Dear All,
I am writing to share with you a very inspiring initiative regarding health
and medicine articles on Wikipedia. Crores of Wikipedia readers read up
about health related issues either when they or their loved ones fall ill
or before or after they have consulted doctors or when they are curious
about a particular disease or drug. In fact, quite a few doctors and
nurses also read up these articles to improve their knowledge.
Wikipedia's medical articles have 15-20 crore page views every month. The
top 300 articles are viewed more than 1 lakh times every month. The
challenge is that the majority of these articles are only available in
English.
This initiative (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Translation_tas…)
has been conceptualised by WikiProject Medicine, Wikimedia Canada and very
interesting organisation called Translators Without Borders. It seeks to
translate a set of 80 of the most important health care articles into as
many languages as possible.
Given the state of our health care system as well as the increasing
readership of Indic language projects, there is huge positive impact that
we can have if we participate in this initiative and have these articles in
all Indic languages. The project page (referenced above) includes an
outline of the project, FAQs, useful links and a sign up for interested
volunteers.
The ways that we can participate are as follows
- English Editors to improve articles on en-wp
- English Editors to convert articles into simple English Wikipedia (so
that non-English editors who don't have a medical background can also help
out)
- Indic editors to help translating either by themselves or by helping
the translators at Translators Without Borders
Remember, you don't have to be a health care professional to help out. All
you have to do is simply care.
I am really happy to note that 5 editors from 5 Indic languages have
already signed
up<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Translati…
for
this wonderful project. Of these 2 languages - Assamese and Malayalam -
have already started wiki project and started working on articles (really
big comprehensive articles) related to Medicine.
Assamese wikipedia medicine project page: ৱিকিপিডিয়া:ৱিকিপ্ৰকল্প
চিকিৎসাবিজ্ঞান<http://as.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%A7%B1%E0%A6%BF%E0%A6%95%…
Some of the articles created:
- কৰ্কট
ৰোগ<http://as.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%A6%95%E0%A7%B0%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%95%E0…
(Cancer)
-
সৰ্পদংশন<http://as.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%A6%B8%E0%A7%B0%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%…
(Snakebite)
Malayalam wikipedia biology project page:
വിക്കിപീഡിയ:വിക്കിപദ്ധതി/ജീവശാസ്ത്രം<http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%B4…
Some of the articles created:
- ആസ്മ (Asthma) <http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asthma>
- ന്യുമോണിയ (Pneumonia) <http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumonia>
- മസ്തിഷ്കാഘാതം (Stroke) <http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroke>
Please note that this project do not involve machine translation or bots.
It is really happy to note that both in Assamese and Malayalam wiki these
projects are run by doctor (or medicine students) wikipedians :) Yes, Indic
wikipedias has editors from all wakes of life.
There is so much potential on the articles related to medicine both in
Indic and English. I encourage interested wikipedians to join this project
by adding your name
here<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Transla…
.
I welcome and invite everyone to join in.
Healthy Editing
Shiju Alex