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Grants:IdeaLab/Medicine Translation Project Community Organizing

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status: idea
project:
Medicine Translation Project Community Organizing
idea creator:
project contact:
wikiocaasi(_AT_)yahoo.com
participants:
advisors:
summary:
English Wikipedia's Wiki Project Medicine has translated millions of words of medical articles into smaller languages; some of these translations are just sitting there waiting to be integrated into local language versions. This project will organize a community team around making that happen.
created on: 00:44, 8 March 2014

Project idea

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What is the problem you're trying to solve?

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Wikipedia is the most consulted source of medical information for the lay public. In many languages, Wikipedia is the only general knowledge source, and source of free health information that exists. English Wikipedia has highly developed medical content and we have arranged a partnership with w:en:Translators without Borders to translated the best and most important content into smaller languages. The problem is that there are far more articles translated than we have been able to upload/integrate into the local versions.

What is your solution?

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We want to use a community organizing model to identify the failure points in the process and create a volunteer pipeline for continual integration of the medical content. We want a project community leader to build a network and a system for clearing the queue of translated content. A first step in this process is analyzing past experience to develop best practices which have previously worked; we also want to identify roadblocks (such as occasional local resistance to translated articles) and spend some time troubleshooting them. The next step is to start building a network of local volunteer integrators, training them if necessary, and then regularly updating them about new medical content available in their language. There may be a lightweight technical component to making that streamlined and efficient, but the primary driver is going to be community organizing.

Project goals

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  • Complete a strengths-weaknesses analysis of year 1 of translation integration.
  • Create a list of local volunteer integrators. Fill gaps in languages with no local integrators.
  • Develop a local integrator training kit.
  • Develop a system of rewarding encouraging volunteer integrator.
  • Systematize (or automate) updating local integrators about newly translated not-yet-integrated content
  • Start thinking about sustainability and scale, so a future phase of the project would be self-sufficient and able to handle greater capacity in more languages and with more content

Get involved

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I'm happy to advise on this project, and Doc James will too. We're looking for an experienced Wikipedian to take on this grant as project leader, and to be funded for their time organizing and executing the project. We will help you turn this idea into an Individual Engagement Grant proposal (ideally by March 31, 2014) and help you get up and running. But it will be your grant.


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