Wikipedia in the time of the Covid-19 crisis
25 May 2020
Wikipedia provides freely reusable, objective and verifiable content that every citizen may modify and improve. It is difficult to achieve this aim when it comes to providing real-time information about a crisis marked by uncertainty, as is the case with the current Covid-19 epidemic.
At Télécom Paris, Caroline Rizza, a researcher in information sciences, and Sandrine Bubendorff, a sociologist, have explored how crises are approached on Wikipedia –
a topic they have been studying for three years through the ANR MACIV project. In this joint interview, they explain the motivations for producing content about the health crisis by comparing it to more short-term crises, such as the attacks of 13 November 2015 in Paris.