Assessing the quality of health-related Wikipedia articles with generic and specific metrics

Wikipedia is an online, free, multi-language, and collaborative encyclopedia, currently one of the most significant information sources on the web. The open nature of Wikipedia contributions raises concerns about the quality of its information. Previous studies have addressed this issue using manual evaluations and proposing generic measures for quality assessment. In this work, we focus on the quality of health-related content. For this purpose, we use general and health-specific features from Wikipedia articles to propose health-specific metrics. We evaluate these metrics using a set of Wikipedia articles previously assessed by WikiProject Medicine. We conclude that it is possible to combine generic and specific metrics to determine health-related content’s information quality. These metrics are computed automatically and can be used by curators to identify quality issues. Along with the explored features, these metrics can also be used in approaches that automatically classify the quality of Wikipedia health-related articles.