Wellcome Collection, Wikipedia and the pandemic
Wellcome’s vision is to “support science to solve the urgent health challenges facing everyone.” Getting expert knowledge out to as many people as possible means that the benefits of research can be widespread. At Wellcome Collection, one of the ways in which we do this is by training people to edit Wikipedia using published peer-reviewed research. During the Covid-19 pandemic, this proved to be more useful than even we thought possible.
Why Wikipedia?
In the 21st century, when we have questions, we turn to the internet. Some of us might go direct to Wikipedia; many others will ask a search engine, phone or smart speaker our questions, and their answers often come from Wikipedia or its sister site, Wikidata. A lot of people use Wikipedia to access information, knowingly or unknowingly: 22 billion per month, as of October 2021.
Readers come from all around the world: Wikipedia exists in hundreds of different languages (it’s easy to click between them, just look in the grey bar on the left side of any Wikipedia article) and there are gadgets to help editors translate information. There is even an app and a physical media platform called “Internet in a Box” to enable people with an unreliable or non-existent internet connection to access information.
It makes sense to put things where so many people are already looking for and accessing knowledge. So, as Wikimedian in Residence at Wellcome Collection, I help train people how to edit Wikipedia to add facts and references, how to edit Wikimedia Commons to share useful images such as photographs and diagrams, and how to use Wikidata, to share and query data.
Wellcome trains experts to edit
We regularly host training sessions to teach people how to edit Wikipedia and share their knowledge on life, health and wellbeing with the online encyclopaedia’s vast audience. We often work in partnership with organisations such as the National Institute for Health Research, the Royal College of Nursing, The Crick, Optica, the National Heart and Lung Institute and numerous universities, helping to facilitate these learned institutions sharing their expertise with as many people as possible.
Events we host are aimed at different audiences, which have included Wellcome Collection visitors, school students, nurses, doctors, researchers and scientists. The varied backgrounds, interests and ages of participants attending Wellcome Collection events mean they have knowledge on a wide range of subjects that they can then share with others. The events often also help to bring together experts with non-experts, so they can work together to think about the best way to share information with a wide audience, who might not be familiar with technical jargon.
Since 2019 (when this handy dashboard was created to keep track of metrics), participants at Wellcome Collection’s Wiki-events have added more than 545,000 words and 3500 references to Wikipedia, improved nearly 1500 articles and created 320 brand new articles. These new and improved pages have been viewed more than 6.5 million times since the events took place.
That’s an enormous impact just from events, but sometimes there is a ripple effect that creates even further impact: some participants are especially inspired by the potential of Wikipedia to do more and take things much further.
For instance, Ceryl Evans, who learned how to edit Wikipedia at a Wellcome Collection event, went on to run a nationwide centenary celebration for the Women’s Engineering Society that focussed on putting women engineers on the map (by editing Wikipedia). Another editor, Jess Wade, was subsequently recognised in the 2019 Birthday Honours for services to gender diversity in science for her efforts to improve the gender and racial equality of the scientists represented on Wikipedia.
And, to return to the pandemic, one remarkable editor trained at a Wellcome Collection session made sure that vital information was available to the whole world when it was desperately needed.
Wikipedia and COVID-19
When the COVID-19 pandemic began, the world turned to Wikipedia for information. As a Wired article noted:
As soon as the crisis kicked off, people flocked to Wikipedia to read about the virus and its potential risks, turning to the online encyclopedia for bits of trusted information that would often be shared on social media. Wikipedia’s map of confirmed cases, for example, was circulated on Twitter, and citizen scientists used its list of known cases to create data visualisations about the outbreak. On Reddit, users cited figures from Wikipedia while discussing the virus’s mortality rates.
We just expect to be able to find information on the world’s biggest encyclopaedia, especially on such an important topic. The information is there because of the invisible labour of volunteer editors.
Whispyhistory is one such editor. They are a London GP (who prefers to remain anonymous and remain known by their wiki-username). They trained at a Wellcome Collection event. And they helped play a key role in getting the article about the emerging outbreak on the front page of Wikipedia in January 2020, before most of us had even heard the term ‘coronavirus’. This editor worked tirelessly with others to prevent the spread of Coronavirus misinformation. They “guided the article about the new coronavirus from a one-sentence item in early January to a substantial article with charts of infections around the world”.
Like Whispyhistory, many of the editors working on medical articles on Wikipedia are healthcare workers. For instance, Dr Netha Hussain, a Swedish-based clinical neuroscientist and doctor, edits in English and Malayalam (a language of southwestern India) to improve articles about COVID-19 vaccines and Dr Alaa Najjar spent breaks during his emergency room shifts addressing COVID-19 misinformation on the Arabic version of the site.
These individuals are examples of a huge group effort. As of November 2021, more than 3000 people have helped work on the COVID-19 pandemic article on Wikipedia and there are currently 1969 people “watching” the article, ready to scrutinise any changes and ensure that they are informative, readable, and cite reliable sources.
This fact-checking goes beyond our present situation. A group of volunteers united under WikiProject Medicine oversee tens of thousands of medical articles. It instructs its participants to “cite reviews, don’t write them” and has strict rules on sourcing that go beyond what is usually required of a Wikipedia article.
These sources are important to readers: research indicates that readers of medical content on Wikipedia are particularly likely to verify the content by checking that it is well-referenced. Wikipedia’s “scientific infrastructure” and approach to sourcing has been praised by public health experts.
Even experts need encyclopaedias
People like public health experts are particularly well-placed to judge the reliability of the information they find on Wikipedia. And even experts need entry points to new topics, which Wikipedia often provides.
In November 2020, newspaper headlines proclaimed “SAGE experts relied on Wikipedia to model impact of Covid crisis”. Such headlines referred to a statement by Professor Ian Hall, the deputy chair of the UK Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling, who said in a documentary: ‘The public may be surprised that we were using Wikipedia to get data very early on in the pandemic, but that was really the only data that was publicly available that we could access.’
The newspapers made this sound like a terrible and worrying thing — the only available information was on Wikipedia, which (as all the newspapers were keen to observe) can be edited by anyone. But experts are aware of how Wikipedia works, and independently assess the reliability of the information they find there: Hall and his colleagues went to Wikipedia because it had useful, up-to-date, publicly available, and accessible information on the rapidly-developing situation of the COVID-19 pandemic.
And in training editors, Wellcome Collection played a part in helping to make this happen.
The impact of editing Wikipedia
Making information available as widely as possible is something we at Wellcome do in various ways from supporting researchers to publish findings openly to sharing materials from the Collection (more on this soon!).
Being open means being open to experts, and beyond. As long ago as 1865, Darwin acknowledged that “I sometimes think that general and popular treatises are almost as important for the progress of science as original work.” And we know that science is shaped by Wikipedia; Covid confirmed this.
Wellcome’s vision is that “We want everyone to benefit from science’s potential to improve health and save lives.” We believe that science works better when information can be openly shared, and during the pandemic, speed was vital to this. So, in addition to other initiatives, it makes perfect sense that we are bold enough to support making scientific knowledge openly accessible by training people to edit Wikipedia too.
