Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Research/BestWork

How do Wiki Project Medicine's best disease related article compare with those from professional sources?

Comparison to be performed by
We will need a group of independent experts with no vested interests in any of the sources being examined to rate the quality based on a structured format. If we are able to find a suitable rigorous structure format for analysis medical article quality we might be able to use less formal experts.

Method of comparison
As of 2002 there does not appear to be "operational definitions of quality criteria" The AHRQ published 7 criteria to judge web health content in 1999  A 2007 article describes some tool used to assess quality. Discern appears to be one potential tool. There is also a shorter version. It may be applied by none experts. It along with Health On the Net Foundation however have their limitations (not very sensitive).

A number of papers from 2008 used a few more scoring systems on top of the discern. These appear to require those who are using them to have some expertise in the subject matter. Wikipedia I am sure was contained within the analysis just is not mentioned by name. Have queried the author about this. This article by him gives Wikipedia a 6th place for clinical depression scoring ahead of the patient information part of Uptodate.

Another tool is the "LIDA instrument" which was used in this paper. And a few more techniques are touched on in this review.

What it comes down to is we need a "gold" standard to which to compare our sources. This may be a formal quality assessment tool or a subject matter expert. The assessment tool will probably be the easiest and least expensive of the two main methods.
 * Summary

Articles to be compared
Wiki Project Medicine has 63 featured article 29 of which relate to diseases and are thus more suitable for comparison. While some have claimed that Wikipedia's content is of lower quality compared to other sources (and much of it certainly is). How does its best content compare? Which if drawn to its conclusion and Wikipedia reaches it full potential (all content is featured) what sort of source would Wikipedia be.

Number of articles
Would be great to do 25 articles. If it takes 2 hours for each and each is reviewed by two people that takes us to 125 hours of work ( assuming two comparitors )

Sources to which we will compare
Uptodate, Emedicine, current undergraduate textbook chapter of similar scope, others?