| Responding to COVID-19 - How Wikimedia can help in this time of uncertainty - 06/04/2020 |
| The Wikimedia Foundation |
| Technical Community and Civil Society | The Americas | United States |
| The Wikimedia Foundation has led efforts to ensure Wikipedia remains available for everyone to access reliable information about the global pandemic. Thanks to the hard work of Wikipedia volunteers around the world, more than 5,200 Wikipedia articles about the pandemic have been created in 175 languages. These articles have been visited over 424 million times. Wikipedia content is also being used by other organizations such as Google, Mozilla, and governments to share information about the pandemic.Overall, we saw a roughly 20% increase in traffic across our sites during the height of the pandemic (March - June). With the introduction of minor changes to increase our network capacity and streamline our caching structure, we were able to continue delivering content seamlessly and did not suffer any outages or a degradation in service as a result of the pandemic. Over 60 percent of the world’s student population is still affected by school closures from the pandemic according to UNESCO estimates. To address this, the Wikimedia Foundation has shared free resources for at-home learners using Wikimedia projects, including lesson plans, “#EduWiki Challenge” exercises, and worksheet templates. We joined UNESCO’s Global Education Coalition to provide digital learning resources during the pandemic. We also partnered with the United Nations Human Rights Office to support communities in not only learning and documenting the spread of COVID-19, but also its critical impact on human rights. The Wikimedia Foundation drew attention to Wikipedia as an essential information resource through media, social media, and paid advertising. This effort was particularly important in geographic regions such as India, due to the limited information about the pandemic available across local languages, but available across 10 Indic languages on Wikipedia. Lastly, we supported our staff by shifting to a 50% reduced work week, while guaranteeing all staff the same full-time compensation. |
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Source Link Keywords: Education, Wikipedia, information, neutrality, reliability, digital learning, access |