Incident Reporting on Wikipedia

Living in an urban environment, we witness everyday events or occurrences that may warrant an action or response but are not considered important enough to require such action. Such incidents could be a broken street lamp making the street dark and presumably unsafe, a leaking gas/water pipe, or even a wrongly parked car in a designated bike lane. We rarely respond to such ‘incidents’ unless it directly impacts us; most of the time we choose to walk past these ‘incident’. Contrast this to our response to cases that are deemed emergencies or one that lead to us calling ‘911’ emergency response services (112 in EU and Asia). Situations that require urgent emergency response are (thankfully) rare and should stay that way. However, the ‘low’ priority incidents occur almost daily and there are limited sources for citizens to report these incidents. When these incidents are not reported, they are not logged, and thus do not lead to a corrective action from responsible parties.

The field of ‘Incident Reporting’ is new but gathering momentum. Startups, non-profits, and community organizations are adopting technological tools to allow citizens to report these events and create data on them. Open source tools such as Ushahidi and FrontlineSMS have been adopted for incident reporting in Kenya, Malaysia, Egypt, and Pakistan. My work on crowdSOS also deals with building an incident reporting platform for citizen activism.

On Wikipedia, this concept of ‘Incident Reporting’ is present in the form of Confidential Incident Reporting and Incident Report.

1. Confidential Incident Reporting article is specific to safety-critical fields where individuals are encouraged to report incidents in confidence to ensure constant vigilance – the talk page for the entry identifies this entry within the fields of Aviation, Railways, Medicine, and Transport. The current stub was entered in May 2014 and there has been limited talk or revision on the subject.
2. Incident Report article refers to an accident report logged by medical staff for unplanned or unusual events at a medical facility. It is recorded by medical staff as an incident or accident report. The article was last updated in November 2010 and the talk page specifically calls out for expansion of the topic to include other relevant fields.

I believe the two entries on Wikipedia are too narrow in their focus and need to be expanded to include the broader field of work on Incident Reporting. ‘Confidential Incident Reporting’ should be a subsection within the ‘Incident Reporting’ topic. Confidentiality is a feature within the larger topic of incident reporting and does not warrant an entry on its own. Similarly, the Incident Report article should be expanded to include fields of work beyond medical and healthcare sector.

The field of Incident Reporting and Incident Reports is vast and must be reflected as such on the medium that we use daily as our source of information.