Lori Thicke, the founder of translation company Lexcelera as well as of Translators without Borders has been invited to give a presentation in Hong Kong August 10th for the annual Wikimedia conference: Wikimania.
The subject will be the collaboration between Translators without Borders and Wikipedia to produce translations of 100 of the top-ranked medical articles into 100 languages of the developing world.
Translators Without Borders and Wikiproject Medicine began collaborating on efforts to bring high quality health care content to all people in all languages via Wikipedia in 2011. Since that time, more than 175 translations have been carried out into more than 30 languages. The goal is to have 100 core article of high quality in more than 100 languages. This project aims to take down language barriers to Wikipedia content, particularly for communities just coming online thanks to mobile technology.
Presentation by the Founder of Lexcelera, the parent company of LexWorks, and Translators without Borders, Lori Thicke, and Dr James Heilman, Head of Wikimedia Canada.
About the collaboration proposal
“In English the medical content on Wikipedia got about 230 million page views in February 2013, or about 3% of all page-views for that language.
This makes Wikipedia the number one used medical resource in English globally.
The project that curates medical content (Wikiproject Medicine) rates medical articles both by quality and by importance:
A collection of 80 articles deemed to be of key importance got about 12 million page views in February 2013 (5% of the page-views for medical content) although they represent only a fraction of the total number of medical articles (26,000). While medical content is fairly well developed in a few other primarily European languages, little medical content exists in most of Wikipedia’s other 285 languages.
What makes developing content in these languages difficult is that most sources for medicine are written in English.
Thus in 2011 Wikiproject Medicine formed a collaborative effort with Translators Without Borders (TWB) to first improve key medical content in English to at least Good Article or Featured Article status followed by translation by volunteers into as many other languages as possible. Translators without Borders is a US-based non profit organization […] which donates translations to other non-profit organizations using crowdsourcing via a community of certified volunteer translators. The number of volunteers which participate with the organization is around 1600 and growing steadily. This talk is going to be an overview of our progress as well as a discussion of some of the hurdles we have encountered.
It will also place the project in the context of unequal access to health information and discuss how the combination of removing language barriers and advances with Wikipedia Zero opens up opportunities for democratizing global access to global knowledge.
There will be an opportunity for those who are interested to ask questions and become involved.”
