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AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo A woman receives a flu vaccination.

Say you're feeling sick, and you visit Wikipedia to see if your symptoms match those of the flu. Wikipedia logs that visit and makes public the number of people who visit every single one of its pages.

Now, a group of data scientists fromLos Alamos National Laboratory think this data could be useful for tracking diseases. In a paper published Friday in the journal PLOS Computational Biology, they present an algorithm that uses Wikipedia traffic data to estimate the rates of diseases in the real world and project imminent outbreaks.

Would this actually work? The idea of following what happens on the internet to model and predict disease rates isn't entirely new. For several years,Google Flu Trends has attempted to use Google queries as a proxy for flu rates, and other researchers have tried touse tweets for the same purpose. Yet those methods have had some real problems with predicting outbreaks.

But the researchers behind this new paper say that Wikipedia data might be the best bet and could allow us to track a number of diseases in different countries.

The researchers began by picking 14 different disease-country pairs to look at, such as the flu in the United States, tuberculosis in Thailand, and dengue in Brazil.

Next, they collectedpublicly-available page view data for every single page on Wikipedia in the relevant language. The data typically came on a weekly or monthly basis, and spanned a few years.

For each of these 14 disease-country pairs, the researchers also had conventionally-collected public health data on rates of the disease over time. They parsed each language's Wikipedia traffic data to find the ten particular pages that best matched with the known disease data.

"The general disease page was generally the one that correlated most strongly," saysNicholas Generous, the study's lead author. "Drugs and treatments were also usually in the top ten, and then for the flu, some of the various strains would also be in there."

In 8 of the 14 cases, the combined group of Wikipedia articles matched the actual disease rate extremely closely. For dengue rates in Brazil, for instance, traffic to the set of 10 articles correlated nicely throughout a three-year period:

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Wikipedia could help predict disease outbreaks

Moscow: Russia plans to create its own "Wikipedia" to ensure its citizens have access to more "detailed and reliable" information about their country, the presidential library said on Friday.

Citing Western threats, the Kremlin has asserted more control over the Internet this year in what critics call moves to censor the web, and has introduced more pro-Kremlin content similar to closely controlled state media such as television.

Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia assembled and written by Internet users around the world, has pages dedicated to nearly every region or major city within Russia's 11 time zones, but the Kremlin library said this was not good enough.

Wikipedia has pages dedicated to nearly every region or major city within Russia's 11 time zones, but the Kremlin library said this was not good enough.

"Analysis of this resource showed that it is not capable of providing information about the region and life of the country in a detailed or sufficient way," the state news agency RIA quoted a statement from the presidential library as saying.

"The creation of an alternative Wikipedia has begun." It was not known whether the project might affect Russians' access to the existing Wikipedia in any way.

President Vladimir Putin has branded the Internet a "CIA special project", and the Kremlin has said it must protect its online realm from threats from the West, as ties between the Cold War-era foes have hit a new bottom over the Ukraine crisis.

Since August, bloggers in Russia with more than 3,000 followers must register with the Moscow's mass media regulatory agency and conform to rules applied to larger media outlets.

And since February, state authorities have been able to block websites without a court order. The webpages of two leading Kremlin critics were among the first to be barred.

The presidential library statement said that 50,000 books and archive documents from 27 libraries around Russia had already been handed over for the process of establishing the "alternative Wikipedia".

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Russia plans to create its own 'Wikipedia'

Tim Wise an anti-racist essayist, author and educator is the next speaker in Lincoln Universitys Droppin Knowledge Lecture Series.

Hell speak at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday in Martin Luther King Halls Thomas D. Pawley Theatre, on the southwest corner of East Dunklin and Chestnut streets.

Admission is free; the event is open to the public.

Wise began his career as youth coordinator and associate director of the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism.

He now tours the country speaking to students on more than 1,000 college and high school campuses, and to professional institutions, on ways to remove racism from within their ranks.

Wises memoir White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son is known for its depiction of how racism creates privilege for Caucasians, while impacting persons of color negatively.

His five other, already published works also have earned critical acclaim, including, Dear White America: Letter to a New Minority.

His seventh work, Culture of Cruelty: How Americas Elite Demonize the Poor, Valorize the Rich and Jeopardize the Future, is scheduled to be released early next year.

The Droppin Knowledge Lecture Series was launched last month, to bring engaging speakers to LUs campus and community on a regular basis.

The next event in the series will be offered in January.

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LUs Droppin Knowledge lectures returning

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