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Meta-Research: Citation needed? Wikipedia and the COVID-19 pandemic

View ORCID ProfileOmer Benjakob, View ORCID ProfileRona Aviram, View ORCID ProfileJonathan Sobel
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.03.01.433379
Omer Benjakob
1The Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel
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  • For correspondence: omerbj@gmail.com anorona@gmail.com jsobel83@gmail.com
Rona Aviram
2Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel
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Jonathan Sobel
2Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel
3Faculty of Biomedical Engineering, Technion-IIT, Haifa, Israel
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  • For correspondence: omerbj@gmail.com anorona@gmail.com jsobel83@gmail.com
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Abstract

With the COVID-19 pandemic’s outbreak at the beginning of 2020, millions across the world flocked to Wikipedia to read about the virus. Our study offers an in-depth analysis of the scientific backbone supporting Wikipedia’s COVID-19 articles. Using references as a readout, we asked which sources informed Wikipedia’s growing pool of COVID-19-related articles during the pandemic’s first wave (January-May 2020). We found that coronavirus-related articles referenced trusted media sources and cited high-quality academic research. Moreover, despite a surge in preprints, Wikipedia’s COVID-19 articles had a clear preference for open-access studies published in respected journals and made little use of non-peer-reviewed research uploaded independently to academic servers. Building a timeline of COVID-19 articles on Wikipedia from 2001-2020 revealed a nuanced trade-off between quality and timeliness, with a growth in COVID-19 article creation and citations, from both academic research and popular media. It further revealed how preexisting articles on key topics related to the virus created a framework on Wikipedia for integrating new knowledge. This “scientific infrastructure” helped provide context, and regulated the influx of new information into Wikipedia. Lastly, we constructed a network of DOI-Wikipedia articles, which showed the landscape of pandemic-related knowledge on Wikipedia and revealed how citations create a web of scientific knowledge to support coverage of scientific topics like COVID-19 vaccine development. Understanding how scientific research interacts with the digital knowledge-sphere during the pandemic provides insight into how Wikipedia can facilitate access to science. It also sheds light on how Wikipedia successfully fended of disinformation on the COVID-19 and may provide insight into how its unique model may be deployed in other contexts.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Footnotes

  • - Improved formatting - Textual changes regarding few discussion points about WPM

  • https://zenodo.org/record/3901741#.YD0Pdnk6-cw

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-ND 4.0 International license.
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Posted May 03, 2021.
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Meta-Research: Citation needed? Wikipedia and the COVID-19 pandemic
Omer Benjakob, Rona Aviram, Jonathan Sobel
bioRxiv 2021.03.01.433379; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.03.01.433379
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Meta-Research: Citation needed? Wikipedia and the COVID-19 pandemic
Omer Benjakob, Rona Aviram, Jonathan Sobel
bioRxiv 2021.03.01.433379; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.03.01.433379

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