- Author
- Year
- 2020
- Title
- COVID-19 research in Wikipedia
- Journal
- Quantitative Science Studies
- Volume | Issue number
- 1 | 4
- Pages (from-to)
- 1349-1380
- Number of pages
- 32
- Document type
- Article
- Faculty
- Faculty of Humanities (FGw)
Interfacultary Research - Institute
- Amsterdam Institute for Humanities Research (AIHR)
Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) - 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 were created, accumulating over 400 million page views 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 content is 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 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 219 literature under consideration. 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 that is highly cited, widely shared on social media, and peer-reviewed.
- URL
- go to publisher's site
- Language
- English
- Persistent Identifier
- https://hdl.handle.net/11245.1/1558b583-13c1-4e18-9800-0234a0aeb329
- Downloads
-
qss_a_00080(Final published version)
Disclaimer/Complaints regulations
If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library, or send a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible.