WikiProjectMed:Wiki Project Med Foundation

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Frameless

Wiki Project Med Foundation (WPMEDF), also known as Wikimedia Medicine, is a nonprofit corporation founded in December 2012 with the purpose of promoting development and distribution of health care content on Wikimedia projects. We do this by forming collaborations with other like-minded organizations, giving talks at universities and other organizations, and working to develop greater access to the medical literature for Wikipedians, among many others. We are incorporated in New York State and tax exempt in the United States, but are a global group with members from all continents with permanent residents. We seek to provide the sum of all medical knowledge to all people in their own language.

How to get involved

⇒ Join at no associated cost

⇒ Donate securely through PayPal

Mission

To make 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 online and off.

This organization has no direct editorial control over the health-related content of the Wikimedia projects themselves. We believe the goals of the Wikimedia movement are best achieved in collaboration with other organizations who share those goals, and we see WikiProject Med's role primarily as an educational one, where we will provide advice and instruction to other like-minded individuals and organizations regarding how to contribute to Wikimedia projects. Many of us as individuals, however, are extensively involved as editors within these projects.

WikiProject Med will fulfill its mission by, among other things:

  1. Persuading individual experts and professional and scholarly organizations to review or contribute to Wikimedia medical content, and provide them with necessary support and training
  2. Create, collect, process, and present the sorts of metrics which describe usage statistics and quality of health content on Wikimedia projects

While WikiProject Med members may contribute health content themselves, they will do so not as members or representatives of WikiProject Med but as members of the projects that host that content (Wikipedia, Wikiversity, Wiktionary, Commons, etc.).

  • The territory of activity is everywhere in the world where there are people interested in achieving our mission.
  • The organization is legally registered in the United States but people from around the world can join.

Join

Membership is free for active contributors of medical content to a Wikimedia project (such as Wikipedia) or participants in an organisation whose mission aligns with WikiProject Med's. More details about the exact requirements can be found here.

After filling out the application form, please be sure to add your name to the public list as well.

Projects

This organization promotes participation in Wikipedia Medicine projects across different languages (of which there are several).

Internet-in-a-Box

Picture of 5 devices from different angles

Internet-in-a-Box (IIAB) is an effort to provide Wikipedia and other content via physical media. It is primarily for distribution in places where access to the Internet is limited or controlled. The device includes software which creates a Wi-Fi hotspot that offers closed platform access.

We are currently distributing a number of versions containing languages for specific regions of the world. Devices are being sent in exchange for a donation of equal or greater than the cost of the underlying hardware. The device also functions as a mini offline app store in that people are able to download to their Android phone some of our offline apps

Organizational partnerships

The standard kind of partnership which WikiProject Med offers to any health organization is assistance in getting information and content from that organization's field of expertise into Wikipedia, then assisting the organization in getting feedback on how their information has been received and processed. In this model, organizations come to Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects in the same manner as any other volunteers. The two kinds of help most frequently offered are as follows:

  1. If an organization has people who are willing to contribute information, WikiProject Med will help arrange for training of those people.
  2. If an organization has information or media to donate so that Wikipedia's own volunteers can integrate it into the encyclopedia and elsewhere, then WikiProject Med will help advertise and promote this content.

Collaborations are currently being developed with the World Health Organization, Cancer Research UK, United States National Library of Medicine / National Institutes of Health, and the Cochrane Collaboration. Efforts include issues surrounding copyright and the support of the creation of Wikipedians in Residence.

A number of presentations have been given globally regarding the significance of Wikipedia in Medicine including in Canada, the UK, India, Switzerland and Nepal. A model presentation is available here under a CC BY SA license for others to use and adapt. See there.

We are an official supporter of Health Information For All 2015.

Translation

Logo for translation work

The Translation Task Force is a project that began on the English Wikipedia in collaboration with Translators Without Borders to improve key medical articles via translation. A summary of the project is as follows:

  1. Identify the most globally important health articles on Wikipedia (a list is here)
  2. Improve them to "Good Article" or "Featured Article" status in English according to English Wikipedia criteria
  3. Once an article reaches at least good status, have it professionally reviewed
  4. Put the article in queue for translation into every other language in the world at Translators Without Borders, with emphasis on languages which do not have equivalent articles of good quality
  5. Present the most comprehensive multilingual source of health information ever compiled to the world, for free, continually as it is being created

Education outreach

  • We are partnered with UCSF on running 4 week elective for medical students each semester in which the students edit Wikipedia, with a class twice per year since 2013.
  • There is an existing Wikipedia outreach program which sends Wikipedia ambassadors - "campus ambassadors" - to schools to encourage students and professors to incorporate contributions to Wikipedia projects into the learning curricula. This organization facilitates participation in the campus ambassador program for those participating in health-related education projects at universities.
  • Taiwanese university
  • Video to help guide new editors[1]

Wikimedia community events

As might be expected, this organization participates more generally in outreach and development programs of the broader Wikimedia community. Among other things, some members of this organization also participate in the following:

Tech work

Bots and scripts can help us improve medical content. This is a place to collaborate on proposals to develop these.

We have put together a "copy and paste detection bot" which is running on all medical articles. Results can be seen here en:User:EranBot/Copyright

Communication

As of February 2016, there are WikiProject Medicines in 38 languages. There is a Global message delivery target list for those.

Email communication

  • The board has frequent, ongoing internal communications via email.
  • We have a mailing list here, but it is expected that most discussion will take place on meta.

Social media

Press and awards

General administration

The organization was established in 2012 to be a Wikimedia movement affiliate and as an international health education organization with legal registration as a nonprofit organization in the United States.

On Meta-Wiki all of the pages in [Wiki Project Med] can be found via Special:PrefixIndex/Wiki Project Med.

Elections

The organization regularly organizes elections as documented at WikiProjectMed:Election.

Resolutions

Annual Plan 2019