COVID-19 research in Wikipedia [article]

Giovanni Colavizza
2020 bioRxiv   pre-print
Wikipedia is one of the main sources of free knowledge on the Web. During the first few months of the pandemic, over 4,500 new Wikipedia pages on COVID-19 have been created and have accumulated close to 250M pageviews by early April 2020. At the same time, an unprecedented amount of scientific articles on COVID-19 and the ongoing pandemic have been published online. Wikipedia's contents are based on reliable sources, primarily scientific literature. Given its public function, it is crucial for
more » ... ikipedia to rely on representative and reliable scientific results, especially so in a time of crisis. We assess the coverage of COVID-19-related research in Wikipedia via citations. We find that Wikipedia editors are integrating new research at an unprecedented fast pace. While doing so, they are able to provide a largely 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, despite the pressure to keep up with novel results, Wikipedia editors rely on literature which is highly cited, widely shared on social media, and has been peer-reviewed.
doi:10.1101/2020.05.10.087643 fatcat:m47tl6mkwzbkvpvzchfce4tby4