Equal opportunities in the access to quality online health information? A multi-lingual study on Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a free, multilingual, and collaborative online encyclopedia. Nowadays, it is one of the largest sources of online knowledge, often appearing at the top of the results of the major search engines, being one of the most sought-after resources by the public searching for health information. The collaborative nature of Wikipedia raises security concerns since this information is used for decision-making, especially in the health area. Despite being available in hundreds of idioms, there are asymmetries between idioms, namely regarding their quality. In this work, we compare the quality of health information on Wikipedia between idioms with 100 million native speakers or more, and also in Greek, Italian, Korean, Turkish, Persian, Catalan and Hebrew, for historical tradition. Quality metrics are applied to health and medical articles in English, maintained by WikiProject Medicine, and their versions in the above idioms. With this, we contribute to a clarification of the role of Wikipedia in the access to health information. We demonstrate differences in both the quantity and quality of information available between idioms. English is the idiom with the highest quality in general. Urdu, Greek, Indonesian, and Hindi achieved lower values of quality.