Hi everyone,
Following up on my earlier thread about this, we are excited to announce a new collaboration between the Wikimedia Foundation and the World Health Organization (WHO). The collaboration will initially focus on releasing WHO content such as public-health related infographics, videos, and other COVID-19 resources under a free license (CC BY SA 3.0) to be shared on Wikimedia Commons. We are hopeful that these resources will be useful for volunteers writing about COVID-19 across language wikis and further expand access to knowledge about the pandemic to people around the world.
You can read more about the collaboration announcement in the press release we published earlier today [1], and see the first batch of content uploads from WHO on Wikimedia Commons [2]. If you want to help share the collaboration news on social media, please retweet the Foundation’s account [3] or share your own post using this toolkit [4].
I want to give a major thank you and shout out to the volunteers (including Doc James, Dr. Netha Hussain, John Cummings, and many others) who have been moving these conversations with WHO forward for years, as well as to the many Wikimedians providing accurate and relevant coverage of COVID-19 on the projects that this collaboration hopes to support. We are so excited to finally reach this milestone with WHO.
In the coming months, Alex Stinson, from our Community Programs team, will be working with volunteers to continue sharing details of the WHO content available on Commons and collaborating with volunteers to understand how WHO resources might help address information needs and gaps about COVID-19 on the projects. We need your help identifying the most useful content. Please join us on the project page on Commons to request WHO materials, and ask questions or give feedback on the project [5].
We are excited to celebrate this important achievement in making more knowledge about COVID-19 freely available to everyone in such a critical time in the world. Thank you to all who made this possible!
Feel free to reach out on this thread or to Alex and I directly in case you have further questions about this collaboration.
Jorge Vargas
Sr. Manager, Regional Partnerships
[1]
https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2020/10/22/world-health-organization-and-wikimedia-foundation-expand-access/[2]
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:World_Health_Organization_COVID-19_Disinformation_Infographics [3]
https://twitter.com/Wikimedia/status/1319263874303037442[4]
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SCc0uXewzL5CUD2JPQYSYIDs3B63KxdLjprSBsn4kvA/edit?usp=sharing[5]
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:World_Health_Organization