Wikipedia has established itself as a reference source on the Covid19 for millions of French people. The French version of Wikipedia totaled 8.9 billion page views in 2020 (+5% compared to 2019). It recorded audience peaks during the containment and crossed the billion page view mark in April and May 2020. Of the top 10 most viewed articles in 2020, four are about the pandemic.
Wired magazine had devoted an investigation to how Wikipedia (the English version) had stemmed the tide of misinformation about Covid-19. " For a long time," observes WiredFor a long time," observes Wired, "the Wikipedia encyclopedia has been singled out as unreliable, on the grounds that anyone can edit the articles. However, this characteristic is also a strength that allows specialists from all over the world to improve the quality of articles, as is currently the case with Covid-19. Wikipedia's content on the coronavirus is attached to the WikiProject Medicine, which includes 150 editors with expertise in medicine or public health. Once an article is attached to the WikiProject Medicine, it is inspected very closely. The sources must include peer-reviewed journals, textbooks or official reports, and not just mainstream media (...) Does this mean that there is no questionable information about Covid-19 on Wikipedia? Yes, but on a dedicated page: "Disinformation related to the 2019-2020 coronavirus pandemic".
Wikipedia's ability to resist the infodemia and to publish reliable aggregated information relies on its founding principles (such as encyclopedic relevance or neutrality of point of view) and its rules (such as the primacy of secondary sources) that frame the activity of contributors and allow to settle the famous controversies and other "editing wars".
Le Monde set out to understand how the community that has been running the encyclopedia for the past twenty years has dealt with the pandemic and its constant stream of uncertainties, controversies and attempts at misinformation."- The Covid-19 crisis and its global ramifications have resulted in more than two hundred articles being written
- The article " Covid-19 pandemic" was created in January 2020 and has over 1,500 contributors
- It took almost 9,000 changes in a year to write it - the equivalent of one change per hour.
- This article alone has nearly 1000 different references at the bottom of the page.
- Almost three hundred people have added this article to their watch list and half of them have viewed recent changes.
- An observatory of sources, which is neither exhaustive nor prescriptive, allows contributors to check whether the site consulted is generally considered reliable or not.
Références :
the way crises are dealt with on Wikipedia at Telecom Paris; a subject they have been studying for three years.
