COVID-19 research in Wikipedia

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 have been created and have accumulated over 400M pageviews 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 contents are 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 so 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 considera- tion. 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 which is highly cited, widely shared on social media, and has been peer-reviewed.

Wikipedia citations: A comprehensive data set of citations with identifiers extracted from English Wikipedia

“…This result is in line with previous findings (Pooladian & Borrego, 2017;Priem et al, 2012;Shuai et al, 2013;Zahedi et al, 2014). The proportion of cited articles might seem low when compared to all of science, yet it is worth considering that an editorial selection takes place: Articles cited from Wikipedia are typically highly cited and published in visible journals (Arroyo-Machado et al, 2020;Colavizza, 2020;Nielsen, 2007;Teplitskiy et al, 2017). All in all, the relatively low fraction of scientific articles cited from Wikipedia over the total available does not per se entail a lack of coverage or quality in its contents: More work is needed to assess whether this might be the case.…”

“…The reliability of Wikipedia's content has been debated, as anyone can edit it (Mesgari et al, 2015;Okoli, Mehdi et al, 2012). Nevertheless, the confidence that users and third-party services place on Wikipedia appears to be justified: Wikipedia's content is of general high quality and up to date, as shown by several studies over time (Colavizza, 2020;Geiger & Halfaker, 2013;Keegan, Gergle, & Contractor, 2011;Kumar, West, & Leskovec, 2016;Okoli et al, 2012;Piscopo & Simperl, 2019;Priedhorsky, Chen et al, 2007).…”

How are encyclopedias cited in academic research? Wikipedia, Britannica, Baidu Baike, and Scholarpedia

“…Altogether Wikipedia was cited by 141, 991 Scopus indexed documents (2002to 2020), Britannica 15,929 (2002to 2020), Baidu Baike 2,934 (2007to 2020) and Scholarpedia 8,399 (2007to 2020. The proportions of documents citing each of the four encyclopedias have increased over time, with Wikipedia being by far the most cited (Figure 1).…”

“…Wikipedia has become popular for both education and research since it started in 2001 Thelwall, 2017;Mesgari et al, 2015;Okoli et al, 2014), although the authority of its content has been repeatedly scrutinized for accuracy and coverage (Chesney, 2006;Giles, 2005;Holman-Rector, 2008;Jullien, 2012;Messner;DiStaso, 2013;Okoli et al, 2012;Samoilenko;Yasseri, 2014). One advantage of Wikipedia is its ability to react quickly to new issues, such as Covid-19 (Colavizza, 2020). Since Wikipedia summarizes knowledge for a general audience, often supported by references, it has been used as evidence of the wider impact of academic research to complement traditional citation-based indicators (Jemielniak;Masukume;Wilamowski, 2019;Thelwall, 2017;Lin;Fenner, 2014;Priem;Piwowar;Hemminger, 2012).…”

Identifying and characterizing social media communities: a socio-semantic network approach to altmetrics

“…Also, most of these studies revolve around the use of Twitter and Wikipedia. Colavizza ( 2020 ) estimated how well Wikipedia, as a tool communicating scientific knowledge to the general public, reflects current scientific progress on COVID-19. Similarly, science mapping techniques haven been used to analyze how Wikipedia structured science in comparison with global science maps based on bibliometric databases (Arroyo-Machado et al, 2020 ); and the humanities (Torres-Salinas et al, 2019 ).…”