Volunteer contributions to Wikipedia increased during COVID-19 mobility restrictions

COVID-19 Pandemic, Physical Distancing Policies, and the Non-Profit Sector Volunteer Force

Although COVID-19-related physical distancing has had large economic consequences, the impact on volunteerism is unclear. Using volunteer position postings data from Canada's largest volunteer center (Volunteer Toronto) from February 3, 2020, to January 4, 2021, we evaluated the impact of different levels of physical distancing on average views, total views, and total number of posts. There was about a 50% decrease in the total number of posts that was sustained throughout the pandemic. Although a more restrictive physical distancing policy was generally associated with fewer views, there was an initial increase in views during the first lockdown where total views were elevated for the first 4 months of the pandemic. This was driven by interest in COVID-19-related and remote work postings. This highlights the community of volunteers may be quite flexible in terms of adapting to new ways of volunteering, but substantial challenges remain for the continued operations of many non-profit organizations.

Toxic comments are associated with reduced activity of volunteer editors on Wikipedia

Wikipedia is one of the most successful collaborative projects in history. It is the largest encyclopedia ever created, with millions of users worldwide relying on it as the first source of information as well as for fact-checking and in-depth research. As Wikipedia relies solely on the efforts of its volunteer editors, its success might be particularly affected by toxic speech. In this paper, we analyze all 57 million comments made on user talk pages of 8.5 million editors across the six most active language editions of Wikipedia to study the potential impact of toxicity on editors' behavior. We find that toxic comments are consistently associated with reduced activity of editors, equivalent to 0.5-2 active days per user in the short term. This translates to multiple human-years of lost productivity, considering the number of active contributors to Wikipedia. The effects of toxic comments are potentially even greater in the long term, as they are associated with a significantly increased risk of editors leaving the project altogether. Using an agent-based model, we demonstrate that toxicity attacks on Wikipedia have the potential to impede the progress of the entire project. Our results underscore the importance of mitigating toxic speech on collaborative platforms such as Wikipedia to ensure their continued success.

Poor attention: The wealth and regional gaps in event attention and coverage on Wikipedia

Wikipedia is an important source of general knowledge covering a wide range of topics. Moreover, for many people around the world, it also serves as an essential news source for major events such as elections or disasters. Although Wikipedia covers many such events, some events are underrepresented and lack attention, despite their newsworthiness predicted from news value theory. In this paper, we analyze 17 490 event articles in four Wikipedia language editions and examine how the economic status and geographic region of the event location affects the attention and coverage it receives. We find that major Wikipedia language editions have a skewed focus, with more attention given to events in the world's more economically developed countries and less attention to events in less affluent regions. However, other factors, such as the number of deaths in a disaster, are also associated with the attention an event receives. Overall, this work provides a nuanced understanding of attention and coverage on Wikipedia through event articles and adds new empirical analysis to news value theory.

Crowdsourcing Knowledge Production of COVID-19 Information on Japanese Wikipedia in the Face of Uncertainty: Empirical Analysis

BACKGROUND

A worldwide overabundance of information comprising misinformation, rumors, and propaganda concerning COVID-19 has been observed in addition to the pandemic. By addressing this data confusion, Wikipedia has become an important source of information.

OBJECTIVE

This study aimed to investigate how the editors of Wikipedia have handled COVID-19-related information. Specifically, it focused on 2 questions: What were the knowledge preferences of the editors who participated in producing COVID-19-related information? and How did editors with different knowledge preferences collaborate?

METHODS

This study used a large-scale data set, including >2 million edits in the histories of 1857 editors who edited 133 articles related to COVID-19 on Japanese Wikipedia. Machine learning methods, including graph neural network methods, Bayesian inference, and Granger causality analysis, were used to establish the editors' topic proclivity and collaboration patterns.

RESULTS

Overall, 3 trends were observed. Two groups of editors were involved in the production of information on COVID-19. One group had a strong preference for sociopolitical topics (social-political group), and the other group strongly preferred scientific and medical topics (scientific-medical group). The social-political group played a central role (contributing 16,544,495/23,485,683, 70.04% of bits of content and 57,969/76,673, 75.61% of the references) in the information production part of the COVID-19 articles on Wikipedia, whereas the scientific-medical group played only a secondary role. The severity of the pandemic in Japan activated the editing behaviors of the social-political group, leading them to contribute more to COVID-19 information production on Wikipedia while simultaneously deactivating the editing behaviors of the scientific-medical group, resulting in their less contribution to COVID-19 information production on Wikipedia (Pearson correlation coefficient=0.231; P<.001).

CONCLUSIONS

The results of this study showed that lay experts (ie, Wikipedia editors) in the fields of science and medicine tended to remain silent when facing high scientific uncertainty related to the pandemic. Considering the high quality of the COVID-19-related articles on Japanese Wikipedia, this research also suggested that the sidelining of the science and medicine editors in discussions is not necessarily a problem. Instead, the social and political context of the issues with high scientific uncertainty is more important than the scientific discussions that support accuracy.

The shock, the coping, the resilience: smartphone application use reveals Covid-19 lockdown effects on human behaviors

Human mobility restriction policies have been widely used to contain the coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19). However, a critical question is how these policies affect individuals' behavioral and psychological well-being during and after confinement periods. Here, we analyze China's five most stringent city-level lockdowns in 2021, treating them as natural experiments that allow for examining behavioral changes in millions of people through smartphone application use. We made three fundamental observations. First, the use of physical and economic activity-related apps experienced a steep decline, yet apps that provide daily necessities maintained normal usage. Second, apps that fulfilled lower-level human needs, such as working, socializing, information seeking, and entertainment, saw an immediate and substantial increase in screen time. Those that satisfied higher-level needs, such as education, only attracted delayed attention. Third, human behaviors demonstrated resilience as most routines resumed after the lockdowns were lifted. Nonetheless, long-term lifestyle changes were observed, as significant numbers of people chose to continue working and learning online, becoming "digital residents." This study also demonstrates the capability of smartphone screen time analytics in the study of human behaviors.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1140/epjds/s13688-023-00391-9.