The state of Wikipedia pages relating to health economics is dismal.
The page for health economics itself makes for a good case in point. It is incoherent, inconsistent and of little use. If one delves just a little deeper to investigate pages for cost-utility analysis, value-based pricing or discrete choice experiment, it becomes clear that many pages are either similarly bad, lacking a health economics perspective or simply do not exist.
As such, I’d like to call on fellow health economists to join me in making the micro-contributions necessary to raise the standard of health economics pages on Wikipedia. Whenever I come across a relevant Wikipedia page that is in need of some care and attention, it will be tweeted with the hashtag #HealthEconWiki. I encourage you to do the same!
The value of Wikipedia to students is undeniable, and as such it’s important that those with a good knowledge of their subject ensure the content is accurate. You don’t need to be entirely selfless to support this. There is the opportunity for self-promotion through Wikipedia. If you’ve written an article that is pertinent to the content of the page you can reasonably cite it. If you do decide to chip-in, let us know in the comments below.
[…] since such people should not really be using Wikipedia as a source. However, as Chris Sampson has suggested elsewhere on this blog, health economists should be paying more attention to what is published […]
Sharing this Call-to-Action on HealthEconomics.Com and all of our social media networks. Thank you, Carl.
Great initiative!