Characterizing and comparing Portuguese and English Wikipedia medicine-related articles

Abstract

Wikipedia is the largest on-line collaborative encyclopedia, containing information from a plethora of fields, including medicine. It has been shown that Wikipedia is one of the top visited sites by readers looking for information on this topic. The large reliance on Wikipedia for this type of information drives research towards the analysis of the quality of its articles. In this work, we evaluate and compare the quality of medicine-related articles in the English and Portuguese Wikipedia. For that we use metrics such as authority, completeness, complexity, informativeness, consistency, currency and volatility, and domain-specific measurements, in order to evaluate and compare the quality of medicine related articles in the English and Portuguese Wikipedia. We were able to conclude that the English articles score better across most metrics than the Portuguese articles.