Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Translation task force/Grant

Grand Challenges Explorations Application Form as per here [1]

Section I. What is your idea?

A) Proposal

Our proposal has two main goals: 1) create a process to develop high quality, peer-reviewed medical content under a Creative Commons license and provide it free to the world; 2) provide translated versions of this content to low and middle income countries in the languages of the population. To achieve this, the project will prioritize 80 high-burden medical topics currently available on Wikipedia in English. Academics will raise the standard of these topics to publication level, and then submit them to open access general medical journals for peer review and publication. The revised articles will then be re-integrated into Wikipedia. This high quality content will then be simplified and translated into initially 80 languages, and hopefully more as time goes on. Our innovative project takes two proven ideas - collaborative content creation/translation and academic peer review - and combines them into a new process that makes high quality information available to many people in need, in a language they understand.

B) Background and Relevance

Over the past 25 years, the cost of medical serial journals has far outpaced inflation, effectively pricing all but academic physicians and those at prestigious private institutions out of the market. Individual subscriptions to most high quality resources cost USD$400-800 per year, creating a burden for most healthcare providers, and putting these resources out of reach for healthcare providers in low and middle-income countries. The problem is compounded by the fact that content is only available in a few languages. Approximately half of the people in various African countries, including many health care providers, do not speak or read European languages, yet most medical information is only available in European languages. This means that the majority of Africans have no access to the health facts they need to know. Consequently, unproven, ineffective and substandard health practices and treatments are difficult to eradicate, and the implementation of effective care is often delayed for long periods. At the same time, there is tremendous progress being made in closing the “digital last mile” in developing countries, notably with mobile technology. For example, Wikipedia has recently signed deals with mobile service providers Orange and Telnor, who have agreed to waive the data charges for Wikipedia access via mobile device for 300 million people in the developing world. Our innovative proposed project solves the “language last mile” for medical information, at the same time as the digital last mile. It aligns making local language medical information available on Wikipedia with the upcoming great expansion of the numbers of people in developing countries who will have access to Wikipedia on their phone.

C) Execution Plan

The proposed process for each article involves 4 separate organizations: a) Source and publisher of health care information for the initial 80 topics; b) Peer review journals; c) Simplifier of the topics; d) Translator of the topics

1) The original article is taken from Wikipedia and improved until it passes the academic peer-review process and is worthy of publication. Recruitment of co-authors, creation of the articles and submission to the journals will be managed by Organization (a and b).

2) The article is submitted for peer-reviewed publication and is published by an open access medical journal.

3) The published article is re-integrated on Wikipedia, including bringing the article topic up to Wikipedia’s “Good Article” or “Featured Article” quality rating, indicating that it is a reliable and valid article.

4) Editing of the article to simple English is carried out by Organization (c).

5) Translation of the articles from simple English to as many other languages as possible is carried out by Organization (d), initially 80 languages for each article but hopefully more as time goes on.

6) Reintegration of articles back into the appropriate language wiki, carried out by Wikipedians in those languages who are currently being recruited by Organizations (a) and (d).

7) Usage is monitored and measured against goals, via monthly use of Wikipedia automated tools by Organization (a).

Section II. How will you test it?

Our project proposal is based on two hypotheses: 1) The Wikipedia assessment grade will go up as a result of the improvements made to the topic page; 2) The total worldwide page views for a given topic will increase as a result of the improvements made to its English topic page and availability in more languages.

We will test our hypotheses by using Wikipedia’s automated tools to obtain a monthly measurement of page views for each topic and each language, as well as measuring the increase in assessment scores as a result of the peer-reviewed publishing process.

If the two hypotheses are validated, we will have achieved our goal of making higher quality, understandable medical information available globally. In addition it will be accessible without data charges, to 300 million people in developing countries. The outcome of this should be a big step towards achieving the Millennium Development Goal of health information for all by 2015 and a healthier and better informed population globally.