Wikipedia often misses important drug facts
Kevin Clauson, PharmD, associate professor of pharmacy practice at Nova Southeastern University in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., conducted an independent search of answers to 80 drug-related questions in eight categories on Wikipedia and compared the results with what he found on a peer-reviewed site, Medscape Drug Reference search.medscape.com/drug-reference-search. Wikipedia is an open-source site that serves as an encyclopedia to which anyone can contribute content en.wikipedia.org/.
MDR provided answers to 82.5% of the questions, compared with Wikipedia's 40%. Of the answers found, however, there were four inaccurate answers on MDR and none on Wikipedia.
Researchers also found 48 errors of omission on Wikipedia and 14 for MDR.
"The silent danger of Wikipedia is that having missing information could be as dangerous as factual errors," Clauson said. His study appeared in the December Annals of Pharmacotherapy www.theannals.com/cgi/content/full/42/12/1814.
At the top of the list, Clauson said, were pain medications. One example was the entry on Arthrotec; the Wikipedia entry omitted a warning that the drug could cause miscarriages.
The findings were particularly troublesome, Clauson said, when placed in the context of another study published in the October Journal of Women's Health that looked at medication borrowing (www.liebertonline.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1089/jwh.2007.0769). That study found the group most likely to borrow medications was women of childbearing age, and the medications most likely to be borrowed were pain medications.
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