Translators Without Borders and Wikipedia's Wikiproject Medicine would like to announce a partnership to improve the free global access to high quality health information. Wikipedia, as many are aware, is one of the foremost health care information resources. It is freely usable by all people globally and can be re-purposed or changed for other uses as long as Wikipedia is acknowledged and the resulting product is released under a license that allows the same. Wikipedia's 26,000 medical articles receive approximately 150-200 million page views a month in English alone with some content available in over 280 other languages. The top 300 medical articles receive more than 100,000 page views a month[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Popular_pages] and it is used extensively by both health care providers and the lay public with between 50-70% of physicians using it in clinical practice.
Availability of high quality content is however limited in many languages. Even in English less than 1% of articles have passed a semi formal peer review process. Our efforts are attempting to both improve the English content and translation articles on humankind's 80 most important health care conditions to as many other languages as possible. This will be for many people the first time high quality health information becomes available in their own language. We are looking for people to both help us at Wikipedia improve articles in English and people to help Translators Without Borders do translation. We are also needing people with both language abilities and the ability or desire to learn how to edit Wikipedia to integrate the translated material back in the Wikipedia edition in question. This project is just beginning and we are planning on caring it out over the next three to five years. If you wish further details or want to become involved feel free to contact me or sign up here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Translation_task... . Also please be extra nice to all the people I am recruiting and give me a heads up if problems are encountered.
-- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian