COVID-19 research in Wikipedia

Giovanni Colavizza

doi:10.1162/qss_a_00080

Abstract

Wikipedia is one of the main sources of free knowledge on the Web. During the first few months of the pandemic, over 5,200 new Wikipedia pages on COVID-19 were created, accumulating over 400 million page views by mid-June 2020. 1 At the same time, an unprecedented amount of scientific articles on COVID-19 and the ongoing pandemic have been published online. Wikipedia’s content is based on reliable sources, such as scientific literature. Given its public function, it is crucial for Wikipedia to rely on representative and reliable scientific results, especially in a time of crisis. We assess the coverage of COVID-19-related research in Wikipedia via citations to a corpus of over 160,000 articles. We find that Wikipedia editors are integrating new research at a fast pace, and have cited close to 2% of the COVID-19 literature under consideration. While doing so, they are able to provide a representative coverage of COVID-19-related research. We show that all the main topics discussed in this literature are proportionally represented from Wikipedia, after accounting for article-level effects. We further use regression analyses to model citations from Wikipedia and show that Wikipedia editors on average rely on literature that is highly cited, widely shared on social media, and peer-reviewed.

Highlights

Alongside the primary health crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic has been recognized as an information crisis, or an “infodemic” (Cinelli, Quattrociocchi, et al, 2020; Ioannidis, 2020; Xie, He, et al, 2020)
We pose the following general question: Is Wikipedia relying on a representative and reliable sample of COVID-19-related research? We break this question down into the following two research questions: 1. RQ1: Is the literature cited in Wikipedia representative of the broader topics discussed in COVID-19-related research?
We address here our first research question: Is the literature cited in Wikipedia representative of the broader topics discussed in COVID-19-related research? We start by comparing the general topic coverage of articles cited from Wikipedia with those which are not

Summary

Introduction

Alongside the primary health crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic has been recognized as an information crisis, or an “infodemic” (Cinelli, Quattrociocchi, et al, 2020; Ioannidis, 2020; Xie, He, et al, 2020). Widespread misinformation (Swire-Thompson & Lazer, 2020) and low levels of health literacy (Paakkari & Okan, 2020) are two of the main issues. In an effort to deal with them, the World Health Organization maintains a list of relevant research updated daily (Zarocostas, 2020), as well as a portal to provide information to the public (World Health Organization, 2020a); the European Commission does (European Commission, 2020), as do many other countries and organizations. The need to convey accurate, reliable, and understandable medical information online has never been so pressing. Wikipedia plays a fundamental role as a public source of information on the Web, striving to provide “neutral” and unbiased content (Mesgari, Okoli, et al, 2015). Wikipedia is important for access trusted medical information (Smith, 2020; Swire-Thompson & Lazer, 2020). Wikipedia’s verifiability policy mandates that readers can check the sources of information contained in Wikipedia, and that reliable sources should be secondary and published. These

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