The quality of Wikipedia articles regarding concepts in the field of microbiology and parasitology

Wikipedia is an online, non-commercial, multilingual encyclopedia created in 2001. Its characteristic feature is that the content can be edited and new articles can be created by anyone. The aim of the study was to analyze the quality of articles in Polish Wikipedia (pl.wikipedia.org) regarding concepts in the field of microbiology and parasitology. 231 articles were selected for analysis. Their content was examined in terms of factual errors, also stylistic and typographic. Archived versions of articles were not analyzed. A differentiated level of quality of the examined articles was observed. 13 articles (5,63%) showed serious factual errors. In addition, some of the 231 articles contained out-of-date information, not relevant or did not contain information relevant to the discussed issue. The articles often had outdated links, small number of bibliographic items (0 ‒ 28.57%, 1 ‒ 25.97%), low quality or outdated sources (e.g. from 1964, 1975). The authors also did not describe abbreviations and used genre names incorrectly (a specific name was omitted). The presence of factual errors in articles and articles without bibliographic sources indicate that Polish Wikipedia cannot be treated as a reliable source of information