Many people continue to criticize the user-generated content website Wikipedia for lack of proper citations, plagiarisms, and wrong information. However, according to a new study, the same website may be used to predict potential global epidemics.
The Internet has changed the way we live our lives. For example, if we're sick, we "check" our symptoms first online. We exchange ideas and data more often in cyberspace. These two things can all contribute to making a website such as Wikipedia a health tool.
A team of researchers from New Mexico's Los Alamos National Laboratory discovered that Wikipedia traffic on selected pages had unnatural highs in periods when certain outbreaks had been occurring.
The researchers, led by Nicholas Generous, compared disease outbreaks such as Haiti cholera in 2010 or the TB cases in Thailand with the Wikipedia traffic data pertaining to these diseases.
After getting the page views of these selected pages, they then matched the figures with those of the infection records and found out that infection rates went up after a couple of weeks from the spike in traffic. Simply put, Wikipedia searches had "predicted" the outbreak at least 28 days before it happened. Interestingly, this pattern was present in 8 of 14 cases.
For the remaining cases including HIV or AIDS, the researchers attribute the slow progression of the disease to the little traffic in certain pages in Wikipedia. It's also possible that other people may be searching for other topics, thereby overshadowing the rate of infected people who may be checking out their symptoms.
Generous then cited the case about Ebola, wherein there is a huge interest and search traffic pertaining to the deadly virus. However, most of these people didn't have the symptoms since the outbreak is in West Africa. Incidentally, this African region doesn't have a reliable Internet connection, which means potential and existing patients are not searching for information in Wikipedia.
Nevertheless, Generous believes that Wikipedia may be harnessed to effectively manage potential outbreaks.
