Wikipedia: a tool to monitor seasonal diseases trends?

Today, Internet, especially Wikipedia, is an important part of everyday life. People can notably use this popular free online encyclopedia to search health-related information. Recent studies showed that Wikipedia data can be used to monitor and to forecast influenza-like illnesses in near real time in the United States [1,2].

 We carried out a study to explore whether French Wikipedia data allow to monitor the trends of five seasonal diseases in metropolitan France: influenza-like illness, gastroenteritis, bronchiolitis, chickenpox and asthma.

Objective

To explore the interest of Wikipedia as a data source to monitor seasonal diseases trends in metropolitan France.