 Okay. Hello and welcome everyone to the COVID-19 and human rights webinar from the Wikimedia Foundation and UN Human Rights. This is a great opportunity to learn a bit more about the Wiki for Human Rights and partnership that Wikimedia Foundation and UN Human Rights are pursuing. We want to welcome you all, especially since kind of global news and in particular US news right now is very full of human rights conversations related to both the pandemic and the larger social context that is happening right now. And we welcome you to this webinar. It seems to be unfortunately well timed for this conversation. I'm Alex Stenson. I'm a strategist at the Wikimedia Foundation focused on how the community organizes and responds to various kind of activities and editing content. And we thought this was a really good time to talk about our partnership and the activities that are happening around human rights and Wiki for Human Rights. So thank you for joining. If you have questions, the Q&A button towards the bottom of the screen and zoom is where we're collecting those questions. We have the chat closed for participants. Thank you. So just briefly, our two speakers are Peggy from UN Human Rights and Neta, a Wikimedia volunteer, and we will introduce them more closely soon. But before I do that, I'd like to kind of pose kind of a few contextual pieces of information of like why we're talking about Wikipedia, COVID-19 and human rights in one conversation. Right now, we know that the public is using Wikipedia to understand the pandemic in a number of different ways. It's everything from the pandemic itself to topics related to public health responses, breaking news events, and people going to school from home or working from home. That digital context is really important. And we've seen this most through the page views to the actual COVID-19 pandemic articles on English Wikipedia, but also all the other 300 or so Wikipedia's that are operating around the world. Collectively, these pages have had almost 400 million page views since the major kind of spike in attention that started in March as the World Health Organization declared this global pandemic. This growing set of kind of attention has also trickled into a lot of other topics that surround the pandemic. Our community has tracked at least 845 topics that are related to the pandemic in some way, and those 845 topics have been edited by over 5,000 Wikipedia editors and at least 175 languages. So we know that there's both global attention and global contribution happening. And it's more than just like the obvious things related to the pandemic. If you know much about how that information is structured on the Wikipedia's English Wikipedia, for example, has split out the article into the disease, the pandemic and the actual virus itself. So there are like core articles like that, but there's also a whole realm of context. So I've been working with our Wikipedia Foundation research team to see like where readers are going in the context of this pandemic. And we used a method that follows reader sessions. So the pages that individuals read during one viewing session of Wikipedia to see what articles that other individuals are likely to encounter. And what we found is there there's a whole bunch of clusters of these topics that look at the medical context at the public health context about historical precedents, but also the cultural context of this pandemic it's more than just reading about the science or the public health but also all those other things that help us understand what is going on. If you want to look more at this data, the short link there w wiki slash capital S capital D lowercase a will give you that list of data from two snapshots in time. And that data is the way we created it we use this method that is kind of like when a public. When architects and like university campuses or other public spaces look at tread lines in in tabs on green spaces and say, ah yes, like people are walking here maybe we should lay a sidewalk. This data kind of creates that context that's asking where our readers reading and and what what kind of common paths are there between these topics. And we we took a deeper look at this, especially for this webinar at to kind of hub core topics, not about the pandemic, more generally, but at the central articles. A list of incidents of xenophobia and racism related to COVID-19 and the gendered impact of COVID-19. And did the similar kind of mapping asking this question, where are readers going around these topics. And what are what are these contexts that individuals are reading about. And we found these interesting patterns when looking at the xenophobia and racism article. So that the topics that using our machine learning tools were identified able to identify like what topic areas readers are looking at. And at 35 of the first 100 topics related to this article that readers are looking at are about society. 32 were about science, eight were about biography seven were about Asia and six were about politics. What we noticed with the xenophobia and racism article is that it zooms in really quickly on East Asia East Asian racism, and other kinds of context related to that, which is kind of in sharp contrast with some of the news about, especially in last week or so other contexts, whereas when you look at the gendered impact articles, you see a much closer attention to science topics so the medical impact in the medicine impact society topics so like how women are affected by the pandemic and politics. And so it's really an interesting, it's an interesting pattern that we didn't quite expect these kind of divergences but it's also showing that readers are looking in very different bubbles and very different subsets of our content. And we thought this conversation would be a great opportunity to kind of talk about how to draw those connections. If you don't know UN Human Rights and the Wikimedia Foundation have had a partnership for close to a year now, really focused on spreading knowledge about human rights. The most high profile part of that was a campaign earlier this year, but this webinar kind of continues that conversation how do we close the gap and draw the connections. So I'd like to introduce you to our first panelist Peggy Hicks from UN Human Rights who is here to talk a bit about the context of like communicating the human rights issues related to the pandemic from kind of a global perspective. Peggy is served as the director of the thematic engagement special procedures and right to development at UN, the UN Human Rights Office, and she provides strategic direction to that office on a broad range of human rights issues including human rights in the digital age. And so we're really excited to have her here to speak to us and kind of explain a bit more about that context. So Peggy over to you. Thanks very much Alex it's it's such a pleasure to be here thank you as well for the partnership with the Wikimedia Foundation and the work that you all those on the call are doing I think as you said information has never been more crucial and finding ways to communicate clearly on these topics is absolutely essential. From a human rights perspective we have a lot to say one thing we found with the COVID-19 pandemic is how it affects the full range of human rights issues that the office works on so it's been challenging for us to be frank to figure out how we take on all of these points and work to provide information more effectively on them and if you go to our website which is OHCHR.org you'll see we've done all sorts of guidance on a broad range of topics. But I wanted to emphasize we're going to talk a lot about the social and economic impacts and the gender discrimination impacts of the pandemic. But it really does affect every type of right imaginable. For example we worked on the rights of people in detention. We've worked on what it means to have a state of emergency and when they can be declared and what rights governments can restrict in states of emergency. But on the other end we've also looked at what it means for the right to work what it means for the right to health what it means for the right to education. And so it's the full range of rights that are affected. One of the things that we've seen is the extent to which this pandemic exposes human rights gaps. So what we see is we've been calling for a long time for more universal health coverage. But what we find is that in fact we are seeing through this pandemic how vulnerable societies are when not everybody has access. Everybody has access to health care. Similarly, there are about 2.2 billion people worldwide who have inadequate access to water and sanitation. In an environment where everybody's being told to wash their hands frequently as one of the key ways to you know to avoid further spread of the pandemic that statistic means so much more today. Similarly, about 1.8 billion people have inadequate housing or homeless. What does that mean in a context when you're being told that you have to lock down or be more distant from others. So looking at how the pandemic has exposed those gaps is one of the things that we've done. I also wanted to say that we're focusing and I think Alex's comments made this clear as well in terms of the way the wiki media pages have worked that it's a multi faceted look because we're looking at sort of what happened before who's vulnerable based on how prepared we were coming into the pandemic. And we're also looking at during you know what is the impact on different people in different communities during, but then also what's going to come after we know there's an economic downturn we know that there will be things left behind like widespread surveillance. What will happen with all those after effects as well so it's a multi temporal approach as well. So in terms of what the office has focused on. We've started to look as I said at the social and economic impacts, and in particular on the impacts on certain marginalized and vulnerable groups we do that because the sense is that these are the people that might get left out in the pandemic health response as well as the response that's created that the impacts on them in terms of their employment and other issues. So there's a lot of groups that fall into that category of course it differs from place to place, who's most vulnerable. So for example, migrants are a good example of a community that isn't generally reached very effectively, and where we saw there being very high levels of vulnerability. And some states have done some really impressive things. So for example, Portugal made it so that migrants could be treated as citizens for purposes of access to healthcare during the pandemic. So we're leveraging for example more things like that to happen, but we've also looked at communities like people with disabilities, minority communities, and older persons as groups that we needed more targeted attention on. When we do that there are sort of two sets of issue I want to emphasize that are sort of core to the way our office works. One is that we focus on the need for information. We all come in. And on the requirement that people have a right to participate. People have to be well informed, but they also as citizens and as as people affected by this pandemic. They have a right to be well enough informed that they can have their voices heard in terms of how we respond to the pandemic. So really making sure that policy making is transparent, and that people are informed and able to participate. And again, there are certain groups that are traditionally left out of some of the participation in these decision making. I remember one of the early profiles within the US, where they had a big meeting on COVID-19 and everybody in the room was a man. So, you know, having women at the table, having groups that are most affected at the table is one of the other things we focus on. And then the second big thing I wanted to highlight at the top was the issue that Alex had mentioned, which is the racial discrimination, misinformations, xenophobia, and the different groups that have been targeted. At one point I was keeping a tally of all the different groups that were labeled as responsible for the pandemic. So, you know, sometimes it's the Asians, sometimes it's LGBTI people, it can be the migrants, it can be whichever group is most marginalized or disaffected or which is the best political target. So we've really tried to follow those issues and of course to not only respond in our own voice, but to call on others to speak up against that sort of hatred and discrimination that we hear. But I wanted to highlight, we can move to the slide on gender now. We wanted to highlight the impact on and I mentioned the before, during and after the social economic impacts on the first slide. And now on gender equality, we wanted to highlight how this analysis works on gender because it gives you a snapshot and how it would work on on some of the other issues I mentioned. And what we did was we worked through all the different ways women, girls and LGBTI populations are affected by the pandemic. One of the areas that's been very thankfully very high profile has been the increased gender violence that has happened as part of the pandemic. This of course happens for a variety of reasons, but the reality is that when people are being locked in their homes, we have seen documented evidence of increase in gender based violence. And of course that means that we've had to advocate for people to be able to continue to have recourse to shelter and hotlines and other things that can protect them from that gender based violence. We've also looked at the disproportionate impacts on women and girls at home and at work and some of these might not be obvious to everybody looking at the question. For example, women often work in the informal sector. They're more represented in jobs where you don't have a regular paycheck and you don't get any sort of benefit when when you leave you don't have a pension waiting for you. And you're often sort of the people who are the most vulnerable to changes in employment and are most likely to be let off and not have health coverage and other things when they are. It's also the case that women are about 70% of health sector health sector employment so jobs in the health field are mostly women. And we've also seen that those are jobs that are on the front lines where they've had particular vulnerability. Many of you may have seen the stories about the fact that some of the protect personal protective gear was actually designed for men and doesn't fit women correctly because they're not the right size, and that increases their vulnerability. So looking at issues like that as well. It also, you know, another aspect of impact on women that we've seen is around things like childcare. Women still bear the predominant burden not only of childcare but care for the elderly and households. And that means that in the pandemic they face greater stress and work because of the situation that hasn't risen. And even things like for example that women are responsible in those places that I mentioned where that are water insecure, women are the ones that go to fetch the water, and that also has created all sorts of problems in the face of the pandemic. So really sorting through those impacts. But we've also seen health impacts for women. For example, we've seen a trend that we've talked about in a, some of our UN experts talked about in a press release last week about the fact that there have been places that have taken the opportunity to shut down access to some of the critical care that women need for their sexual and reproductive health including access to abortions, for example. We've also seen that girls often get access to some of that education and other things in schools, and when they're not going to school, they are more vulnerable. So those types of impacts. And finally I did want to emphasize as I said that when we look at gender we also look at the impact of the pandemic on LGBTI persons and we've really wanted to emphasize this because it hasn't come out as much and of course LGBTI people in many of the contexts worldwide in which we work, people are very vulnerable in that they cannot even necessarily declare their status or talk about their status but they may be vulnerable in terms of access, for example, to healthcare that's necessary to them, but that they may not be able to get in the current circumstances. It's also the case that many LGBTI people also work in the informal sector. There are statistics that show that they're more likely to be economically deprived in various ways, so they are more vulnerable. And this issue of exposure to violence in the household for LGBTI people is also something we've been filing closely. Finally, I wanted to mention, which of course we wanted to include very much reflecting the issues today is issues of racial disparity. There was a lot of reporting at the beginning of the conflict of the pandemic, as has been noted, on the impact on Asian Americans and Asians across the globe who are being blamed for having brought the virus in some way and we've targeted that as well and there's been a lot of attention but it still continues very tragically. But one of the things that of course has come out very predominantly in the last month is really solid evidence that not only are racial and ethnic minorities suffering more from the pandemic. The extent to which they're suffering is really very, very much higher than white and other communities. So it's about double for African American communities, the mortality rates that are being faced. And you can see similar things with ethnic minority communities and other places. So there are a lot of reasons for that a lot of it does go back to some of the structural issues that of discrimination and inequality that are being exposed in the protest right now. But it's also things like access to health care as well. So one of the things we've been emphasizing is that we can't wait to solve all of those problems we need to address both the current situation and that means we need to do things like priority testing of communities that are more vulnerable and giving them greater access to health care. But at the same time we have to look at why has the situation developed and really be very serious about addressing the structural reasons why these this incredibly heightened risk from the pandemic is being found. And before that one of the things that we absolutely need is just aggregated data. That means that in a lot of places, you can expose this problem because we don't know, have the right data to, to show which communities are being affected how fortunately in a lot of us situations we're able to get some of this but even that at the beginning was not being released as quickly by the CDC, for example. So that's another thing that we were pushing for is really for that disaggregated data to be available so that we're really able to hone in on and target the problems that are happening. So that gives you a sense of some of the broad work that we're doing. I hope it wasn't too technical. There are lots of issues here and happy to answer questions when we have time at the end. Thanks. Thank you so much, Peggy, and as I'll remind the viewers you can use the Q&A button towards the bottom to ask questions and we have a team on the back end that's doing a wonderful work bringing those to me so I can ask them of the panelists later so feel free to ask questions. Next I'd like to introduce Neda, who is a Wikimedian and volunteer in our community but also a, and also a physician and researcher, recently received her PhD from the University of Gothenburg or defended her PhD from the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. And we're really excited to have her because she's been doing a really active role in translation both during this pandemic and during other medical editing activities in our community and contributes in both English and Malayalam languages. So we're really excited to have you Neda and I'll let you take it away. Thank you, Alex. In this presentation, I will try to shed some light on COVID-19 related content on English language Wikipedia related to human rights, the knowledge gaps existing there, the challenges faced while writing these articles and some solutions for these challenges. Next slide please. English Wikipedia has a broad coverage of human rights related topics surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. We have articles on overarching topics such as human rights issues during the COVID-19 pandemic, and also about very specific topics such as impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on abortion in the United States. Human rights and COVID-19 related articles on Wikipedia cover many of these issues that Peggy spoke about earlier, such as censorship, surveillance, disproportionate border control, xenophobia, racism, violence, and other human rights issues that have emerged during the pandemic. There is a Wikipedia article that lists the misinformation related to the pandemic, and there is a specific article about unproven methods against COVID-19. The advocates have been mindful of the xenophobia and racism that happens in relation with the pandemic, and like Alex said earlier, there is a specific Wikipedia page for listing xenophobic incidents. The poster shown in this slide was created in India for educating people to not to engage in discrimination and hatred against specific racial groups. The gendered impact of the pandemic has also been documented on Wikipedia. Impact of the pandemic on the LGBT plus community and the impact of the pandemic on domestic violence that Peggy also mentioned about earlier have dedicated Wikipedia pages. Certain demographic groups are more affected by the disease than the others. There are dedicated Wikipedia pages about the impact of COVID-19 on pregnant persons and people living with cancer. Those in prisons or those living in long term care facilities are disproportionately affected by the pandemic, and there are separate Wikipedia pages for covering these aspects of the pandemic. So I would say that we have a pretty good coverage of COVID-19 and human rights related content on Wikipedia. These articles act as reference material not only for today's readers but also for tomorrow's historians. Future historians can relay on Wikipedia's coverage of COVID-19 to understand how the pandemic evolved in time, as Wikipedia also has publicly accessible revision history of all of its articles. Several years after the Holocaust happened, many people created fabricated sources and evidences to falsely show that the Holocaust never happened. Even today, there are Holocaust deniers in many countries. The human rights issues that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic should not be subject to such falsifications as it happened in the case of Holocaust. The work that Wikipedia's are doing also ensures that human rights issues are neatly documented for future reference to reduce the ambiguity surrounding these issues in the future. Traditional encyclopedias have limited capability to collect, analyze and curate huge amount of recent information and keep it updated from time to time. That puts Wikipedia in a unique position of being the only encyclopedia that gives comprehensive and updated coverage of human rights issues surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. But knowledge gaps do exist on Wikipedia too, and I would like to mention some of these knowledge gaps in the next slide. In my experience of editing human rights related articles in the context of COVID-19, I have seen that there are very few images and other media in these articles. On Wikipedia, we could add images of people queuing up for food in Geneva. We could add images of congestive prisons in Venezuela. We could add videos of protests happening in the streets across every country in the world. But such images are largely missing on Wikipedia, mainly because many human rights issues do not get as much attention by the mainstream media, and partly because of state censorship and partly because our contributors cannot travel to take photos as they have to respect stay-at-home restrictions. I am inclined to believe that the human rights issues we see reported on media is only a tip of the iceberg and that many such incidents go unseen or unreported. Wikipedia cites secondary sources such as news media and it can only mirror the information that has been previously published elsewhere. The quality of information on Wikipedia is compromised when the quality of Wikipedia citations are poor. For Wikipedia to remain healthy, we first need a healthy media and a healthy internet. We need to also increase the diversity of content on human rights related articles. Many of the COVID-19 related articles have country-wise information and yet not all countries are listed there. Information from countries which have overburdened healthcare systems or fragile economies or reduced freedom of expression are underrepresented on Wikipedia. The article about the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States is 25 times as big as the article about the pandemic in Yemen. Whenever country-wise information is present in articles about global issues, it is most likely that the information and perspectives come from sources released from countries of the global north. Similarly, we need more diversity of images on Wikipedia. Peggy mentioned that approximately 70% of the healthcare workers globally are women and yet most articles related to COVID-19 show white men performing medical procedures. We have research publications on Wikipedia's gender gap in terms of its text, but sparse data are available about gender gap in terms of images and other media. We need to first focus on conducting researches to quantify the magnitude of the gender gap in terms of Wikimedia's images to be able to close it. There is also a reduced coverage of COVID-19 and human rights related articles in non-English language editions of Wikipedia. The article about human rights issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic exists in only six of the 300 Wikipedia language editions. We should focus on disseminating human rights information in as many languages as possible so that non-English speakers also get to understand and update themselves about the human rights aspects of the pandemic. So I would like to call the attention of our editor community in recognizing and fixing these knowledge gaps on articles related to COVID-19 and human rights. On the other hand, what are the challenges faced by Wikipedia editors in creating and updating human rights related articles? We will see that in the next slide. Next slide please. One of the main challenges that I face while creating human rights related articles is the availability and usability of sources. We have been relying greatly on global organizations like the World Health Organization, UNICEF, UN Population Fund, MST International, and Human Rights Watch, apart from the news media to find content related to human rights in the context of COVID-19. The advantage of these global organizations is that they are quick to respond to recent events and that they have reliable information. The limitation I see is that the content is usually presented as press greetings and daily reports, so the information is scattered in several documents. So ISN editor has to go through several documents in order to find content that is useful for adding on Wikipedia. A vast majority of these documents are also in English and lack of translations make it harder to write articles from scratch in languages other than English. The challenge is to convert reports, news, and journal articles to an encyclopedia format. Reports are sometimes written in a how to do guide style and a news articles are written in an investigative style and journal articles sometimes present specific findings that have limited possibility for generalization. An editor needs to curate all this information from these different sources and present it in encyclopedia format that readers without specialized knowledge are able to understand. So to be able to do this in a scientifically correct way, one needs to be an expert in the subject. We now need more experts on Wikipedia than ever due to the changing nature of information related to this pandemic. In the context of COVID-19, statistical data has become more important than ever. Countries and organizations frequently report COVID-19 related statistics and Wikipedians often need to reproduce them or convert them from tables to prose to relevant articles. While comparing the statistics acquired by using different techniques, there is room for misinterpretation. Presenting such data in a reliable way is quite challenging. In addition, the statistics related to COVID-19 change so quickly and they need to be updated from time to time, which requires enormous volunteer capacity. Human rights violations are complex issues with many dimensions. Some governments are using COVID-19 as a pretext to impose sanctions and enforce stricter control on its citizens. Some of the regulations imposed for controlling the spread of the pandemic might seem to be fair for one section of the society, but might turn out to be unfair for other sections, especially to those having lesser power or privilege. On the other hand, some level of government control is needed for reducing the spread of the disease. So because human rights problems are so complex, narrating them is also challenging. Certain human rights issues are reported in different ways depending on the biases that the reporters have. All these factors make it challenging to write about human rights issues in a neutral way on Wikipedia. Editors from some countries have to face consequences if they criticize their government. It is possible that many people who might edit other articles do not touch topic areas surrounding human rights issues for fear of having to pay a penalty for doing so. In many countries, there are laws that can have you persecuted or even send you to jail if you spread misinformation related to COVID-19. That opens up the possibility that any information that the government doesn't want to be disseminated is classified as misinformation in that country and the editor is prosecuted for writing on Wikipedia. The fear of prosecution might be preventing many people to not speak up about human rights issues happening around them. So what can we do to overcome these challenges? I will try to present some solution for some of these challenges in the next slide. One solution for bringing high quality images and content to Wikipedia is to create institutional partnerships. Individual volunteers can only have limited capacity to create specialized content like busy touching procedures, images of healthcare personal or microscopic images of the virus. Large content donations of high quality images could be made possible only by institutes and organizations. The image on the right shows the structure of the spike protein of the coronavirus. This image was taken from the collection of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of the United States where they have made their content available under CC by SA license. Wikimedia Foundation and its affiliates have made partnerships with multiple United Nations organizations and that has helped to increase the robustness of content on Wikipedia and sister projects. However, not all publicly funded institutes share their content in licenses compatible for use on Wikipedia. And I think we need to invest in partnerships with more number of institutes that can offer specialized content for use on Wikipedia articles, particularly images. Such partnerships can also help us to procure diverse content and present diverse perspectives on Wikipedia. Partnerships could also mean that experts working in these organizations get to suggest key edits and citations on Wikipedia articles. We can also improve the quality of our articles by using technology. We can develop tools for finding and aggregating reliable sources so that it becomes easier for editors to find and use trusted references. We can use the potential of Wikidata for suggesting updates for the content on Wikipedia. We can create robust metrics for identifying the articles that need the most attention in all topic areas. Similarly, we need to make translation from one language to another easier on Wikipedia so that the editors do not need to create an article from scratch if they do not have the resources to do so. These and other possibilities using technology should be considered for increasing the quality of articles on Wikipedia. Whenever we find knowledge gaps, it is a good practice to conduct thematic events to address those gaps. It could be Wikiprojects, editing workshops, online cafes, webinars, podcasts or other ways to connect both experienced editors and newcomers working on human rights. Wikimedia Sweden in relation with UN Population Fund and UN Women are running an editing event to increase the content related to women's health and COVID-19 on Wikipedia. And I welcome all participants of today's webinar to be a part of this editing event starting Friday and the link to the event is given in the slide. In-person outreach events and conferences were once a great way to edit together and share best practices. Conducting in-person events is not possible nowadays due to the pandemic situation. We will need to brainstorm on running events and conferences remotely and also innovate on creating better online experiences to build and nurture relationships among volunteer editors. So some of these solutions are already in place and some are under discussion. We need to give more attention to human rights related content on Wikipedia because they are of crucial importance during these tough times more than ever before. Thank you. Thank you so much, Netta. It's been really lovely hearing from both of you, like the perspectives and what the context you're bringing. And we've gotten a few questions and I remind all the webinar viewers to check in on the Q&A section and ask questions, especially as we start talking about it here. But I wanted to open up the floor with our first question. That's for both Peggy and Netta. So as we're kind of looking at the kind of global, looking for specific information, especially around global statistics. Where should our Wikipedia editors and other members of the public be looking for the gender-based violence stats during the crisis? Are there specific aggregators or publishers of this data? Wikipedia should be paying attention to. Thanks. I could come in on that. I mean, Netta may have more to say too. Our office doesn't have the global figures on that, but what we've done is looked at country by country figures where you get very good information, I think, on increases in particular contexts. And on the basis of those, one resource I'd point to is the UN's Food and Population Agency, UNFPA, that really has tried to draw attention to this issue. And you may have seen their press release from 28th of April that noted their estimates that if the situation continued based on the increase in domestic violence rates they'd seen, they expected 15 million additional domestic violence cases for every three months. The lockdowns continued. So that was based on a compilation. So I expect that would be one good resource. WHO has also issued a press release in which they talked about up to 60% increases on gender-based violence. So I do think sort of the UN agencies are issuing good data on this. But I also have seen good data on sort of a country by country basis for particular studies that have been done by women's rights organizations in each context. Neda, are you encountering this data? I have also been relying very much on the United Nations and Allied organizations for this kind of data and the United Nations Population Fund has very good data about the gender impact. And another source which I would like to suggest is the aggregator that the World Health Organization is running. The WHO has an aggregator that aggregates all kinds of research related to COVID-19, not only medical research but also about the socio-economic impact. And what I do is I look up there and I see the new information that has come up in journal articles and they use that for references, citations on Wikipedia articles. And the good thing about the United Nations and Allied organizations is that they have reliable and updated data and I have been relying very much on them. So kind of a mix of the recent academic publications and the aggregated information from the UN. For Peggy and kind of related, what are your recommendations for like learning about and talking about children's rights issues during the pandemic, especially in light of those school closures and the kind of changing social context to which children are. Great. Well, I'm sure others have a broader range of information on some of this, but of course UNICEF is a very good site talking, speaking about the various UN agencies that have come in. They've done a number of very specific guidance documents on the particular challenges that children are facing during the pandemic. So I look at their website. I also on our website, OHCHR.org, we have enclosed links to some of the guidance on these issues relating to children's rights. But also, I mentioned earlier the system that we call special procedures. I don't know if you're all familiar with it, but it's just a term that we use to refer to UN experts that have been appointed by the Human Rights Council. And there are experts that have been appointed on issues relating to both the women's rights issues we've been discussing and on children's rights, and they've issued some specific guidance and press releases on these issues that I think would also be good sources for you. And Neda, in kind of my browsing of the topics, I haven't seen very, like, strong or high coverage of children's rights or the kind of children's perspective on the human rights issues. Are you seeing that on Wikipedia? Yes, I think we have a gap there. But we do have a very good article about impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on education and it has country-wide information listed there. And this article is also updated regularly with also the help from the Wikipedia Education Foundation. Yes, and yes, we do not have a particular article for COVID-19 and children as we do have for COVID-19 and pregnancy or COVID-19 and cancer. So I think that is one of the knowledge gaps that we have to address on Wikipedia. And I think for me, and looking at the data that I developed with the WMF research team, there was a lot of, like, we've deliberately filtered out the by-country articles from some of our results because we're seeing those articles were where a lot of, we knew a big public was going there and we were looking for the topics that people were going around those by-country articles. I'm wondering just kind of, first Annetta, like, are you seeing the human rights issues being covered at the by-country level well? And for Peggy, like, where's the tension or where's the kind of gap between, like, the reporting by-country stories and the international conversation? Like, where are those kind of communication gaps or where is that opportunity? So, first, Annetta. Yes. So I have seen that in human rights related, like, overarching topics, we have country-wise information listed as subheadings. And most often we have, like, 10 or 15 or 20 countries' perspectives and other countries are missing there. So we need to, like, find more sources and citations about what's happening in these countries and also update that country-specific information. Although we do have, like, a wide variety of articles, I think perspectives from different countries are missing, and that is one of the gaps that we need to address. Yes. And Peggy, like, sitting at the international level, like, where's that tension and kind of communication spectrum between the international and the country level? Alex, I think it's a really good question. I mean, I think one of the big challenges for us is that we have a tendency to only talk in those two levels, that either the global or the national. And in reality, this pandemic, as it's being experienced, there is a substantial difference between how it is experienced in a resource-relatively rich environment, like Western Europe or the United States, and what it means for the pandemic in other places in the global south and other places that may not have the same ability. You know, it's all well and good to say, you know, throw a lot of money at the employment problems that have developed, which of course should be done, but that is not necessarily as an answer that's available to countries that are already facing huge debt burdens. And so, you know, really making sure that when we look at these issues, we aren't having one-size-fits-all human rights solutions, that the human rights problems tend to be very similar. But what can be done to address them has to take into account the local context. And so trying to find ways that we really push all governments to do what is, what they are able to do within their resources. And then obviously on the global level, one of the key things for us has been to stress that multilateral solutions are absolutely essential. And, you know, as with climate change, this is an area where each state going its own is not, you know, a workable solution from a human perspective. And for every place on the globe to be free of this pandemic, it will require a lot of support and assistance that goes from the places that have the resources to those that may not fight the pandemic successfully. You saw articles early on that were talking about competition for protective gear, where, you know, wealthier states were able to sort of stockpile things and other states weren't able to access it because, you know, there was too much in some places. So, you know, it's one of those things where we really do need a response that takes up each level and really looks at the concerns that existed each level from a human rights perspective. And this is all related to the larger kind of huge wave of information coming out about the pandemic, including quite a lot of disinformation. For example, I woke up yesterday to Twitter to see a hashtag called DC blackout that I quickly realized was a disinformation activity related to the protests that were happening in DC. And I was in a consultation earlier in the kind of pandemic response with WHO about this like disinformation, this information pandemic. And so I'm wondering, like for both of you, like how does the Wikipedia conversation and the human rights conversation connect to this issue of disinformation. And kind of effective online communication here in the process. I can jump in on that because it's something we talk about. I wouldn't just say daily but almost hourly because it's it's the huge it's a huge challenge. Because like it with many areas of human rights. We have to protect the full range of rights because the issue here is we want to push back against the misinformation and disinformation because the propensity for that information to be out there undermines people's rights as I as I said at the beginning. But then the response that is sometimes taken up to address those issues can be to really suppress speech and that I talk about those issues as well. So, over broad approaches that basically block, you know, all discussion and all debate on issues are also, you know, huge problems from a human rights perspective to really trying to get governments to recognize that the best way to respond to bad information is with evidence and with good information and really prioritizing that in a way that makes sure that resources are going into the information campaigns and the work that's being done and that's why of course Wikipedia is so crucial that that you're out there are making those links and making that information available in the ways that we've been discussing. You know, our emphasis is always as easy as it might sound to just sort of, you know, stop all this information. What we see is that when when there is a push to do that. It also ends up roping in in many ways in many contexts, all forms of dissent all forms of action by human rights defenders that's critical of a government response. And those are things that have to be said. So we really want to make sure that the approaches on misinformation are appropriately narrow and targeted, but yet effective and that that is when you know really emphasizing more information and better information comes in. And Neda, what do you think Wikipedia's role is in all of us. Yes, I would like to agree with Peggy that the answer to bad information misinformation is providing good information and Wikipedia is doing a great job there in providing good information to people. On the other hand, Wikipedia is also listing misinformation and saying that this indeed is misinformation. So we have a particular article, we have a separate Wikipedia article for misinformation related to the COVID-19 pandemic. We have a separate article about a list of unproven methods against COVID-19. There is a list of xenophobic and racist incidents in the context of COVID-19 pandemic. So Wikipedia is just not only saying that look, this is information, but we also list the misinformation and particularly saying that these are all the kind of misinformation that emerged during the pandemic, and don't believe in those. So, in the xenophobia and racism article, we do have specific sections for different continents and different countries, and all the missing all the xenophobic incidents are listed there. The misinformation article has become very long that now I think we'll need to have separate articles for, you know, the bio weapon conspiracy theory and xenophobic conspiracy theory and so forth. So I think each of the types of conspiracy, each of the type of misinformation merits a specific Wikipedia article on its own, and we could also have specific misinformation articles by country, because a lot of misinformation circulate in different countries that we can have a full length Wikipedia page about that. So I think the list will be ever expanding and we should be mindful about adding more and more information there. Yeah, I thought I've thought it's been really interesting to watch Wikipedia become like a documentation space of the misinformation, not in the like fact check this particular conspiracy theory but more like, how do we keep a map of all the disinformation that's out there and pay attention to it. And I think it's kind of an interesting role that that would be is playing kind of like how we aggregate the best information we're also aggregating a sense of where all the bad information might be. For Netta, I'm really interested, like, you were just in university and a lot of schools are closed down right now and people are turning to Wikipedia for Wikipedia as a learning resource connected with their online network or connected without being at school at all. And if a Wikipedia is looking to like fill a gap for a public audience like what tactics are you looking for to like identify Oh this topic might have a lot of impact. How do you how do you go about thinking about that. No, when I start writing when I want to write some volunteer my time for Wikipedia what I do is I want to do the most impactful article I and I want to find what is the topic of the day, which I can contribute to so that more people are benefited from that. So in order to do that, I go to the template, which lists all the COVID-19 related articles, and then when I see COVID-19 article related to say pregnancy, then I know that Oh, we haven't created one, we don't have information about breastfeeding, but we do not have one about childcare and so forth. So the existing articles give me ideas about what doesn't exist. And that is how I find these knowledge gaps and try to fill up there. I'm not trained in human rights. I'm a medical doctor and the researcher, but when I looked at Wikipedia, when I started writing articles related to the medical topics. I also found that there is a lot of human rights perspectives missing there, which is why I got interested and started writing some of these. So, yes, I look up what is existing there to find to get ideas about what is not there and then look up all those references and try to build an article from S-Transfer. Yeah, I find that as a strong Wikipedia editor myself in my volunteer time, the more I read it, the more I see the gaps and they're glaring. And my space right now is climate change and looking at both human rights and kind of social impact of those. And it's really, it's amazing how clear the gaps are once you start reading more and you start seeing like the quality coverage on say like the US or Europe on one set of issues, but not other parts of the world. So, I definitely recommend the reading tactic, but you described like reading around a topic on Wikipedia. Also that data set I shared earlier in the talk is a great resource for folks who are looking like where readers looking for gaps as well. And Peggy, we have time for about one more question. You mentioned the LGBTQI perspective in the human rights issues. Can you speak briefly to like what kinds of patterns you're seeing in like communicating those issues, the human rights challenges there? I mean, it's been tough, Alex, because it's one of those areas where the people that are most vulnerable, it's not an easy to investigate and get information on. So some of this is not as well documented so far as with regards to gender-based violence where there's just a, you know, an easier resource really to get information on that. But the types of trends that we're seeing are very much along the same lines of violence in the home, stress and difficulty accessing healthcare is another issue where people are in a position where they feel like they would be exposed by making themselves available for healthcare. We've also looked at the issues of stigma within the LGBTI community. As I referenced earlier, and I hate to even say it because it's absurd, but there actually are articles that have said things about LGBTI people being the ones that are spreading the pandemic and things like this. So I would just urge everybody to really keep an eye out for those issues and, you know, maybe there isn't the ability and the data to do everything you'd want on the issues at this stage from an information perspective. But try to bring in that perspective and think about how some of the government rules and regulations might impact LGBTI communities and people going forward because, you know, from what we've seen so far the impact can be quite profound. Thank you so much. It's it's really a hard complicated conversation and everything's breaking news right now so like gathering and document it seems like a real challenge. We received more questions in the Q&A session, but we ran out of time in this hour and we're extremely grateful to Netta and Peggy for being part of the conversation. If you want to learn more, we created a meta page to kind of document this. Also, I believe Netta, Peggy and I are all on Twitter. You had our Twitter handles in the slide deck. And the wiki for human rights hashtag is a great place to kind of highlight things or parts of this conversation. We really recommend checking out the link and connecting to those resources, learning more about the data, the foundations putting out about COVID-19 and generally just participating in the conversation. More over the editathon that Netta mentioned, the Iowa community of Sweden is running as a great opportunity to get some hands on practice with writing human rights into the pandemic and health coverage of this situation. So we're really grateful. Thank you so much. And I believe we are done with this one at a time. So we're going to end recording and say and sign off. But thank you so much for everyone participating. Thanks everybody.