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You can trust Wikipedia, but always check sources and citations
What we believe is that Wikipedia can only be successful when the rest of the information ecosystem is healthy, says Wikimedia Foundation CEO Katherine Maher.
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Looking for new homes: Piles of used encyclopedias that are offered at the price of Rp 750,000 (US$53.08) await new owners. Unfortunately, many people nowadays prefer to consult Wikipedia rather than an encyclopedia. (JP/Arief Suhardiman)
W
hen the reliability of information is a matter of life and death in the time of COVID-19, Wikipedia’s volunteer editors have been facing great challenges to present the most trustworthy content possible to the public. Speed and accuracy are essential, but misinformation can infiltrate the platform. Katherine Maher, the CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, which manages Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects, shared recently with The Jakarta Post’s Budi Sutrisno how the free encyclopedia is handling the situation.
Question: How do you make sure that every part of the world affected by the pandemic gets coverage despite the demographic bias that most of the editors happen to be from the West?
Answer: It is correct that many of the Wikipedia editors on English Wikipedia are based in North America or other Western countries such as the [United Kingdom], but it is also the case that the people who edit Wikipedia around the world are focusing on the COVID-19 pandemic. We have editors from almost every active language community who have written articles about the COVID-19 pandemic.
One of the ways in which the community is working on this is through the WikiProject Medicine, which is an initiative by people in our medical editing community to ensure that the quality of COVID-19 articles is consistent across languages for critical information about the pandemic. This is a volunteer effort that involves people from many different countries and languages who are committed to the idea that public health information should be accessible.
The other way is through the World Health Organization. We are partnering with the WHO to ensure all COVID-19-related articles have the latest, most high quality and up-to-date information that the WHO is itself providing to the world.
