The Power and Politics of Online Collaborative Genres during the Covid-19 Information/Health Crisis

Abstract

In the context of the recent Covid-19 ‘infodemic,’ the World Health Organization joined forces with Wikipedia, the largest multilingual collaborative online encyclopedia, in order to boost the dissemination of accurate reliable knowledge (WHO 2020, online). It cannot go unnoticed that this agreement implicitly acknowledged the major role Wikipedia plays as a source of medical information on the Web; at the same time it was challenging—albeit for a good cause—the nature of Wikipedia as an encyclopedia. In fact, coping with the Covid-19 emergency has inevitably expanded Wikipedia’s boundaries beyond the limits of the encyclopedia genre, by ‘forcing’ it to chart unknown territories in the pursuit of a balance between established information and ever new data.
It is against this background that the impact of this new scenario on the ‘generic integrity’ of Wikipedia is discussed in the present article through the analysis of pages related to Covid-19 in Wikipedia. The basic assumption is that while the interplay between the centrifugal and centripetal forces of discourse remains at the heart of the Wikipedia enterprise (Gatto 2012; Bakhtin 1982), in the case of the Covid-19 health/information crisis a more pressing recourse might have been made to centripetal forces, in ways not dissimilar to the typical ‘gatekeeping’ at work in traditional genres, so as to maintain both generic integrity and high standards in the quality of information.