User:Bluerasberry/Wikipedia coverage of disasters

Background
Wikipedia is a general reference encyclopedia covering many topics. -Academic studies about Wikipedia have reviewed categories of its articles including for -Health information on Wikipedia and -Science information on Wikipedia.

Disasters
Researchers examining Wikipedia's coverage of the Western African Ebola virus epidemic

Zika A study examining reader responses to the 2015–2016 Zika virus epidemic found that spikes of readership in Wikipedia articles occur at the same time as increased readership in other media platforms. Another study observed that reader interest Wikipedia Zika articles was high at the start of the pandemic in places affected by the disease, but dropped when news coverage lessened even while the pandemic was still a public health problem. When the Italian National Institute of Health published Italian-language news about Zika and other infectious tropical diseases, researchers observed spikes in Wikipedia traffic in response.

Wikipedia traffic to articles about dengue fever has been observed to increase when there are outbreaks of the disease.

-Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster

Critiques of disaster coverage
In the same way that people after a disaster will experience hindsight bias by reporting that the event was predictable, Wikipedia articles also can contain this bias as editors explain the causes of disasters in a way that was not apparent at the start of the event.

Wikipedia editors bring their own biases into interpreting disaster articles. Sentiment analysis detects angrier word choices in Wikipedia articles about terrorism than it does in articles about natural disasters. Also, because more Wikipedia editors are part of Western culture, the word choice in Wikipedia articles for disasters outside the Western World tends to be more neutral than articles for disasters which are geographically closer to editors' communities.

Word choice in disaster media outside of Wikipedia tends to mirror the word choice which Wikipedia editors use.

Studies have observed that the intensity of traffic to Wikipedia's health articles matches the intensity of off-wiki media coverage for those conditions

-Wikipedia coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic