User:Doc James/Blog
The launch of MDWiki...
Translation
The Healthcare Translation Task Force began in 2011 as a collaboration between Wiki Project Med Foundation and Translators Without Borders. The goal was to address some of the prior issues that had occurred with efforts to translate between languages by Google in 2009 and 2010.[1] Which included not using good quality and well referenced initial content and overwriting existing material.
Initially we brought articles to good article status on EN WP before having translated the entire thing into another language. Feedback from the Swahili Wikipedia, that well this content was good it was too much content for the community to maintain. If was also very labor intensive for those on EN WP to produce. So in 2014 we shifted to just improving the leads of EN WP for translation into other languages.
In 2020 pushback on EN WP to developing leads that were also useful for translation grew. Some within the community did not feel easier to understand language and references in the lead were positive changes, leds on EN WP such as Friedreich's ataxia have no references making them unsuitable to translate.
Thus in July of 2020 we moved efforts to a separate wiki and MDWiki.org was born. Here we continue to take leads of articles and improve them in preparation for translation, including already decent articles like Friedreich's ataxia
Developing world
Wikipedia has long had an issue with being US centric. In part this is due to the US having a strong popular press and our editor base being skewed to this geographical area. So while the price of insulin in the USA is discussed as it has garner press this price in LMIC and that of essential medications generally in these regions was not.
An International Medical Products Price Guide is available that has been developed in collaboration between the World Health Organization and an NGO. The wholesale price of medications by one supplier, the IDA Foundation, which serves more than 100 LMICs is included.
When it comes to esketamine Wikipedia has removed the only really notable thing about the product, which is the price of the nasal spray at > 5,000 USD for the first month of treatment.[2]
Video
Back in 2015 we began collaborating with a branch of the Khan Academy that was developing medical videos.[3] Sal Khan; however, was not willing to drop the NC from the licensing of their videos generally and subsequently drop the development of post grade 12 video content. Some of the individuals within Khan left for a new initiative called Osmosis in 2015 and we began collaborating further.
During the the final discussion regarding collaboration with Osmosis on video in March of 2018 one user noted that on EN WP "Text is King".
To address the criticism of the lack of collaborative editability of these videos we joined the development of VideoWiki spear headed by an individual out of India. We meet up for the first time in South Africa in 2018 and funded gathering again in Sweden.
We believe that video deserves greater prominence and as such have created a namespace for the scripts on MDWiki and added a top tag between "Article" and "Talk" for these scripts.
NC Commons
- Community opinion is mixed[4]