Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Translation task force/Press release

Wikipedia and Translators Without Borders are busy working on an open healthcare textbook that already stretches to more than 2,000 pages and is viewed approximately 10 million times a month. And that is just the English version. The goal is to both improve and translate 80 key medical articles on Wikipedia into as many other languages as possible. Currently we are working on 30 different languages; however, we hope to eventually be creating healthcare content in all 285 languages in which Wikipedia currently exists, plus a few others in which it does not yet exist.

Wikipedia is currently the most used online healthcare resource globally, being used extensively by both professionals and the lay public alike. People who search for health information online are frequently led to Wikipedia, while surveys of physicians have found usage rates of between 50% and 100%, and it is the second most used Internet site by medical students after Google. While the quality of Wikipedia's medical content is hit and miss, its open editorial policy allows us to do something about this. More importantly, Wikipedia's content is free to use and reuse globally due to the open license under which it is published. This means that we can build upon each other's work as long as we agree that the results will always remain open to all.

While in this project we are concentrating on a key set of 80 articles, the entirety of Wikipedia's medical content makes up more than 25,000 articles and receives approximately 150-200 million page views a month in English. The top 300 medical articles receive more than 100,000 page views a month.

We believe that all people deserve high quality healthcare content in their own language. However, currently, this is not the case. As more and more people come online via cell phones, we have an amazing opportunity to address this knowledge gap. While most of the current 2.2 billion people online read one of the major languages, the next few billion will not. The Wikimedia Foundation is also working on collaborations to improve access for the world's poorest people through collaborations with cell phone companies. Two companies, Telenor and Orange, have agreed to waive data charges when browsing Wikipedia for 200 million of their customers in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.

We are looking for people to both help improve articles in English and to translate into other languages. This project is just beginning, and there are plans to carry it out over at least the next five to eight years. Further details are available here.