Welcome to the Wiki Wacky Covid news factory!

Do you remember when we were in lockdown, already 3 years ago? You certainly must remember about reading strange "news" circling on the internet, like that drinking hand disinfectant could kill the virus in the body, or that a certain billionaire put microchips in the vaccines... Of course some of them were so outlandish that were impossible to believe, but other news were perfectly credible – Vitamin C cures covid, Covid remains in the body permanently. Anyways these news or conspiracy theories were (and still are) a source of interest for a lost of us. How do we inform ourselves about them? For most of us the main source of general information is Wikipedia, which strives to be a neutral platform vigilant against misinformation. For this reason a page is never explicitly labelled as “fake”, but we can still cluster articles related to a certain Fake news topic and analyse its page view count in a certain period of time. As such, page visits of properly clustered articles are a powerful tool to monitor interest related to a specific fake news, and whether it was used by users as a resource to fact check, or a way to go deeper down the rabbit hole doesn’t matter. In this project, we want to evaluate the usefulness of Wikipedia as a tool for studying misinformation.