This makes a lot of sense, I'll get started on looking for correlation between that time-line and geolocated interest coming in through the different language wikis.

  Original Message  
From: Daniel Mietchen
Sent: Monday, February 15, 2016 02:28
To: Wiki Medicine discussion
Reply To: Wiki Medicine discussion
Cc: A mailing list for the Analytics Team at WMF and everybody who has an interest in Wikipedia and analytics.; Discussion list for the Wikidata project.
Subject: Re: [Wiki-Medicine] [Analytics] Zika

The link to microcephaly has become clearer this week:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Zika_virus&oldid=704879995#cite_ref-11
states "A complete ZIKV genome sequence [..] was recovered from brain
tissue" (of a fetus whose mother had been infected with Zika virus).

Given that the mass media are currently all over Zika, simple page
view stats are essentially useless for tracking the spread of the
disease - the PLOS Computational Biology article that Anthony has
linked states "Wikipedia data have a variety of instabilities that
need to be understood and compensated for. For example, Wikipedia
shares many of the problems of other internet data, such as highly
variable interest-driven traffic caused by news reporting and other
sources."

However, correlating geolocated view stats or searches with external info like
http://www.healthmap.org/zika/#timeline
might be useful.

In addition, if we had some representation of clickstreams for
Zika-related articles in languages spoken in affected areas, this
could help guide the development of Zika-related content in those
languages.

Beyond Wikipedia, there is a page on Wikidata to coordinate activities
around Zika:
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Medicine/Zika .

Cheers,
d.

On Mon, Feb 15, 2016 at 4:24 AM, Dan Andreescu <dandreescu@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 14, 2016 at 2:58 PM, Leila Zia <leila@wikimedia.org> wrote:
>>
>> Hey Dan,
>>
>> On Sun, Feb 14, 2016 at 3:02 AM, Dan Andreescu <dandreescu@wikimedia.org>
>> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> So, I felt personally compelled in the case of Zika, and the confusing
>>> coverage it has seen, to offer to personally help.
>>
>>
>> Which aspect of the coverage are you referring to as confusing?
>
>
> Well, so the first reports were that 3500 cases of microcephaly were linked
> to Zika in Brazil, since October. If you do the math, with Brazil's birth
> rate of 300,000 per year, 3500 for three months is incredibly high. The
> number went up to 4400 before it was discredited and the latest I read is
> that it's down to 404 [1] and there are claims of over-inflation. That same
> article talks about serious doubts that Zika even has anything to do with
> microcephaly. In reading around some more about the subject, it seems like
> a multi-variate analysis gone wrong.
>
>>
>>
>>>
>>> I can run queries, test hypotheses, and help publish data that could back
>>> up articles. Privacy of our editors is of course still obviously protected,
>>> but that's easier to do in a specific case with human review than in the
>>> general case.
>>
>>
>> I'm up for brainstorming about what we can do and helping. Please keep me
>> in the loop. In general, given that a big chunk of our traffic comes from
>> Google at the moment, it would be great to work with the researchers in
>> Google involved in Google's health related initiatives to produce
>> complementary knowledge to what Google can already tell about Zika (for
>> example, this). I'll reach out to the few people I know to get some more
>> information.
>> Depending on what complementary knowledge we want to produce, working with
>> WikiProject Medicine can be helpful, too.
>
>
> Cool, yeah, I'm nowhere close to knowledgeable on this, I can data-dog
> though :)
>
>
> [1] www.cbc.ca/news/health/microcephaly-brazil-zika-reality-1.3442580
>
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