Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Dec 7, 2020
Date Accepted: Feb 18, 2021
Date Submitted to PubMed: Apr 13, 2021
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
What drives the public interest during the pandemic? An analysis of 9 Wikipedias' most visited medical articles during the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak
ABSTRACT
Background:
In the current days of widespread access to the internet, we can monitor populational interest in a topic based on information-targeted web browsing. We provide direct proof of the altered use of medical knowledge from Wikipedia by the global population due to the new SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and related global restrictions.
Objective:
To quantify changes in access to Wikipedia Medicine articles related to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic
Methods:
We provide a retrospective analysis of medical articles from Wikipedia across 9 languages paired with country-specific statistics of registered deaths due to SARS-CoV-2. We provide Chi2 goodness of fit measures for the forecast model of Wikipedia use trained on data from 2015-2019 and more in-detail analysis concerning specific articles and their clusterization in years prior and during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.
Results:
We observed a significant change in the usage of Wikipedia medical articles in the pandemic period. The increased interest in COVID-related articles correlated with global deaths temporally while presenting a constant correlation with region-specific deaths.
Conclusions:
An analysis of Wikipedias’ medical article popularity could be a successful tool for epidemiologic surveillance. Moreover, it could provide important information about the reasons that trigger public attention and factors that sustain it in the long run.
Citation
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Copyright
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