Volume 14 Number 9 (January 2017)
From the Director’s Desk
John Howard, M.D.
Director, NIOSH
Reaching Our Audience Where They Are: Our Work with Wikipedia
Wikipedia is one of the most widely read websites in the world. In fact, it is read by hundreds of millions of people around the world every year. Chances are, you have used Wikipedia to look up something that has slipped your mind, or just for fun. After all, it seems to have an article on just about everything. But did you know that people also use Wikipedia to look up information on occupational safety and health? In fact, the Wikipedia article on occupational hazards is read 4,622 times per month and the article on occupational lung diseases is read 2,546 times per month, just to name a couple.
Our challenge at NIOSH is to put our research into practice, turning the findings of our research into recommendations and best practices that will improve the safety and health of all workers. As we know from our experience that people are turning to Wikipedia for information, we want to make sure that the information there is complete, up to date, and free of errors. For the last two years, our ‘Wikipedians in Residence’ have been making improvements to Wikipedia articles, putting our latest research in front of Wikipedia’s millions of readers.
Our partnership with Wikipedia also includes adding video content. It is not often you come across videos while reading Wikipedia, but we are leading the charge in adding rich audiovisual content that goes above and beyond just reading plain text. Over the past several months we have uploaded 98 of our videos and have embedded most of them within Wikipedia articles. For example, when you go to the Wikipedia article on human factors and ergonomics, you’ll also see our video, Practical Demonstrations of Ergonomic Principles. We are seeing great results from our efforts as our videos have been viewed on Wikipedia over 50,000 times since we started posting them in February 2016. In fact, some individual videos have been watched more on Wikipedia than on our YouTube channel. We are excited by the potential that videos have in spreading occupational safety and health information to our audience.
Wikipedia is a collaborative effort, supported by 30,000 volunteer editors around the world. Anyone can make an edit to an article, even you! At NIOSH we have already begun piloting a training program among some of our partners. Starting this year, we will be holding training sessions at our Pittsburgh and Cincinnati facilities for our NIOSH staff. We want to invite you to join us in this collaborative effort and hope that you will also help us by viewing and contributing to Wikipedia. To learn more about the NIOSH Wikipedia initiative contact Max Lum at mrl1@cdc.gov. You can get started today by looking through articles in Wikipedia that are of interest to you or see if there’s a need for new content. After all, if something is wrong on Wikipedia, why not fix it?
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