Omer Benjakob

Tel Aviv University, Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, Graduate Student

Université de Paris, Centre de Recherches Interdisciplinaires, Research Fellow

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Investigative journalist (Haaretz, cyber and disinformation) and researcher focused on knowledge from print to digital. Currently a research fellow at the CRI in Paris researching the interface between Wikipedia and science, as well as using Wikipedia as a historiographical tool to research the integration of scientific knowledge into Wikipedia together with Rona Aviram from the Weizmann Institute of Science.
Supervisors: Prof. Yossi Shwartz & Dr. Moshe Elhanati and Prof. Ariel Linder

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Papers by Omer Benjakob

What Happened to Urban Heat Island Mitigation? A Diachronic Analysis of Wikipedia Articles Reveals Knowledge Circulation Gaps

Citation needed? Wikipedia bibliometrics during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic

bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory), Mar 1, 2021

Background: With the COVID-19 pandemic's outbreak, millions flocked to Wikipedia for updated info... more Background: With the COVID-19 pandemic's outbreak, millions flocked to Wikipedia for updated information. Amid growing concerns regarding an "infodemic", ensuring the quality of information is a crucial vector of public health. Investigating if and how Wikipedia remained up to date and in line with science is key to formulating strategies to counter misinformation. Using citation analyses, we asked: which sources informed Wikipedia's COVID-19-related articles before and during the pandemic's first wave (January-May 2020). Results: We found that coronavirus-related articles referenced trusted media sources and high-quality academic research. Moreover, despite a surge in COVID-19 preprints, Wikipedia had a clear preference for open-access studies published in respected journals and made little use of preprints. Building a timeline of English COVID-19 articles from 2001-2020 revealed a nuanced trade-off between quality and timeliness. It further showed how preexisting articles on key topics related to the virus created a framework for integrating new knowledge. Supported by a rigid sourcing policy, this "scientific infrastructure" facilitated contextualization and regulated the influx of new information. Lastly, we constructed a network of DOI-Wikipedia articles, which showed the shifting landscape of pandemic-related knowledge on Wikipedia and how academic citations create a web of shared knowledge supporting topics like COVID-19 vaccine development. Understanding how scientific research interacts with the digital knowledge-sphere during the pandemic provides insight into how Wikipedia can facilitate access to science. It also reveals how, aided by what we term its "citizen encyclopedists", it successfully fended off COVID-19 disinformation and how this unique model may be deployed in other contexts.

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High Impact: Wikipedia sources and edit history document two decades of the climate change field

bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory), Nov 30, 2023

Since being founded in 2001, Wikipedia has grown into a trusted source of knowledge online, feedi... more Since being founded in 2001, Wikipedia has grown into a trusted source of knowledge online, feeding Google search results and serving as training data for ChatGPT. Understanding the accuracy of its information, the sources behind its articles and their role in the transference of knowledge to the public are becoming increasingly important questions. Meanwhile, climate change has moved to the forefront of scientific and public discourse after years of warnings from the scientific community. Therefore, to understand how it was represented on English Wikipedia, we deployed a mixed-method approach on the article for "Effects of climate change" (ECC), its edit history and references, as well as hundreds of associated articles dealing with climate change in different ways. Using automated tools to scrape data from Wikipedia, we saw new articles were created as climatology-related knowledge grew and permeated into other fields, reflecting a growing body of climate research and growing public interest. Our qualitative textual analysis shows how specific descriptions of climatic phenomena became less hypothetical, reflecting the real-world public debate. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had a big impact on content and structure, we found using a bibliometric analysis, and what made this possible, we also discovered through a historical analysis, was the impactful work of just a few editors. This research suggests Wikipedia's articles documented the real-world events around climate change and its wider acceptance -initially a hypothesis that soon became a regretful reality. Overall, our findings highlight the unique role IPCC reports play in making scientific knowledge about climate change actionable to the public, and underscore Wikipedia's ability to facilitate access to research. This work demonstrates Wikipedia can be researched using both computational and qualitative methods to better understand transference of scientific information to the public and the history of contemporary science.

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Wikipedia as a tool for contemporary history of science: A case study on CRISPR

PLOS ONE, 2023

Rapid developments and methodological divides hinder the study of how scientific knowledge accumu... more Rapid developments and methodological divides hinder the study of how scientific knowledge accumulates, consolidates and transfers to the public sphere. Our work proposes using Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, as a historiographical source for contemporary science. We chose the high-profile field of gene editing as our test case, performing a historical analysis of the English-language Wikipedia articles on CRISPR. Using a mixed-method approach, we qualitatively and quantitatively analyzed the CRISPR article's text, sections and references, alongside 50 affiliated articles. These, we found, documented the CRISPR field's maturation from a fundamental scientific discovery to a biotechnological revolution with vast social and cultural implications. We developed automated tools to support such research and demonstrated its applicability to two other scientific fields-coronavirus and circadian clocks. Our method utilizes Wikipedia as a digital and free archive, showing it can document the incremental growth of knowledge and the manner scientific research accumulates and translates into public discourse. Using Wikipedia in this manner compliments and overcomes some issues with contemporary histories and can also augment existing bibliometric research.

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A meta analysis of Wikipedia's coronavirus sources during the COVID-19 pandemic

At the height of the coronavirus pandemic, on the last day of March 2020, Wikipedia in all langua... more At the height of the coronavirus pandemic, on the last day of March 2020, Wikipedia in all languages broke a record for most traffic in a single day. Since the breakout of the Covid-19 pandemic at the start of January, tens if not hundreds of millions of people have come to Wikipedia to read - and in some cases also contribute - knowledge, information and data about the virus to an ever-growing pool of articles. Our study focuses on the scientific backbone behind the content people across the world read: which sources informed Wikipedia's coronavirus content, and how was the scientific research on this field represented on Wikipedia. Using citation as readout we try to map how COVID-19 related research was used in Wikipedia and analyse what happened to it before and during the pandemic. Understanding how scientific and medical information was integrated into Wikipedia, and what were the different sources that informed the Covid-19 content, is key to understanding the digital knowledge echosphere during the pandemic. To delimitate the corpus of Wikipedia articles containing Digital Object Identifier (DOI), we applied two different strategies. First we scraped every Wikipedia pages form the COVID-19 Wikipedia project (about 3000 pages) and we filtered them to keep only page containing DOI citations. For our second strategy, we made a search with EuroPMC on Covid-19, SARS-CoV2, SARS-nCoV19 (30'000 sci papers, reviews and preprints) and a selection on scientific papers form 2019 onwards that we compared to the Wikipedia extracted citations from the english Wikipedia dump of <strong>May 2020</strong> (2'000'000 DOIs). This search led to 231 Wikipedia articles containing at least one citation of the EuroPMC search or part of the wikipedia COVID-19 project pages containing DOIs. Next, from our 231 Wikipedia articles corpus we extracted DOIs, PMIDs, ISBNs, websites and URLs using a set of regular expressions. Subsequently, we computed several statistics for each wikipedia article and we retrive Atmetics, CrossRef and Eur [...]

Meta-Research: Citation needed? Wikipedia and the COVID-19 pandemic

With the COVID-19 pandemic's outbreak at the beginning of 2020, millions across the world flocked... more With the COVID-19 pandemic's outbreak at the beginning of 2020, millions across the world flocked to Wikipedia to read about the virus. Our study offers an in-depth analysis of the scientific backbone supporting Wikipedia's COVID-19 articles. Using references as a readout, we asked which sources informed Wikipedia's growing pool of COVID-19-related articles during the pandemic's first wave (January-May 2020). We found that coronavirus-related articles referenced trusted media sources and cited high-quality academic research. Moreover, despite a surge in preprints, Wikipedia's COVID-19 articles had a clear preference for open-access studies published in respected journals and made little use of non-peer-reviewed research uploaded independently to academic servers. Building a timeline of COVID-19 articles on Wikipedia from 2001-2020 revealed a nuanced trade-off between quality and timeliness, with a growth in COVID-19 article creation and citations, from both academic research and popular media. It further revealed how preexisting articles on key topics related to the virus created a framework on Wikipedia for integrating new knowledge. This "scientific infrastructure" helped provide context, and regulated the influx of new information into Wikipedia. Lastly, we constructed a network of DOI-Wikipedia articles, which showed the landscape of pandemic-related knowledge on Wikipedia and revealed how citations create a web of scientific knowledge to support coverage of scientific topics like COVID-19 vaccine development. Understanding how scientific research interacts with the digital knowledge-sphere during the pandemic provides insight into how Wikipedia can facilitate access to science. It also sheds light on how Wikipedia successfully fended of disinformation on the COVID-19 and may provide insight into how its unique model may be deployed in other contexts.

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A Clockwork Wikipedia: From a Broad Perspective to a Case Study

Journal of Biological Rhythms, Apr 17, 2018

Wikipedia and Science A forthcoming study from the MIT Sloan School of Management (Cambridge, MA)... more Wikipedia and Science A forthcoming study from the MIT Sloan School of Management (Cambridge, MA) attempted to address a question that up until a few years ago may have been unimaginable: Does content from Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, find its way into academic works? The researchers commissioned PhD students to write articles on topics that fell under their field of expertise; half of the articles were introduced to Wikipedia, while the remaining were held as a control group. Using textual analysis, the researchers claimed that "word-usage patterns" from the articles introduced into Wikipedia show up more in peer-reviewed papers than do those from the control group. Less than a week after being uploaded to the Social Science Research Network website, the unreviewed preprint received widespread media coverage, including in Nature, which parroted its findings that "1 in every 300 words in a scientific paper was influenced by language 768120J BRXXX10.

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Wikipedia as a tool for contemporary history of science: A case study on CRISPR

bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory), Nov 29, 2022

Rapid developments and methodological divides hinder the study of how scientific knowledge accumu... more Rapid developments and methodological divides hinder the study of how scientific knowledge accumulates, consolidates and transfers to the public sphere. Our work proposes using Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, as a historiographical source regarding contemporary science. We chose the high-profile field of gene editing as our test case, performing a historical analysis of the English-language Wikipedia articles on CRISPR. Using a mixed method approach, we qualitatively and quantitatively analyzed its text, sections and references, alongside 50 affiliated articles. These, we found, documented CRISPR's maturation from a fundamental scientific discovery to a biotechnological revolution with vast social and cultural implications. We developed automated tools to support such research generically and demonstrated its applicability on two other scientific fields we have previously studied-COVID-19 and Circadian clocks. This method makes use of Wikipedia as a digital and free archive, documenting the incremental growth of knowledge and the manner scientific research accumulates and translates into public discourse. Using Wikipedia in this manner compliments and overcomes some issues with contemporary histories and can also augment existing bibliometric research.

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Wikipedia as a tool for contemporary history of science: The CRISPR case study

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), Oct 15, 2022

Citation needed? Wikipedia bibliometrics during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic

GigaScience, 2022

Background: With the COVID-19 pandemic's outbreak, millions flocked to Wikipedia for updated info... more Background: With the COVID-19 pandemic's outbreak, millions flocked to Wikipedia for updated information. Amid growing concerns regarding an "infodemic," ensuring the quality of information is a crucial vector of public health. Investigating whether and how Wikipedia remained up to date and in line with science is key to formulating strategies to counter misinformation. Using citation analyses, we asked which sources informed Wikipedia's COVID-19-related articles before and during the pandemic's first wave (January-May 2020). Results: We found that coronavirus-related articles referenced trusted media outlets and high-quality academic sources. Regarding academic sources, Wikipedia was found to be highly selective in terms of what science was cited. Moreover, despite a surge in COVID-19 preprints, Wikipedia had a clear preference for open-access studies published in respected journals and made little use of preprints. Building a timeline of English-language COVID-19 articles from 2001-2020 revealed a nuanced trade-off between quality and timeliness. It further showed how pre-existing articles on key topics related to the virus created a framework for integrating new knowledge. Supported by a rigid sourcing policy, this "scientific infrastructure" facilitated contextualization and regulated the influx of new information. Last, we constructed a network of DOI-Wikipedia articles, which showed the landscape of pandemic-related knowledge on Wikipedia and how academic citations create a web of shared knowledge supporting topics like COVID-19 drug development. Conclusions: Understanding how scientific research interacts with the digital knowledge-sphere during the pandemic provides insight into how Wikipedia can facilitate access to science. It also reveals how, aided by what we term its "citizen encyclopedists," it successfully fended off COVID-19 disinformation and how this unique model may be deployed in other contexts.

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From Anarchy to Wikiality, Glaring Bias to Good Cop: Press Coverage of Wikipedia’s First Two Decades

The MIT Press eBooks, Oct 13, 2020

Media coverage of Wikipedia has radically shifted over the past two decades: once cast as an inte... more Media coverage of Wikipedia has radically shifted over the past two decades: once cast as an intellectual frivolity, it is now lauded as the "last bastion of shared reality" online. To increase diversity and digital literacy, journalists and the Wikipedia community should work together to advance a new "wiki journalism." "Jimmy Wales has been shot dead, according to Wikipedia, the online, upto-the-minute encyclopedia." That was the opening line of a blatantly false 2005 news report by the online magazine the Register. 1 Rather than being an early example of what we may today call "fake news," the report by the tech site was a consciously snarky yet prescient criticism of Wikipedia and its reliability as a source for media. Wales was still alive, of course, despite what it had briefly stated on his Wikipedia entry, but by attributing his death to English Wikipedia, the Register sought to call out a perceived flaw in Wikipedia: on Wikipedia, truth was fluid, and facts were exposed to anonymous vandals who could take advantage of its anyone-can-edit model to spread disinformation. Over the past twenty years, English Wikipedia has frequently been the subject of media coverage, from in-depth exposés to colorful features and critical op-eds. But if you randomly sample the words used to describe Wikipedia from the headlines in this period, you might conclude that the press has no idea what it thinks about the free internet encyclopedia. Should we refer to it as "the hive" as the Atlantic did in 2006 or rather as the "good cop of the internet" as the Washington Post did in 2018? Is Wikipedia "impolite" as the New York Times claimed in 2008 or rather a "ray of light" as the Guardian suggested in 2018? 2 Is there a logical progression to how the press has described Wikipedia over the past two decades, or does seemingly every reporter possess a dramatically different opinion?

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Wikipedia as a tool for contemporary history of science: A case study on CRISPR

PLOS ONE

Rapid developments and methodological divides hinder the study of how scientific knowledge accumu... more Rapid developments and methodological divides hinder the study of how scientific knowledge accumulates, consolidates and transfers to the public sphere. Our work proposes using Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, as a historiographical source for contemporary science. We chose the high-profile field of gene editing as our test case, performing a historical analysis of the English-language Wikipedia articles on CRISPR. Using a mixed-method approach, we qualitatively and quantitatively analyzed the CRISPR article’s text, sections and references, alongside 50 affiliated articles. These, we found, documented the CRISPR field’s maturation from a fundamental scientific discovery to a biotechnological revolution with vast social and cultural implications. We developed automated tools to support such research and demonstrated its applicability to two other scientific fields–coronavirus and circadian clocks. Our method utilizes Wikipedia as a digital and free archive, showing it can document...

Wikipedia as a tool for contemporary history of science: A case study on CRISPR

Plos One, 2023

Rapid developments and methodological divides hinder the study of how scientific knowledge accumu... more Rapid developments and methodological divides hinder the study of how scientific knowledge accumulates, consolidates and transfers to the public sphere. Our work proposes using Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, as a historiographical source for contemporary science. We chose the high-profile field of gene editing as our test case, performing a historical analysis of the English-language Wikipedia articles on CRISPR. Using a mixed-method approach, we qualitatively and quantitatively analyzed the CRISPR article’s text, sections and references, alongside 50 affiliated articles. These, we found, documented the CRISPR field’s maturation from a fundamental scientific discovery to a biotechnological revolution with vast social and cultural implications. We developed automated tools to support such research and demonstrated its applicability to two other scientific fields–coronavirus and circadian clocks. Our method utilizes Wikipedia as a digital and free archive, showing it can document the incremental growth of knowledge and the manner scientific research accumulates and translates into public discourse. Using Wikipedia in this manner compliments and overcomes some issues with contemporary histories and can also augment existing bibliometric research.

Download

Wikipedia as a tool for contemporary history of science: The CRISPR case study

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), Oct 15, 2022

A meta analysis of Wikipedia's coronavirus sources during the COVID-19 pandemic

A Clockwork Wikipedia: From a Broad Perspective to a Case Study

Journal of biological rhythms, 2018

While research has shown that scientists use Wikipedia and that scientific content on Wikipedia r... more While research has shown that scientists use Wikipedia and that scientific content on Wikipedia ramifies back into scientific literature, many questions remain on how the two sides interact and through what paradigm this dynamic may be best understood. Using the circadian clock field as a case study, we discuss this scientific field's representation on Wikipedia. We traced the changes made to the articles for "Circadian clock" and "Circadian rhythm" and reviewed the debates that informed them over a span of a decade, using Wikipedia's native and third-party tools. Specifically, we focused on how groundbreaking research pertaining to the function of biological oscillators was integrated into the articles to reflect a wider paradigmatic shift within the field. We also identified the articles' main editors to detail the dynamic collective editorial process that took place during a time that saw the field undergo a fundamental change. We discuss the diffe...

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From Anarchy to Wikiality, Glaring Bias to Good Cop: Press Coverage of Wikipedia’s First Two Decades

Citation needed? Wikipedia and the COVID-19 pandemic

With the COVID-19 pandemic’s outbreak at the beginning of 2020, millions across the world flocked... more With the COVID-19 pandemic’s outbreak at the beginning of 2020, millions across the world flocked to Wikipedia to read about the virus. Our study offers an in-depth analysis of the scientific backbone supporting Wikipedia’s COVID-19 articles. Using references as a readout, we asked which sources informed Wikipedia’s growing pool of COVID-19-related articles during the pandemic’s first wave (January-May 2020). We found that coronavirus-related articles referenced trusted media sources and cited high-quality academic research. Moreover, despite a surge in preprints, Wikipedia’s COVID-19 articles had a clear preference for open-access studies published in respected journals and made little use of non-peer-reviewed research uploaded independently to academic servers. Building a timeline of COVID-19 articles on Wikipedia from 2001-2020 revealed a nuanced trade-off between quality and timeliness, with a growth in COVID-19 article creation and citations, from both academic research and pop...

Citation needed? Wikipedia bibliometrics during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic

Background: With the COVID-19 pandemic’s outbreak, millions flocked to Wikipedia for updated info... more Background: With the COVID-19 pandemic’s outbreak, millions flocked to Wikipedia for updated information. Amid growing concerns regarding an “infodemic”, ensuring the quality of information is a crucial vector of public health. Investigating if and how Wikipedia remained up to date and in line with science is key to formulating strategies to counter misinformation. Using citation analyses, we asked: which sources informed Wikipedia’s COVID-19-related articles before and during the pandemic’s first wave (January-May 2020).

Results: We found that coronavirus-related articles referenced trusted media sources and high-quality academic research. Moreover, despite a surge in COVID-19 preprints, Wikipedia had a clear preference for open-access studies published in respected journals and made little use of preprints. Building a timeline of English COVID-19 articles from 2001-2020 revealed a nuanced trade-off between quality and timeliness. It further showed how preexisting articles on key topics related to the virus created a framework for integrating new knowledge. Supported by a rigid sourcing policy, this “scientific infrastructure” facilitated contextualization and regulated the influx of new information. Lastly, we constructed a network of DOI-Wikipedia articles, which showed the shifting landscape of pandemic-related knowledge on Wikipedia and how academic citations create a web of shared knowledge supporting topics like COVID-19 vaccine development.

Conclusions: Understanding how scientific research interacts with the digital knowledge-sphere during the pandemic provides insight into how Wikipedia can facilitate access to science. It also reveals how, aided by what we term its “citizen encyclopedists”, it successfully fended off COVID-19 disinformation and how this unique model may be deployed in other contexts.

Download

A Clockwork Wikipedia: From a Broad Perspective to a Case Study

Journal of Biological Rhythms , 2018

Our paper treats Wikipedia as a historical source which can document the collective understanding... more Our paper treats Wikipedia as a historical source which can document the collective understanding of certain topics. We tracked the edits made to a small group of pages to tell the story of the scientific field of biological clocks. Through interviews with editors and a historical analysis of the articles for Circadian Clocks and Circadian rhythms, we show how scientific knowledge is integrated into Wikipedia and how these articles managed to mirror fundamental shifts in the field for the span of over a decade.

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