Quality of Male and Female Medical Content on English-Language Wikipedia (Preprint)

Abstract

Wikipedia (WP) is the largest online free encyclopedia and 7th most visited website in the world. It contains over 45,000 freely accessible English medical articles accessed nearly 1.6 billion times per year. Concerns have been expressed about the gender balance of content on WP.

The aims were to: 1) identify female, male, and not sex specific top 1,000 health articles on English WP; 2) assess quality of these articles on English WP.

Firstly, a list of the 1,000 most read WP medical articles for the month of June 2019 was identified using ‘WikiProject Medicine Popular pages’ and analyzed on 13 factors including total views, article quality and total number of references. Secondly, two general medical textbooks were used as comparators to assess whether WP’s spread was typical in comparison to the general medical textbooks. We proposed a criteria with five categories for sex specific health articles: 1 - ‘exclusively female’, 2 - ‘predominantly female but can also affect males’, 3 - ‘not sex specific/neutral’, 4 - ‘predominantly male but can affect females’ and 5 - ‘exclusively male’.

Of the 1,000 most read WP medical articles, 933/1,000 (93.3%) were ‘not sex specific’ and 67/1000 (6.7%) were sex-specific. The number of reads per month showed no statistically significant difference between the types of articles. Coverage of female topics was higher (4.7%) than male topics (1.5%) which was proportional to the two medical textbooks where 91.1% of content was rated as ‘not sex specific’, female topics (7.8%), and male topics (1.8%) (no statistically significant difference (Fisher extract P=.081). Female category articles were ranked higher on the WP medical topic importance list (top, high or mid importance) compared with male category articles (borderline for statistical significance, Fisher extract P=.05). Female articles had a higher number of total and unique references, a slightly higher number of page watchers and pictures, but slightly lower number of edits compared with male articles (all these were statistically non-significant).

Across a number of metrics, the quality of WP’s health related articles for both sexes was comparable. The higher ‘exclusively female’ coverage compared to ‘exclusively male’ health articles in WP articles and in the two medical textbooks can be explained by the inclusion of sections on obstetrics and gynecology (e.g, pregnancy, childbirth, menopause), which are much more vast than health topics concerning the male reproductive system. The spread of WP articles may also reflect the readership and the needs of the population.vThis study has highlighted the complexity of health information needs pertaining to sexes. This is unlike the imbalance seen among biographies of living people, of which about 75% pertain to males.

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