[Foundation-l] New partnership: Translators Without Borders and Wikipedia's Wikiproject Medicine

[James Heilman]

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_force#People_involved_.28with_language_ability.29
. 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