Wikipedia's medical collaborations gathering pace
The key annual event in the Wikimedia calendar, Wikimania 2013, will be held in Hong Kong in just five weeks' time. Among the events will be a presentation by two people who are working to promote the development of medical content on Wikimedia projects. One is James Heilman of Wiki Project Med, a non-profit dedicated to making "clear, reliable, comprehensive, up-to-date educational resources and information in the biomedical and related social sciences freely available to all people in the language of their choice". The other is Lori Thicke, president of Translators Without Borders (TWB), the Connecticut-based organisation set up in 2010 to provide pro-bono translation services for humanitarian non-profits.
At Wikimania, Heilman and Thicke will discuss how TWB and Wikipedia are collaborating to improve medical content. Thicke told the Signpost that "more people die from lack of information than from lack of medication. ... We chose to work with Wikipedia because it’s the most frequently consulted health resource on the web. It's not only scalable, but with Wikipedia Zero, consumers in some parts of the developing world actually have access to Wikipedia free of data charges." Crossing the language barriers to health knowledge, she says, is a major hurdle for enabling people in the developing world to live healthier and longer lives.
Heilman, who was recently interviewed in a Bulletin of the World Health Organization, says that while medical articles are in a reasonable state in a few European languages, Wikipedias in almost all other languages have threadbare coverage, including languages spoken where medical services are poor or non-existent. Wikipedias there have significant potential to improve health care in many parts of the world, he says, "but translation is essential if we're going to realise that potential ... and the key to translation is that an article be important and of high quality."
The collaboration has already produced nearly 200 translations into more than 30 languages, but this is a drop in the ocean of information that Wikipedia could make available across languages. Most projects have no equivalent to the English Wikipedia's WikiProject Medicine, although Heilman listed eight other Wikipedias in which there is a reasonably strong presence: the German, Spanish, French, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, and Romanian Wikipedias. Of passing interest is Heilman's observation that TWB's active membership is about 90% female, the inverse of the gender imbalance in the Wikipedia editing community.
In March, the cross-language medical drive attracted a $14.5k grant from the Indigo Trust to help train and fund English–Swahili translators in Kenya. The current collaboration is learning from a Google–Wikipedia translation project Health speaks, which emphasised the use of advanced machine translation. Heilman says, however, that "it's more important to forge close links between article reviewers, Wikipedia's medical editors, and the translation corps"—a hallmark of more recent efforts.