2009/5/6 Steve Bowbrick Steve.Bowbrick@bbc.co.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