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November 16, 2014

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com Your Universe Online

Wikipedia page views could help predict potential disease outbreaks weeks before official health advisories are issued, researchers from Los Alamos National Laboratory report in a recently-published study.

Their research, which was published Thursday in the journal PLOS Computational Biology, indicates that they were able to forecast flu and tuberculosis outbreaks four weeks in advance by monitoring articles on the collaboratively-edited online encyclopedia.

Dr. Sara Del Valle and her Los Alamos colleagues said they were able to successfully monitor outbreaks of influenza in the US, Poland, Japan and Thailand, dengue fever in Brazil and Thailand and tuberculosis in China and Thailand. They also said they were able to forecast all but one of those outbreaks at least 28 days in advance.

Their findings suggest that people have the habit of searching websites such as Wikipedia for disease-related information before actually seeking medical attention, and shows the potential for training computer models using public health data in one location and then implementing it in another part of the world.

A global disease-forecasting system will improve the way we respond to epidemics, Del Valle said in a statement. In the same way we check the weather each morning, individuals and public health officials can monitor disease incidence and plan for the future based on todays forecast.

According to BBC News, Del Valle and her colleagues tracked the page views of disease-related Wikipedia pages from 2010 and 2013. They tracked the languages that the information on those pages was written in, using that as a way to approximate where those individuals lived.

The data was then compared to actual disease outbreak information provided to the research team by various national health surveillance officials. In eight out of 14 cases, the British news organization said that there was a clear increase in page views in the four week period before health officials declared an outbreak.

Furthermore, the model was able to predict every outbreak except the tuberculosis one in China, but as Del Valle explained, the goal of this research is to build an operational disease monitoring and forecasting system with open data and open source code, and that their new study shows we can achieve that goal.

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Can Wikipedia Be Used To Track Disease Outbreaks?

To encourage discussion on gender and sexual minorities, Queerala, in association with Wikimedia India chapter, is organizing a Wiki loves Pride LGBT Edit-a-thon in Kochi on November 29.

Participants at the event will be trained to write and edit articles for Wikipedia. They will be encouraged to write, edit, and translate articles about LGBT issues. The edit-a-thon is an attempt to improve the representation of LGBT groups online and to provide information on rights campaigns, and laws.

The event will be held at Startup Village from 10 a.m. onwards. Wikipedia is the first thing people refer to for information these days. We found that despite all the public discussion about Section 377 and criminalization of homosexuality, there are hardly any Wikipedia entries in Malayalam on some of these topics. We would like to make more articles available in Malayalam, said Jijo Kuriakose, one of the organisers of the event and founder of Queerala, an advocacy group for LGBT rights.

Wikipedia insists that its editors write articles that are fair and refer to multiple sources for accurate information. In the first session, representatives of Wikipedia and technical experts will help participants learn more about editing for Wikipedia, guidelines, and formatting and categorizing. In the afternoon session, participants and organizers will create, expand, and translate articles pertinent to LGBT groups and issues on Wikipedia.

This is only a beginning and we expect people to follow up on the work. After the seminar, people can use the training to continue writing and editing articles on the issue, said Mr. Kuriakose.

The organizers have already prepared a list of topics on which articles need to be created or expanded on the site, such as homosexuality, organisations like Queerala, Queer Pride marches in Kerala, films that refer to LGBT rights and issues, and so on.

Wikimedia organizes such edit-a-thons all over the world.

The event is open to the public free of cost.

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Wikipedia to hold edit-a-thon on LGBT issues in Kochi

Russia Plans Alternative Version of #39;Wikipedia #39;
The Russian Presidential Library said on Friday, Russia plans to create its own "Wikipedia" to ensure its citizens have access to more "detailed and reliable" information about their country....

By: WochitGeneralNews

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Russia Plans Alternative Version of 'Wikipedia' - Video

VLADIVOSTOK, RUSSIA - NOVEMBER 13: Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks during a meeting on shipbuilding on November 13, 2014 in Vladivostok, Russia. Putin is on a two-day trip on the way to the G20 Leaders Summit in Brisbane, Australia. (Photo by Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images) | Sasha Mordovets via Getty Images

Citing Western threats, the Kremlin has asserted more control over the Internet this year in what critics call moves to censor the web, and has introduced more pro-Kremlin content similar to closely controlled state media such as television.

Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia assembled and written by Internet users around the world, has pages dedicated to nearly every region or major city within Russia's 11 time zones, but the Kremlin library said this was not good enough.

"Analysis of this resource showed that it is not capable of providing information about the region and life of the country in a detailed or sufficient way," the state news agency RIA quoted a statement from the presidential library as saying.

"The creation of an alternative Wikipedia has begun." It was not known whether the project might affect Russians' access to the existing Wikipedia in any way.

President Vladimir Putin has branded the Internet a "CIA special project", and the Kremlin has said it must protect its online realm from threats from the West, as ties between the Cold War-era foes have hit a new bottom over the Ukraine crisis.

Since August, bloggers in Russia with more than 3,000 followers must register with the Moscow's mass media regulatory agency and conform to rules applied to larger media outlets.

And since February, state authorities have been able to block websites without a court order. The webpages of two leading Kremlin critics were among the first to be barred.

The presidential library statement said that 50,000 books and archive documents from 27 libraries around Russia had already been handed over for the process of establishing the "alternative Wikipedia".

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Russia To Create Its Own Wikipedia Because Current One Isn ...

AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo A woman receives a flu vaccination.

Say you're feeling sick, and you visit Wikipedia to see if your symptoms match those of the flu. Wikipedia logs that visit and makes public the number of people who visit every single one of its pages.

Now, a group of data scientists fromLos Alamos National Laboratory think this data could be useful for tracking diseases. In a paper published Friday in the journal PLOS Computational Biology, they present an algorithm that uses Wikipedia traffic data to estimate the rates of diseases in the real world and project imminent outbreaks.

Would this actually work? The idea of following what happens on the internet to model and predict disease rates isn't entirely new. For several years,Google Flu Trends has attempted to use Google queries as a proxy for flu rates, and other researchers have tried touse tweets for the same purpose. Yet those methods have had some real problems with predicting outbreaks.

But the researchers behind this new paper say that Wikipedia data might be the best bet and could allow us to track a number of diseases in different countries.

The researchers began by picking 14 different disease-country pairs to look at, such as the flu in the United States, tuberculosis in Thailand, and dengue in Brazil.

Next, they collectedpublicly-available page view data for every single page on Wikipedia in the relevant language. The data typically came on a weekly or monthly basis, and spanned a few years.

For each of these 14 disease-country pairs, the researchers also had conventionally-collected public health data on rates of the disease over time. They parsed each language's Wikipedia traffic data to find the ten particular pages that best matched with the known disease data.

"The general disease page was generally the one that correlated most strongly," saysNicholas Generous, the study's lead author. "Drugs and treatments were also usually in the top ten, and then for the flu, some of the various strains would also be in there."

In 8 of the 14 cases, the combined group of Wikipedia articles matched the actual disease rate extremely closely. For dengue rates in Brazil, for instance, traffic to the set of 10 articles correlated nicely throughout a three-year period:

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Wikipedia could help predict disease outbreaks