Wikipedia:WikiProject Tree of Life/Newsletter/011/Story 1
With the outbreak of a novel coronavirus dominating news coverage, Wikipedia content related to the virus has seen much higher interest. Tree of Life content of particular interest to readers has included viruses, bats, pangolins, and masked palm civets. Viruses saw the most dramatic growth in readership: Coronavirus, which was the 105th most popular virus article in December 2019 with about 400 views per day, averaged over a quarter million views each day of January 2020. Total monthly viewership of the top-10 virus articles ballooned from about 1.5 million to nearly 20 million.
| December 2019 | January 2020 | Rank change | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Gastroenteritis | Coronavirus | +104 |
| 2 | HIV/AIDS | 2019–20 Wuhan coronavirus outbreak | NA |
| 3 | Norovirus | 2019 novel coronavirus | NA |
| 4 | Smallpox | Severe acute respiratory syndrome | +47 |
| 5 | Shingles | Novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) | NA |
| 6 | Measles | Spanish flu | +3 |
| 7 | HIV | Severe acute respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus | +124 |
| 8 | Influenza | List of epidemics | +54 |
| 9 | Spanish flu | Timeline of the 2019–20 Wuhan coronavirus outbreak | NA |
| 10 | Dengue fever | Coronaviridae | +490 |
| Total views | 1,466,143 | 19,845,246 |
From October 2019 – December 2019, the top ten most popular bat articles fluctuated among 16 different articles, with the December viewership of those 10 articles at 209,280. For January 2020, three articles broke into the top-10 that were not among the 16 articles of the prior three months: Bat as food, Horseshoe bat, and Bat-borne virus. Viewership of the top-10 bat articles spiked nearly 300% to 617,067 in January.
While bats have been implicated as a possible natural reservoir of SARS-CoV-2, an intermediate host may be the bridge between bats and humans. Pangolins have been hypothesized as the intermediate host for the virus, causing a large spike in typical page views of 2-3k each day up to more than 60k in a day. Masked palm civets, the intermediate host of SARS, saw a modest yet noticeable spike in page views as well, from 100-300 views per day to as many as 5k views per day.
With an increase in viewers come an increase in editors. In an interview, longtime virus editor Awkwafaba identified the influx of editors as the biggest challenge in editing content related to the coronavirus. They noted that these newcomers include "novices who make honest mistakes and get tossed about a bit in the mad activity" as well as "experienced editors who know nothing about viruses and are good researchers, yet aren’t familiar with the policies of WP:ToL or WP:Viruses." Disruption also increased, with extended confirmed protection (also known as the 30/500 rule, preventing editors with fewer than 30 days tenure and 500 edits from making edits), which is typically used on a very small subset of Wikipedia articles, temporarily applied to Coronavirus and still active on Template:2019–20 coronavirus outbreak data. New editors apparently seeking to correct misinformation continuously edited the article Bat as food to remove content related to China: Videos of Chinese people eating bat soup were misrepresented to be current or set in China, when at least one such video was several years old and filmed in Palau, not China. However, reliable sources confirm that bats are eaten in China, especially Southern China, so these well-meaning edits were mostly removed.
Another level of complexity was added by the fluctuating terminology of the virus. Over a dozen moves and merges were requested within WikiProject Viruses. To give you an idea of the musical chairs happening with article titles, here are the move histories of two articles:
Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2
- Began as Wuhan coronavirus on 9 January
- moved to 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) (16 January)
- Moved to Novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) on 19 January
- Moved to 2019 novel coronavirus on 9 February
- Moved to Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 on 18 February (current name)
- Started as 2019-2020 China pneumonia outbreak on 5 January
- Moved to 2019–20 China pneumonia outbreak on 5 January
- Moved to 2019-20 outbreak of novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) in Wuhan, China on 15 January
- Moved to 2019-20 outbreak of novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) on 15 January
- Moved to 2019–20 outbreak of novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) on 15 January
- Moved to 2019–20 outbreak of novel coronavirus 2019-nCoV on 23 January
- Moved to 2019–20 Wuhan coronavirus outbreak on 23 January
- Moved to 2019–20 coronavirus outbreak on 18 February (current name)
Awkwafaba noted that "the main authorities, WHO and ICTV, don't really have a process for speedily naming a virus or disease." Additionally, they have different criteria for naming. They said, "I remember in a move discussion from the article then called Wuhan coronavirus that a virus name cannot have a geographical location in it, but this is a WHO disease naming guideline, and not an ICTV virus naming rule. ICTV may have renamed Four Corners virus to Sin Nombre orthohantavirus but there are still plenty of official virus species names that don't abide by WHO guidelines."