Health Information on Wikipedia: Can You Trust It?

Wikipedia, a crowd-sourced online encyclopedia begun in 2001, is potentially the most used source for medical information in the world with billions of visits each year. Its goal is to ensure that every person has access to all medical knowledge in their own language. The upside of this free open encyclopedia is everyone can enter an article. The downside of this free encyclopedia is that everyone can change words in an article. Vast amounts of health information has been added to Wikipedia, by medical professionals and some has even been edited by health science librarians and various health science student groups; but is it trustworthy? In this day and age of informed health consumers, is this an information tool on which to rely? This column traces the history of Wikipedia, comments on its health information contents and some editing efforts. This column ends with guiding questions whether or not it should be trusted.