The Readability of the English Wikipedia Article on Parkinson's Disease

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The Readability of the English Wikipedia Article on Parkinson's Disease
Authors
Francesco Brigo
Roberto Erro
Publication date
2015
DOI
10.1007/s10072-015-2077-5
Links
Original

The Readability of the English Wikipedia Article on Parkinson's Disease - scientific work related to Wikipedia quality published in 2015, written by Francesco Brigo and Roberto Erro.

Overview

Millions of people surf the Internet every day as a source of health care information looking for materials about symptoms, diagnosis, treatments and their possible adverse effects, or diagnostic procedures. Since its launch in 2001, the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia has become the most popular general reference website, which contains approximately 30 million articles available in up to 287 languages and over 4.6 million English articles. With 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors per month, the English version of Wikipedia ranks the fifth place in the list of the most visited websites, thus being very likely a common source of health care information by both patients and caregivers. Worth of note, the first webpage that appears after entering the keyword ‘‘Parkinson’s disease’’ (PD) on Google, the most popular search engine worldwide, is the Wikipedia article on PD (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Par kinson’s_disease) (search conducted on 7 November 2014). Hence, such an article is likely to be the most immediate source of online information on PD for millions of Internet users worldwide. To fully understand the content of health information, people need to have adequate ‘‘health literacy’’ defined as ‘‘a constellation of skills, including the ability to perform basic reading and numerical tasks required to function in the health care environment’’ [1]. Low literacy level may reduce patients’ abilities to understand health information, follow medical instructions, take drugs correctly, and learn about disease prevention [1]. Authors therefore aimed to evaluate the reading difficulty level of the English Wikipedia article on PD using quantitative readability-assessment scales. On 5 November 2014, the educational material of the Wikipedia article on PD (available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson’s_ disease) was downloaded into Microsoft Word and analyzed for its overall level of readability with six different quantitative readability scales, using the online software program ‘‘SMOG Readability Calculator’’ (freely available at http://www.harrymclaughlin.com/SMOG.htm). The readability scales obtained through this software included: the Gunning Fog index, the Coleman Liau index, the Flesch Kincaid Grade Level, the Automated Readability Index, the Simple Measure of Gobbledygook, and the Flesch Reading Ease [2]. The Flesch Reading Ease readability index ranges from 0 to 100, with higher scores indicating more readable text. The other readability indexes correspond instead to the ideal academic grade level (i.e. the number of years of education) that a person would need in order to be able to understand the text easily, on the first reading. Readability calculations are made on the basis of sentence length, number of sentences and the number of syllables or characters per word. Described in general, these calculations penalize polysyllabic words and long, complex sentences. Readility levels of the English Wikipedia article on PD are reported in Table 1. The Flesch Reading Ease yielded F. Brigo Department of Neurology, ‘‘Franz Tappeiner’’ Hospital, Merano, Italy

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Wikipedia Quality

Brigo, Francesco; Erro, Roberto. (2015). "[[The Readability of the English Wikipedia Article on Parkinson's Disease]]". Springer Milan. DOI: 10.1007/s10072-015-2077-5.

English Wikipedia

{{cite journal |last1=Brigo |first1=Francesco |last2=Erro |first2=Roberto |title=The Readability of the English Wikipedia Article on Parkinson's Disease |date=2015 |doi=10.1007/s10072-015-2077-5 |url=https://wikipediaquality.com/wiki/The_Readability_of_the_English_Wikipedia_Article_on_Parkinson's_Disease |journal=Springer Milan}}

HTML

Brigo, Francesco; Erro, Roberto. (2015). &quot;<a href="https://wikipediaquality.com/wiki/The_Readability_of_the_English_Wikipedia_Article_on_Parkinson's_Disease">The Readability of the English Wikipedia Article on Parkinson's Disease</a>&quot;. Springer Milan. DOI: 10.1007/s10072-015-2077-5.