Maturity Assessment of Wikipedia Medical Articles

Recent studies report that Internet users are growingly looking for health information through the Wikipedia Medicine Portal, a collaboratively edited multitude of articles with contents often comparable with professionally edited material. Automatic quality assessment of the Wikipedia medical articles has not received much attention by Academia and it presents open distinctive challenges. In this paper, we propose to tag the medical articles on the Wikipedia Medicine Portal, clearly stating their maturity degree, intended as a summarizing measure of several article properties. For this purpose, we adopt the Analytic Hierarchy Process, a well known methodology for decision making, and we evaluate the maturity degree of more than 24000 Wikipedia medical articles. The obtained results show how the qualitative analysis of medical content not always overlap with a quantitative analysis (an example of which is shown in the paper), since important properties of an article can hardly be synthesized by quantitative features. This seems particularly true when the analysis considers the concept of maturity, defined and verified in this work.