Should FDA or Pharma Correct/Edit Drug Information on Wikipedia?

A New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) Perspective ("Drug Safety in the Digital Age") suggests that the FDA "update or automatically feed new safety communications to Wikipedia pages." The authors cite this precedent: "In 2008, the FDA partnered with WebMD to bring public health announcements to all registered users and to quickly integrate this information into WebMD's suite of Web pages."The reason this was suggested is apparent from the following chart, which shows that FDA safety warnings were associated with an "82% increase, on average, in Google searches for the drugs during the week after the announcement and a 175% increase in views of Wikipedia pages for the drugs on the day of the announcement, as compared with baseline trends." Given that insight, the authors believe it is imperative that the drug information consumers find on Wikipedia reflect the most recent information viz-a-viz drug warnings from the FDA. The problem is that it takes a long time -- if ever -- for edits to be made: 36% of the relevant Wikipedia pages remained unchanged more than 1 year after FDA issued warnings. The authors did NOT suggest that pharmaceutical companies "partner" with Wikipedia to correct/edit drug information on Wikipedia.Why not?Read more ยป
Source: Pharma Marketing Blog - Category: Pharma Commentators Tags: Drug Safety FDA guidelines Wikipedia Source Type: blogs