WHO and WIkimedia Foundation partner in fight against COVID-19 infodemic

The World Health Organization (WHO) and the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that administers Wikipedia, have announced a collaboration to expand the public’s access to the latest and reliable information about COVID-19. The collaboration will make trusted public health information available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license when countries experience resurgences of COVID-19, recognising that social stability largely depends on the public’s shared understanding of the facts. The collaboration enables people across the world to access and share WHO infographics, videos, and other public health assets on Wikimedia Commons, a digital library of free images and other resources. The organisations aim to help stop the infodemic, defined by the WHO as ‘an overabundance of information and the rapid spread of misleading or fabricated news, images, and videos’, by making verified information about the pandemic available on one of the world’s most visited knowledge resources.