Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Infodemiology
Date Submitted: Jul 20, 2024
Date Accepted: Oct 8, 2024
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
How reproductive health information-seeking behaviors changed post-Dobbs: A Wikipedia page views analysis
ABSTRACT
Background:
After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, confusion followed regarding the legality of abortion in different states across the country. Recent studies found increased Google searches for abortion-related terms in restricted states after the Dobbs decision was leaked. Since patients and providers use Wikipedia as a predominant medical information source, we hypothesized that changes in reproductive health information-seeking behavior could be better understood by examining Wikipedia article traffic.
Objective:
Our objective was to examine trends in Wikipedia usage for abortion and contraception information pre- and post-Dobbs.
Methods:
Page views of abortion and contraception-related Wikipedia pages were scraped. Temporal changes in page views pre- and post-Dobbs were then analyzed to explore changes in baseline views, differences in views for abortion-related information in restrictive versus non-restrictive states, and viewer trends on contraception-related pages.
Results:
Wikipedia articles related to abortion topics had significantly increased page views following the leaked and final Dobbs decision. Articles about abortion in restrictive states had significantly more page views than articles about abortion in less restrictive states. Finally, pages about common contraceptive methods had significantly increased views post-Dobbs.
Conclusions:
People sought information on Wikipedia about abortion and contraception at increased rates post-Dobbs. Increased traffic to abortion-related Wikipedia articles correlated to the restrictiveness of states abortion policies. Increased interest in contraception-related pages reflects the increased demand for contraceptives observed post-Dobbs. Our work positions Wikipedia as an important source of reproductive health information and demands increased attention to maintain and improve Wikipedia as a reliable source of health information post-Dobbs.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.