@danohu came up with a really good suggestion. Is there any way that we could partner up with Wikimedia to get access to the their data on pageviews of medicine- and care-related Wikipedia pages? Ideally, we would get data (based on their log files) as follows:
- In real time.
- reporting the page visited and the IP address from which the visit comes.
- From the IPs it should be possible to count the visits coming from hospitals, which normally use fixed IPs. They might have to be aggregated in such a way that it is not possible for us to identify the individual computer, just the institution.
- From the IPs it should also be possible to get lat/long
This means you can be a visualization of the world and literally watch humanity look for collective-intelligence built knowledge on medicine and care. It should nicely make the general point that communities already play an important role in care, as well as open the door for all sort of interesting correlations.
What do you think?
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never too late
Well this was posted before I joined, and apparently I missed it in the archive. So, Wikimedia doesn’t store IP addresses (thanks to privacy) so we can not identify the visitor by IP, and we can’t traget hospitals.
There is a new tool that helps get page views per category: See the page views for medecine articles for example. Data is downloadable.
Related to the topic there is also https://twitter.com/WikiProjectMed, a community lead initiative that has a good impact. I can narratively add some related stories from there, but everything will be in retrospective.
Not the right data …
… at least for what we had in mind.
We first hoped we could infer how pages were co-accessed (pages part of the Medicine project or the other projects you mention), as a way to understand how people perform self-diagnosis. But we then realized there were no data to help us infer that type of page co-access, no IP addresses or anything that would indicate two pages were consulted by a same person within a close time interval.
@MoE and @dora had nevertheless come up with pretty nice visualization of the wikipedia pages dataset. See this thread to catch on what happened at Masters of Networks 4/LOTE5 around this. Also have a look at the post-workshop doc.
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Why not releavant
Yup, you can’t get unique visits on Wikipedia …well, thankfully :). But even if we had page views, honestly, thinking twice, linking the assumption that people check medical article as proof that more people are interested in self diagnosis is a bit vague, as it is obsolute, and I don’t know what to compare it to. At the same time, for example, page views of ebola article, are no where close to Lady Gaga article, even during Ebola recent outbreak, but that doesn’t directly mean that people don’t care . IMO, laternatively, questioning how many people cotributed to articles around health issues, or issues like water treatment, is another interestng indicator of how many people are willing to co-create care content, collaboratively. Just saying!