Wikipedia for multilingual COVID-19 vaccine education at scale

Abstract

We present the design of a project to develop Wikipedia content on general vaccine safety and the COVID-19 vaccines, specifically. This proposal describes what a team would need to distribute public health information in Wikipedia in multiple languages in response to a disaster or crisis, and to measure and report the communication impact of the same. Researchers at the School of Data Science at the University of Virginia made this proposal in response to a February 2021 call from a sponsor which was seeking to share public health information to respond globally to vaccine hesitancy related to the COVID-19 vaccines. This proposal was not selected for funding, and now the research team is sharing the proposal here with an open copyright license for anyone to reuse and remix. Most of the text here is from the original proposal, but there are modifications to remove the names of the funder, named partners, and for other details to make this text more reusable. The budget in this proposal has been converted from a dollar amount to equivalent descriptions in terms of labor hours, and the timeline was adapted from absolute to relative months.