Quantifying (mis)alignment between reader focus and editor citation in scholarly biomedical topics in Wikipedia

Abstract When people seek health information online, they often turn to Wikipedia, trusting Wikipedia’s citation of scholarly biomedical research. However, despite Wikipedia’s important role in providing health information, it is unclear how reliably this scholarly information proliferates to all biomedical topics on Wikipedia. In this paper, we quantitatively explore both (a) how scholarly biomedical research is cited in biomedically focused Wikipedia articles, and (b) whether this reflects the topical patterns of those articles’ readership in Wikipedia. Our methods identify quantitative avenues for improved alignment between editors’ limited effort and readers’ focus, with respect to both the biomedical topics themselves and the caliber of biomedical research cited. In other words, readers focus on topics that are very human-focused, but editors focus their citation work on basic science topics (e.g., molecular and cellular biology), leading to disproportionate citation rates of basic research publications for biomedical topics in Wikipedia. These results highlight straightforward but previously invisible design recommendations to help readers better contextualize the health information they seek on Wikipedia.