Lightning talk on Wikimedians as COVID-19 information intermediaries: transcript

Key points

• Information intermediaries move knowledge between researchers and their audiences, and help Wikimedians counter information disorder, from satire to fabrication.
• The research asks how intermediaries gather scientific information, judge its quality, and translate it between experts and the public.
• The study uses interviews with Wikimedians, journalists, activists, fact-checkers, filmmakers, bloggers and influencers.
• It also analyzes online attention to a Cochrane review on physical interventions against respiratory viruses, which has been widely used in discussions about masks.
• So far the team has interviewed 10 people about COVID-19, and upcoming topics are climate change, air and labor.
• Interviews last about an hour by video, and Schneider asks interested Wikimedians to contact her.

Chapters

1. 0:00Introduction and information disorder
2. 1:41What information intermediaries do and the research questions
3. 2:30Interviews and document analysis of a Cochrane review
4. 3:33Interview progress and upcoming topics
5. 4:14Interview questions and how to get in touch

Full transcript

0:00talk. It is now time for the next speaker. So great to be able to be with you even though I'm not with you physically. My name is Jody Schneider. I'm in the United States where I research many topics focused on information. What I want to tell you about today is Wikimedians as information intermediaries. I've been working particularly about COVID-19 and some other topics that i'm looking to talk with more wikipedians about um so first i want to talk about the idea of information disorder um there's all kinds of um information that that we as um as as

1:03wikimedians often um try to prevent from um from from showing up right ranging from things that are utterly You know, meant to be for fun, satires and parodies to things that are fabricated, right? So Wikimedia fights this sort of information disorder. But how? Who is it that that happens? Well, I would say it's because the systems of people and the support around, right, there's this information intermediary work that is happening, right?

1:41An information intermediary means someone who's moving knowledge around, creating connections between researchers and their various audiences. And so what I've been looking at is how is it that Wikimedians and other information intermediaries are gathering and making sense of scientific and technical information? How is it that we're assessing the quality and utility of scientific and technical information? um how are we translating between experts and the general public how do we make sure that that the information that's there is um is good um so as i'm as i'm doing this kind of research What I'm focusing on this to start with is COVID-19, and you see...

2:30From my US context, some of the kinds of information that we've seen in the past handful of years. So we're taking in this research two different approaches. One is talking to people, right? Having interviews with Wikimedians, journalists, activists, fact checkers, filmmakers, bloggers, influencers, anyone who is that kind of information intermediary, moving information across different communities. the second kind of thing that we're doing is what i would call document analysis it's basically looking at stuff um that people have shared um to try to understand what in what's what's there um right now we we're focusing on a particular um scientific um research paper that's a review article a cochran review and analyzing the online attention the alt metrics that's a paper called physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses, which has

3:33been used since it was published to talk a lot about masks. So what I want to say is contact me if you want to talk to my team about this. So far, we've talked to 10 people about COVID-19 I'm various. From various of these perspectives. And we'd love to talk to a bunch of Wikimedians. My topics coming up will be climate change and air and labor. Who's relevant? Anybody who's editing in these areas, who's moving information around, right?

4:14So the kinds of things that we talk to people, usually we have, we try to have about an hour to have maybe a video conversation. And we ask, what does the process of gathering information look like for you when you're working on these scientific and technical topics? What types of information did you look for? How did you know a source was credible? How do you see your source in spreading information? Who's your typical audience? So if that sounds interesting and you'd like to have a conversation, help in the research that we're doing. I look forward to coming back and telling you what we know out of this. My research lab has a webpage, infoquality.org, and there's a knowledge brokers page. You can also find me on wikis, especially English Wikipedias is my main, but you can find me on Meta and other places as user, jodi.a.schneider.

5:08thanks a bunch have a great rest of your time in singapore and i'll see you guys online i hope that was very educative session we all believe that wikimedians have been playing a major role as intermediary between the researchers and the readers so

Source and licence

Recording: File:Wikimania 2023 - Plenary - 18 August - Lightning Talk - Wikimedians as information intermediaries for COVID-19.webm by Wikimania 2023 (2023-08-18), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0. The transcript, summary and chapters on this page are shared under the same licence (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The transcript is machine speech-to-text by the TidyTools Audio & video transcriber; the summary, key points and chapters were written by Claude from that transcript. Both may contain errors: check the recording before quoting it.