This book explores the mediation and contestation of medical evidence in Wikipedia.
Existing scholarship in the medical sciences has highlighted Wikipedia as a key tool for medical ‘knowledge translation’, understood as the process of accelerating the wide dissemination and implementation of the latest scientific evidence in healthcare. Little is known, however, about the people, practices and politics involved in the production of Wikipedia’s medicine and health-related content. To address this gap, this book draws on theories and methods developed in the humanities field of translation studies and over a decade of empirical research into Wikipedia to examine the social, cultural and political dimensions of medical knowledge translation in the online encyclopedia. In doing so, it not only elucidates the complexity of factors that shape what knowledge gets translated, who by, why and how. It also shows how positioning medical knowledge translation within a broader continuum of other interlingual, intralingual and inter-epistemic translational practices can open up novel transdisciplinary perspectives on the critical challenges of improving health, health literacy and healthcare worldwide.
The book is ideal for health humanities researchers and students interested in the deep entanglement of medical evidence, media, power, identity and culture in today’s digital age.