Elsevier

Nurse Education Today

Volume 31, Issue 2, February 2011, Pages 135-139
Nurse Education Today

Wikipedia as an evidence source for nursing and healthcare students

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2010.05.004Get rights and content

Summary

Where students once were confined to the University library, they are now at liberty to wander through cyber-space at will. There is evidence to suggest that student have been very quick to exploit the opportunities that the Internet can offer them. Students frequently cited search engines such as Google and Web 2.0 information sharing sites such as Wikipedia as the first places they look when seeking information for an assignment. Although a number of disciplines have accepted that Wikipedia can be viewed as an accurate and legitimate evidence source nurse educators tend to view Wikipedia with a degree of suspicion. The purpose of this paper is to carry out an exploratory study of health and health related content on a sample of Wikipedia site with the overall intention of assessing the quality of their source and supporting information.

A 10% sample of health related Wikipedia entries were evaluated, with a total of 2598 references assessed. In total 1473 (56%) of the references citied on the Wikipedia pages reviewed could be argued to come from clearly identifiable reputable sources. This translates to a mean number of reputable sources of M = 29 per Wikipedia entry.

The quality of the evidence taken obtained from the 2500 plus references from over 50 Wikipedia pages was of sufficiently sound quality to suggest that, for health related entries, Wikipedia is appropriate for use by nursing students.

Introduction

In the first decade of the 21st century technology has become firmly embedded in every aspect of modern life. Where students' literature searching activities once were confined to the University library, they are now at liberty to wander through cyber-space at will collecting a wide and eclectic range of information (Anderson, 2001). Head (2007) noted that although students were using university library web sites as the first steps in their research process, a reasonable proportion ( 40% n = 72) turned to the World Wide Web to supplement their information gathering activities.

Section snippets

Background

There is evidence to suggest that student have been very quick to exploit the opportunities that Web 2.0 offers them. Conole et al. (2008) noted that students, across a range of disciplines, frequently cited search engines such as Google and online information sites as the first places they look when seeking information for an assignment. The importance that is placed upon the use of supporting materials can be deduced from the number of referencing guides that are available in the online

Method

Wikipedia has 115 pages in the category “health”, and 417 pages in the category “signs and symptoms” (although this also includes pages relating to anatomy and physiology). This gave a potential sample of 532 relevant pages. A 10% sample (n = 50) was selected, given the exploratory nature of this study it must be emphasised that this sample was not designed to be statistical representative. A number of Wikipedia entries across anatomical, health, illness and nurse education related concepts were

Results

As Table 3 demonstrates, there was a considerable array of supporting references across the 50 Wikipedia pages, (range 7–231).

Entries for recognised disorders tended to have the most supporting references for example, Cancer (94) Alzheimer's disease (231) or Hypertension (220). Entries for physiological processes tended to have the least supporting references, for example Krebs cycle (12), Insulin (21) or acetylcholine (8). A total of 2598 references were assessed. The mean number of supporting

Limitations

There are a number of limitations to this study which would require that these findings, however persuasive they may appear, be treated with caution. Only 10% of the health related entries were reviewed and the work would have been enhanced if a more statistically representative sample had been used. Furthermore, the topics selected were almost exclusively one in which the Wikipedia entry focused upon well defined information that was not particularly debateable or controversial. Giles (2005)

Discussion

The quality of the evidence taken from the 2500 plus references over 50 Wikipedia pages was of sufficiently sound quality to suggest that, for health related entries, they were appropriate for use by nursing students. It must be acknowledged that by choosing a quality score of 6 and above as indicative of robustness the evaluation was being particularly stringent. The original source analysis of the sub group (Table 4 and Fig. 1) suggests that overall the references used to support Wikipedia

Conclusion

This small exploratory study would suggest that the use of Wikipedia by nursing students when researching information to contribute to assignments need not necessarily be discouraged. There are implications for educators, particularly the need to adopt a more proactive role in the evaluation of Wikipedia citations. There is also an indication that Wikipedia could have a role as a useful tool in the teaching of critical appraisal and literature searching. Whilst it is acknowledged that Wikipedia

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