Produire collectivement du sens en temps de crise : l'utilisation de Wikipédia lors de la pandémie de COVID-19

Abstract

Framed in the field of crisis informatics, this article focuses on the ways citizens have been collectively making sense through social media to the COVID-19 pandemic. We conducted a qualitative investigation mobilizing an ethnographic analysis of the Wikipedia's pages related to the pandemic as well as interviews with its contributors and a member of the Wikimedia Foundation-France. We show how the Wikipedians' know-how allows to offer a reading of the current dramatic event, vector of uncertainty. We also shed light on the specificities of the health crisis compared to others so-called civil security crises. Specifically, the construction of meaning related to the pandemic has been requiring an unprecedented reorganisation of their ways of editing and publishing these pages. Particularly, they took into account the successive stages of the pandemic and the related disinformation phenomenon.