Some observations (maybe stating the obvious):
https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/#start=2016-01-16&end=2016-02-14&... the double peak seems to confirm PV count on wp:en is not correlated much with spread of the disease,
but of course wp:es is much more relevant https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/#start=2016-01-16&end=2016-02-14&...
As Wikipedia probably isn't much of a household name in some Spanish countries, absolute PV values per country/region are mostly incomparable, even when normalized for population count in the region, and again for percentage people with internet connections (let alone the latter numbers will be unreliable to start with).
A detection of highest relative changes week over week could tell us something. (the oldest week in the comparison should have a minimum PV value, or relative changes from almost zero to negigible with stand out as false remarkables.
Of course a decline could indicate saturation in information demand, but not per se in number of people affected.
Erik
-----Original Message----- From: Analytics [mailto:analytics-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Daniel Mietchen Sent: Monday, February 15, 2016 8:28 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: [Analytics] [Wiki-Medicine] Zika
The link to microcephaly has become clearer this week: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Zika_virus&oldid=704879995#ci... 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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