Crowdsourcing Knowledge Production of COVID-19 Information on Japanese Wikipedia in the Face of Uncertainty: Empirical Analysis

BACKGROUND: A worldwide overabundance of information comprising misinformation, rumors, and propaganda concerning COVID-19 has been observed in addition to the pandemic. By addressing this data confusion, Wikipedia has become an important source of information. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to investigate how the editors of Wikipedia have handled COVID-19–related information. Specifically, it focused on 2 questions: What were the knowledge preferences of the editors who participated in producing COVID-19–related information? and How did editors with different knowledge preferences collaborate? METHODS: This study used a large-scale data set, including >2 million edits in the histories of 1857 editors who edited 133 articles related to COVID-19 on Japanese Wikipedia. Machine learning methods, including graph neural network methods, Bayesian inference, and Granger causality analysis, were used to establish the editors’ topic proclivity and collaboration patterns. RESULTS: Overall, 3 trends were observed. Two groups of editors were involved in the production of information on COVID-19. One group had a strong preference for sociopolitical topics (social-political group), and the other group strongly preferred scientific and medical topics (scientific-medical group). The social-political group played a central role (contributing 16,544,495/23,485,683, 70.04% of bits of content and 57,969/76,673, 75.61% of the references) in the information production part of the COVID-19 articles on Wikipedia, whereas the scientific-medical group played only a secondary role. The severity of the pandemic in Japan activated the editing behaviors of the social-political group, leading them to contribute more to COVID-19 information production on Wikipedia while simultaneously deactivating the editing behaviors of the scientific-medical group, resulting in their less contribution to COVID-19 information production on Wikipedia (Pearson correlation coefficient=0.231; P<.001). CONCLUSIONS: The results of this study showed that lay experts (ie, Wikipedia editors) in the fields of science and medicine tended to remain silent when facing high scientific uncertainty related to the pandemic. Considering the high quality of the COVID-19–related articles on Japanese Wikipedia, this research also suggested that the sidelining of the science and medicine editors in discussions is not necessarily a problem. Instead, the social and political context of the issues with high scientific uncertainty is more important than the scientific discussions that support accuracy.