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The World Health Organization (WHO) has announced that it's collaborating with Wikipedia, opening up its Covid-19 information resources through the site.
The plan is to make public health information available under Wikipedia's Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, which allows users to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and to remix, transform and build on it for any purpose, even commercially.
Information must be attributed, and any content built on it must be shared under the same license.
The information includes infographics, videos and other public health assets, and will be translated across national and regional languages by Wikipedia's volunteer editors, who number more than 250,000.
"Access to information is essential to healthy communities and should be treated as such. This becomes even more clear in times of global health crises when information can have life-changing consequences," says Katherine Maher, CEO at the Wikimedia Foundation.
"All institutions, from governments to international health agencies, scientific bodies to Wikipedia, must do our part to ensure everyone has equitable and trusted access to knowledge about public health, regardless of where you live or the language you speak."
The WHO has been concerned for some time about what it calls an 'infodemic' — "an overabundance of information and the rapid spread of misleading or fabricated news, images, and videos". In the early days of the pandemic, it says, rumors about food shortages led to stockpiling - which did, indeed, cause supply problems. More shockingly, after Donald Trump spoke about the possibility of using hydroxychloroquine as a as a treatment for Covid-19, at least one person died after ingesting a fish tank cleaning product containing chloroquine. Others are reported to have drunk bleach after more presidential speculation.
And you could say it's personal: in a study of misinformation this summer, the Reuters Institute and the University of Oxford found that the single biggest category of misinformation was misleading or false claims about the actions or policies of public authorities like the WHO or the UN.
It's fair to say that Wikipedia has had misinformation problems of its own, but its response to the pandemic has generrally been seen as effective, with editors making thousands of corrections a day.
