology in undergraduate medical education. Our analysis demonstrated that the information derived from Wikipedia was less complete when compared to standard textbooks, in particular in the categories pharmacokinetics and contraindications. However, the accuracy of drug information in Wikipedia was on par with standard textbooks of pharmacology. We thus conclude that Wikipedia may represent a reliable source of drug-related information for undergraduate medical students.