Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2020-03-29/Special report
Wikipedia on COVID-19: what we publish and why it matters
Wikipedia is among the most requested, published, accessed, and consulted sources of information on
Wikipedia's volunteer editors ask the world to identify the most reliable authorities who have published the best information. With these sources available, wiki editors invite everyone to join them in summarizing and citing this content to develop the Wikipedia articles which people read. In this way, readers everywhere get access to information and a public and permanently archived editorial process which anyone can join, review, and critique. Anyone in the world who knows of any expert organization with general reference information to share in any language can encourage that organization to take advantage of Wikipedia's broad reach to share their content. Otherwise, any supporters of an organization's good content can summarize and cite that information themselves in Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is the world's central general information resource
Wikipedia is popular because Wikipedia articles have a high rank in
The audience who reads Wikipedia are the people who use search engines including
Wikipedia's traffic reports are available to everyone
Articles for the COVID-19 pandemic in
are all part of Wikipedia as a multilingual hub and center for establishing global census in information sharing. As Wikipedia is a free and open project, the traffic report for every Wikipedia article in every language is free and open data for everyone to examine. These reports can help organizations to evaluate the usefulness of publishing in Wikipedia. Conventional communication investment assumes that an expert organization will be able to produce quality information at low cost, but then pay for expensive advertising and outreach to drive readers to their website or insert their content as advertising into existing reader communication channels. With Wikipedia, the audience reach is predictable as the people who use Internet search for gathering information. Consequently, Wikipedia's major challenge is in identifying and acquiring content and collaborations with organizations which will share it. Any organization which is engaged in global-scale public benefit communication, such as for global health, can use Wikipedia traffic reports to compare the pageviews to existing Wikipedia articles with their other options through other media channels.Three popular Wikipedia audience metrics reports are "Pageviews", which is the traffic to a single article in a single language; "Massviews", which is the traffic to any number of articles in one language; and "Langviews", which is the traffic to a single article in every available Wikipedia language version. All of these are variations of the Pageviews Analysis tool, which itself is a part of the broader practice of wiki traffic reporting.
Three main COVID-19 articles: disease, virus, and pandemic
Wikipedia's most popular articles on COVID-19 are for the disease in the human body,
Consider the Wikipedia article on the virus. Wikipedia is uncommon or alone among all popular media sources for its attempt to summarize and cite academic journal articles in the scientific field of virology, molecular biology, and genetics. Of the 90 sources which Wikipedia editors currently cite in the article, 40 are to materials published in academic journals. The Wikipedia community's intent here is to bring the best available information to the public when people ask for it, and in the case of COVID-19, people who have never before asked for information from academic journals are getting science articles on demand right here. Readers can even click through and read those research articles if they are available to the public.
Subtopics: locations, people, timelines, and social issues
Almost every country in the world has its own national story about how COVID-19 changed the lives of its people and the activities of its society. Wikipedia has individual articles to present and preserve these stories
The most popular single article type in Wikipedia is the biography. When a person has been the subject of media attention, then Wikipedia editors can cite those media sources and create a biography. Wikipedia's curated COVID-19 collection of biographies includes prominent researchers and scientists, the politicians who are issuing policy decisions, and people who gain attention for their COVID-19 infections. In many cases, these articles began in the local language version Wikipedia of the subject's country of origin, but once anywhere in Wikipedia, editors will translate these biographies into local languages.
English Wikipedia editors deem more than 400 articles worth managing in the
Illustrations and multimedia for every topic
Wikipedia is more than a plain text encyclopedia: some editors volunteer their time curating the text, while others perform other necessary functions such as illustration and photography, copyediting, community organizing, data science, quality control, and administrative tasks.
For supplementary media to illustrate their articles, the encyclopedia writers look to Wikimedia Commons, which is the Wikimedia sister project curating non-text media such as the photos which illustrate Wikipedia's text encyclopedia articles. The typical source of photography is the volunteer photographer who takes a picture wherever they are in the world and shares it in the Wikimedia platform with a free and open copyright license for anyone to reuse. Photography itself has its own subcultures, and for example, there is a culture in photography of people who like to take photos of ships, landscapes, and people.
Part of the COVID-19 story is how
The source of portraits is typically an encounter between a Wikipedia editor and a person of interest. The United States is one of only a few nations that are applying public domain copyright status to its output, which is why Wikimedia curators can re-purpose some medical illustrations from the Centers for Disease Control as Wikipedia illustrations. Many sincere graphic designers also assist Wikipedia by attaching free and open copyright licenses to their illustrations of abstract concepts, which would be challenging to portray otherwise.
Ebola in 2013, Zika in 2016, and Wikidata every day
Every article in Wikipedia gets a corresponding Wikidata item. From this point, Wikidata is the hub of Wikimedia cataloging, organization, and query across all languages. For example, Wikidata labels the COVID-19 pandemic (Q81068910) as an "instance of a pandemic". A "pandemic" is a subclass of disaster, so now COVID-19 outbreaks will appear – whenever and wherever someone includes them in Wikipedia/Wikidata – on the automatically generated maps and timelines of WikiProject Humanitarian Wikidata. The wiki community logs both present and historical outbreaks, wildfires, plane crashes, and mass shootings in Wikidata for anyone to query by disaster type, location, number of people affected, or any other descriptor of the sort which wiki editors would use in writing about an occurrence.
Much information about disease outbreaks comes from academic journals, which are the scholarly publications of researchers. Prior to Wikipedia, most people who read academic journals were university professors and students or experts in a field. Since the establishment of Wikipedia, the wiki community has taught the world more broadly that people who make claims should cite reliable sources, and that informed citizens can establish consensus to distinguish objective truth versus fake news, and that instead of anyone citing Wikipedia, fact-checkers should inspect and cite the original sources which Wikipedia itself cites. Wikidata catalogs the source metadata of citations in the WikiCite project. Once these citations are available in Wikidata format, then anyone can query these publications to find the best sources to cite in Wikipedia or for research in any context. Anyone who wishes to review the WikiCite collection of information may review and curate COVID-19 information about the disease, the pandemic, and the virus.
The encyclopedia which anyone can edit
The Wikimedia community of volunteer editors takes its central media role in the information environment seriously. Just as seriously, Wikipedia editors want Wikipedia to be a friendly and civil environment where everyone can peacefully collaborate. Anyone interested in learning more should create a Wikipedia account and edit articles immediately to experience the culture for themselves. Constructive alternatives to editing include posting comments on Wikipedia talk pages, discussing Wikipedia with friends and colleagues, encouraging your local schools and knowledge centers to teach and edit Wikipedia, and praising anyone who demonstrates an interest in the importance of citing sources. The companion piece to this article, "Wikimedia community responds to COVID-19", tells some of the stories of the Wikipedia community organizations who have contributed to the pandemic coverage.
Discuss this story
thank you for bringing attention to this subject that affects us all --Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 21:43, 3 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]