2024:Program/Quality of Male and Female Medical Content on English-Language Wikipedia: A Quantitative Content Analysis

Session title: Quality of Male and Female Medical Content on English-Language Wikipedia: A Quantitative Content Analysis

Session type: Lightning talk

Track: Diversity & Inclusion

Language: en

English-language Wikipedia (WP) contains over 45,000 medical articles. Concerns have been expressed about the sex balance of content. We assessed the quality of sex-specific articles identified using “WikiProject Medicine Popular pages”. 93.3% WP health articles were not sex-specific and 6.7% were sex-specific. Coverage of female topics was higher (4.7%) than male topics (1.5%). Female articles were ranked higher on the WP medical topic importance list and had a higher number of total and unique references, page watchers, pictures, and available languages, but alower number of edits compared with male articles.

Description

This session would include a presentation by MD James Heilman (Doc James: Canada) and Dr Nuša Farič (Hydra_Rain: Scotland - UK) about the study conducted between 2019 and 2023 by four academic researchers or clinicians (all Wikipedians) examining the quality of male and female health-related content on English-Language Wikipedia. The authors would like to offer interesting and enlightening insights pertaining to the study results. Additionally, the authors could display a poster in the poster session for those who may not be able to attend the talk but would like more information on the study. Note that the study has been submitted to an open-access journal JMIR for publication and may be available for download at the time of Wikimania conference.

How does your session relate to the event theme, Collaboration of the Open?

This session will highlight diversity and encourage collaboration for future generations. No matter how much Wikipedia grows, it can always grow more. The session will highlight that there are differences in the coverage of male and female medical content on English Wikipedia, but in recognition that there is no disparity between general medical textbook coverage and WP, highlighting as well as recognizing the diverse needs for information for different people. The insights of this session will drive future collaborations to improve particular spheres of medical and health-related content on Wikipedia.

What is the experience level needed for the audience for your session?

Everyone can participate in this session

Resources

• https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ooDNQkr3WDqcB8aGId3aAac-Siv52aLe0ZnNBKFVKik/edit?usp=drive_link
• https://preprints.jmir.org/preprint/47562/accepted

Speakers

• Nuša Farič

I obtained a BSc in Psychology from the University of Glasgow in 2011, an MSc in Health Psychology from UCL in 2012 and a PhD in Health Psychology and Informatics from UCL in 2022. I work in health and medical research, mostly femtech and in the accuracy of health information.

• James Heilman

James Heilman is a cofounder of Wiki Project Med Foundation.