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View all search resultsYou can trust Wikipedia, but always check sources and citations
When 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.
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Q
strong>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.
How is Wikipedia staying resilient amid a rapid change of information? Does it really focus on breaking news?
I think the COVID-19 pandemic is unusual in that it is a long, ongoing breaking news event. The good news is that we have actually reached a bit of stability right now, while in the early days, there was so much work happening to document things that were unknown about the disease and about the virus itself. Now that most of the breaking news content and some of the medical information have been established, the editors can really focus on the impact of the pandemic from a public health perspective.
Does Wikipedia really focus on breaking news? Yes. There is a whole group of Wikipedians from many different languages who are interested in ensuring Wikipedia has information about breaking news events, whether those are things like the pandemic, natural disasters or political events such as elections.
