The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) is one of the first US federal agencies to collaborate with the Wikimedia organizations and it is doing so by actively contributing data and the latest research to help improve the health of the population. NIOSH’s effort involves examining mechanisms to help make sure that the occupational safety and health information that reaches Wikipedia’s millions of readers is complete, up-to-date, and free of errors.
The January 2017 NIOSH eNews articleReaching Our Audience Where They Are: Our Work with Wikipedia describes the motivation behind NIOSH’s efforts to expand and improve occupational safety and health content in Wikipedia. Wikipedia has become an important source of information for a large part of the global population. It increasingly appears in search engine rankings on a variety of important occupational safety and health topics. Today, Wikipedia offers more than 5.5 million articles in English. Globally, it serves 400 million unique visitors, accounting for 7.8 billion page views per month. Wikipedia has 37 million articles in 291 languages and is one of the seven most-visited websites in the world. Globally, one out of every two hundred visits to the internet is to Wikipedia.