Study shows Wikipedia Accuracy is 99.5%
Indeed, it seems like a good place to start. They analyzed articles on drugs, drawing every piece of relevant information, as well as references, revision history and readability. Their conclusion is that the accuracy of drug information on Wikipedia was 99.7%±0.2% when compared to the textbook data. However, even though the articles were very accurate, they weren’t fully complete. Scientists rate the completeness of articles at 83.8±1.5%. However, completeness had a huge variation, ranging between 68.0% and 91.0%. This difference shows that Wikipedia is not always the best resource to draw complete information from, but it always provides over two thirds of the whole story. Furthermore, from the drug information missing in Wikipedia, 62.5% was rated as didactically non-relevant in a qualitative re-evaluation study. This is crucial especially in areas which change a lot, such as pharmacology. The fact that you have this huge resource from which you can draw massive amounts of information is remarkable. The fact that it is open source, ad free, community driven (though moderated) and still manages to have an almost perfect accuracy is simply amazing! The only problem I have with this study is the sample size. Of course, it’s a tough analysis to conduct, but 100 drugs is still not enough to draw definite conclusions.