Wikimedia New York City/Reporting 2019-2020/Program Story
Background edit
In early March, Wikimedia New York City ceased support of in-person events for the safety of our members and event participants. It was a heartbreaking move away from the kind of direct interpersonal exchange with our community that we value so much, adding Wikipedia meetups to a growing list of events with an uncertain future. Some planned events were canceled or postponed indefinitely, while others worked hard to adapt to a new online-only format. We look forward to a day when we can once again convene in the same room to talk about Wikipedia and open culture over pizza, but until then we must try to adapt.
There are many elements of in-person events that do not effectively transfer to a virtual environment, but the internet does provide an opportunity to involve people who would otherwise be unable to attend an in-person event in New York City. Without physical limitations, we have the potential to reach a much larger potential audience. With that in mind, we talked about organizing a symposium. We often invite people to present at our monthly WikiWednesday Salons, and prepared talks are always popular with attendees. With a symposium format, we could invite people to prepare presentations on a theme, and could stream their words to anyone who wanted to hear.
The theme we chose was obvious. New York City was the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, and we know that when the public hears about something on the news and wants to learn more, they turn to Wikipedia. In fact, the site received record-breaking pageviews in April. But most people don't know the range of pandemic-related topics Wikipedia covers, how reliable it may be, who volunteers their time to ensure that quality, how editors self-organize, and the role of Wikipedia's sister sites like Wikidata. To that end, we decided to plan the Symposium on Wikipedia and COVID-19.
Logistics edit
On May 9, 2020, at 6:00 PM New York time, we hosted four speakers, all of whom are active contributors to the topic area on Wikipedia, but brought different perspectives, backgrounds, and interests. The event was free and open to the public, broadcast live on YouTube and Facebook, and questions were taken from viewers on these platforms.
To host the event, we decided to use the StreamYard platform, which allows for easy automatic streaming on major platforms, reading and highlighting audience comments, creating and displaying banners and graphic, and other features that seemed useful for this style of event. We kept up communication with participants and met several times before the event to test the software and its features for everyone. To facilitate audience interaction, we had volunteers on both YouTube and Facebook and devised a plan to highlight comments and questions for the moderator to either summarize or display on the screen directly. StreamYard has a live feed that combines them, but we knew there would be more questions than we could include in the stream, so the volunteers were able to answer some of the questions directly in the chat without using the broadcast. There are ways we could have better assigned roles and responsibilities behind the scenes in StreamYard (there was one moment when a volunteer monitoring the chat and the moderator worked cross purposes regarding graphics), but we sorted it out live and the event was otherwise free of technical or procedural problems.
Presentations edit
From the beginning, we knew we wanted a diverse group of speakers who could present about different aspects of pandemic coverage on Wikimedia projects. In researching what people have been working on, we came up with an ideal four-person panel, and to our delight those four quickly confirmed their participation. Below are the biographies of the speakers and an their presentation abstracts.
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Wikipedia is a good example for how people come together at times of crises to build up well-curated, frequently updated and fairly reliable content about various aspects of the crisis. During the 2019-20 coronavirus pandemic, several Wikimedians, including experts, came together to create articles, media and structured data about the medical aspects of the pandemic. I will provide an overview of the medical articles present on English Wikipedia and how Wikimedians work to increase the reliability of these articles. I shall also talk about translation efforts of COVID-19 medical content to various languages, the progress of the work and the challenges faced during the process. I will touch upon the ways by which experts in medical specialities can contribute to Wikimedia projects.
Netha Hussain (User:Netha Hussain) is a physician and researcher. She is currently pursuing her PhD in clinical neuroscience at University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She is an active contributor on Wikipedia, Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons in English and Malayalam languages. She mostly contributes to topics related to medicine, healthcare, women's biographies on Wikipedia. She has organized outreach events for increasing the diversity of participation of the Wikimedia movement and created GLAM partnerships for content donation to Wikimedia. She is currently a member of the editorial board of WikiJournal of Medicine.
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I will provide an overview of the creation, growth, and activities of WikiProject COVID-19 at English Wikipedia, which now has 150+ members collaborating on hundreds of Wikipedia articles and other pages. I'll focus on English Wikipedia but will mention similar efforts related to COVID-19 at other Wikipedias and Wikimedia projects.
I will then give an overview of Wikipedia's non-medical coverage of the pandemic, highlighting the different types of Wikipedia articles about economic repercussions, national responses, and other societal impacts. My goals here are to demonstrate the wide range of topics related to COVID-19, which speak to the pandemic's unprecedented impact across a variety of disciplines, and to remind listeners there are many opportunities to improve Wikipedia.
Jason Moore (User:Another Believer) is based in Portland, Oregon, and has been a daily Wikipedia editor for more than a decade. He ranks as one of the 100 most active English Wikipedia editors of all time and contributes to a wide variety of topics, ranging from local history and public art to current events, music, and politics. He founded WikiProject COVID-19 and actively supports other campaigns and affiliates within the Wikimedia movement, including Art+Feminism, Cascadia Wikimedians, and Wikimedia LGBT+.
Providing critical expertise to Wikipedia from a government agency: Obstacles and opportunities edit
The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) is one of the first US federal agencies, and the first within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), to develop a multi-component strategy to contribute data, content, images, and videos on the latest health research into Wikimedia platforms. NIOSH staff has access to training and also the expertise of a Wikipedian-in-Residence for support. We are encouraged to contribute content to Wikipedia, organize external training and events, and our publications are in the public domain. Emergency situations -- whether natural disasters or pandemic diseases -- require updated and consistent messaging across our agencies; this triggers the need to seek internal approval before adding content to Wikipedia. The more expeditious approach is to switch the focus of our efforts from direct editing to alerting Wikipedia editors of our emergency response-related information as it is made public. This is accomplished through the Talk and Discussion tabs where cross-project coordination takes place, as well as other auxiliary efforts.
Thais Morata (User:TMorata) is a public health researcher based in Cincinnati. She has been editing Wikipedia on a variety of subjects mostly related to occupational health and hearing loss prevention in the workplace. She contributes as co-instructor to several University classes, with the help of the Wiki Education Foundation platform to improve coverage of public health, occupational safety and health, acoustics and audiology articles. She actively organizes or supports various campaigns within the Wikimedia movement.
COVID-19 seen through Wikidata edit
Wikipedia is a text encyclopedia and Wikidata is the structured data collection which complements it. We will explore COVID-19 from the perspective of Wikidata and consider the role of data in public understanding of health. This talk will showcase COVID-19 Wikidata information including epidemiology statistics, citations to academic literature, maps, clinical trials, and logs of those who have died as a consequence of COVID-19. Although this talk focuses on COVID-19, all of this will be presented as an example of Wikipedia's general model for disaster response and crisis preparedness.
Lane Rasberry (User:Bluerasberry) is Wikimedian-in-residence at the School of Data Science at the University of Virginia. His interests include popular science, consumer protection, civic engagement, access to health information, clinical research, the Open Movement, data science, LGBT history, and Wikimedia projects.
Reception edit
We received a great deal of positive feedback from attendees, people who watched it later, and others in the community. More than 300 people watched it live. Afterwards, it received another 1,600 views between YouTube and Facebook (as of July 23, 2020) and was uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. Discussion and comments on the video are still available through the YouTube and Facebook pages. The main event page, where the Commons video is embedded, received more than 25,000 pageviews. In addition to being mentioned in the Signpost and GLAM Newsletter, it was covered in a Slate article by Stephen Harrison, Future Historians Will Rely on Wikipedia’s COVID-19 Coverage.