TY - JOUR T1 - Reader Engagement with Wikipedia’s Medical Content JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/797779 SP - 797779 AU - Lauren A. Maggio, Associate Professor AU - Ryan M. Steinberg, Software Developer AU - Tiziano Piccardi, PhD student AU - John M. Willinsky, Professor Y1 - 2019/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/10/18/797779.abstract N2 - Wikipedia’s extensive health and medical entries, maintained by WikiProject Medicine (WPM), are well supported by external links that provide readers with both a means of verifying the sources drawn upon and visiting those sources to learn more about a topic. In analysing how readers approach these links, data was collected on reader engagement with these links on WPM pages and on the rest of Wikipedia over a 32-day period. Readers of WPM pages were found to engage with external links more frequently than readers of the rest of Wikipedia, with WPM readers favoring hovering over a link and footnote clicking, compared to W readers who tended to click more external links per page viewed. Compared to readers of the rest of Wikipedia, WPM readers appear more attentive to the external link’s function in verifying and authorizing Wikipedia content, than to the educational potential of examining the sources themselves. ER -