2009/5/6 Steve Bowbrick <Steve.Bowbrick(a)bbc.co.uk>uk>:
Should we encourage UK public health agencies to
expand the Swine Flu
article? To treat Wikipedia as part of the public health communications
effort? If such a large number of UK searches are hitting the Swine Flu
entry, is there a public health argument for branching the entry to
provide nationally-specific material?
I'm not sure we should be looking at public health arguments, we just
want to get as much encyclopaedic information as possible of as high a
quality as possible to as many people as possible. If we try and
broaden our remit I suspect it will all go horribly wrong. If there
are reliable sources providing sufficient information for an article
on Swine Flu in the UK, we should write one. I think the big thing the
UK public agencies could do is make sure all the information is freely
available (and, if possible, under a free license, although I'm not
sure there is much we would want to directly quote). In particular, it
would be good if we could access the advice of key scientists directly
and not have to wade through politicised versions. (I haven't looked
at what information is available, so they may already be doing all
this.)
I'm not sure about them editing our articles directly. If they want to
do so and they follow all our rules and policies, then no-one is going
to stop them, but I suspect they may struggle with concepts like No
Original Research and Reliable Sources (and maybe even Neutral Point
of View - Wikipedia shouldn't be advising people to keep calm, or
anything like that, it should be neutrally reporting advice that other
people have given). I think them providing us with all the information
we need would be better.
Is there a Wikipedia response to crises of this kind?
There is always a massive response to things like this, but nothing
coordinated. Somehow, it seems to work, though. Within hours we
generally have by far the most detailed articles on a subject of all
the mass media. The closest we get to coordination is usually someone
posting on the Admin Noticeboard, "You should keep an eye on this
page, it is likely to be very heavily edited over the next few days."
PS I've just looked, and we have branched the entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_swine_flu_outbreak_in_the_United_Kingdom