During the Zika virus epidemic, the public headed to Wikipedia as a source of information. Similar ... [+]
A new study out in the PLOS Computational Biology journal shows that public attention in the midst of the Zika virus epidemic was largely driven by media coverage, rather than the epidemic’s magnitude or extent, highlighting the importance of mass media coverage when it comes to public health. This is reflected in the ongoing COVID-19 situation, where to date, the main 2019–20 coronavirus pandemic Wikipedia page has over ten million page views.
The 2015-2016 Zika virus epidemic began in Northeastern Brazil, and spread across South and North America. The Zika virus was largely spread by infected Aedes mosquitoes, where symptoms included a fever, headache, itching, and muscle pain. It could also be transmitted between pregnant women and their fetuses, causing microcephaly, where a baby's head was much smaller than expected.
Similar to the ongoing COVID-19 situation, the media coverage around the Zika virus epidemic shaped public opinion and awareness.
“We knew that it was relevant, and very important, for public health to understand how the media and news shapes the attention of [the] public during epidemic outbreaks,” says Michele Tizzoni, a principal investigator based at the Institute for Scientific Interchange (ISI) Foundation. Tizzoni is the lead author of this PLOS One study, and is currently under lockdown as a result of COVID-19 in Turin, a northern city in Italy.
“A relevant question here is how much [is] the attention or awareness of individuals during an outbreak modulated by the prevalence of the disease itself. Does it depend on a lot on the fact that there are more cases in an area or is it more [of] a global awareness? […] In the case of COVID-19, is the interest towards COVID higher in places where there are more cases or not?”
To answer this question in the context of the Zika virus epidemic, Tizzoni and colleagues developed different statistical models to investigate the relationship between public exposure to media coverage, and the attention to Wikipedia pages.
As one in three (35%) Americans head to sites, such as Wikipedia, to figure out what medical condition have, Tizzoni and colleagues decided to use visits to Wikipedia pages as a proxy for public attention. The researchers collected the hourly page view data from 128 relevant Wikipedia pages in 2016, including the Zika virus page which received more than eight million views. They also looked for any news coverage which mentioned “Zika” and the “United Sates” in 2016, collecting a total of 112,706 news items from 7,737 different online news outlets, and 23,855 mentions of the word “Zika” in 1,410 English and Spanish programs, aired by 64 U.S. TV stations.
Their findings reveal that visits to Zika-related Wikipedia pages were synchronized, and can be explained by exposure to online and TV coverage, rather than the magnitude or extent of the Zika virus epidemic.
“The global attention that we measured through Wikipedia page views was synchronized at the whole national level in the U.S., and [it was] highly synchronized with the TV and news coverage of the outbreak, and [was] not as much related to the actual incidence of the disease,” says Tizzoni. “People in California or higher [up in the U.S.] were looking at Wikipedia pages [relevant to the Zika virus] in the same way as people in Florida or Texas were, [where] the potential for transmission was higher.”
For example, during the Zika virus epidemic, there were two peaks in attention on Wikipedia: in the beginning of February 2016, corresponding to the announcements from the WHO and CDC; and the second, in August 2016, corresponding to the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. Similarly, there was increased media coverage at these two time points.
“We could actually model the [Wikipedia] page view data using the TV data only — with accuracy,” says Tizzoni.
While this study was limited to a single disease in one country, a similar study found a strong positive correlation between news coverage and social media mentions in the U.S., Brazil and Guatemala during the Zika virus epidemic, suggesting that individuals are more likely to seek out information when official announcements are made, highlighting a critical time period to share information with the public.
This is important more than ever in the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak.
To date, the main 2019–20 coronavirus pandemic Wikipedia page has over ten million page views. ... [+]
Today, the 2019–20 coronavirus pandemic Wikipedia page has around ten million page views. As per Toby Negrin, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Chief Product Officer, this page has been edited over 12K times by nearly 1,900 different editors. The page is currently semi-protected – a common practice for Wikipedia pages that are relevant to current news stories.
In an email, Negrin shared that “the day after the World Health Organization classified COVID-19 as a pandemic on March 11th, the main English Wikipedia article about the pandemic had nearly 1.1 million views, an increase of nearly 30% from the day before the WHO’s announcement (on March 10th, it had just over 809,000 views).” This is similar to the peaks in Wikipedia attention observed when official announcements took place during the Zika virus epidemic.
In addition, initial data from Tizzoni’s research group shows that the lockdown in Italy has resulted in a 50% or more decrease in movement between provinces. Similarly, Negrin notes that since the national lockdown in Italy, “total pageviews from Italy to all Wikimedia projects increased by nearly 30% over where they were at the same time last year.”
With increased public awareness during epidemics, tackling misinformation is critical. This remains important at Wikipedia.
“When it comes to documenting current events on Wikipedia, volunteers take even greater care to get the facts right,” stated Negrin, and pointed out that there is a page dedicated to misinformation during this pandemic, which has received over half a million views.
“We value accuracy over speed. Wikipedia is not the first to break the news, but volunteers around the world work minute by minute, edit by edit to make sure that new information is verified, cited and included so that people have access to the most accurate information possible.”
