Dear All,
I am writing to share with you a very inspiring initiative regarding health
and medicine articles on Wikipedia. Crores of Wikipedia readers read up
about health related issues either when they or their loved ones fall ill
or before or after they have consulted doctors or when they are curious
about a particular disease or drug. In fact, quite a few doctors and
nurses also read up these articles to improve their knowledge.
Wikipedia's medical articles have 15-20 crore page views every month. The
top 300 articles are viewed more than 1 lakh times every month. The
challenge is that the majority of these articles are only available in
English.
This initiative (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Translation_tas…)
has been conceptualised by WikiProject Medicine, Wikimedia Canada and very
interesting organisation called Translators Without Borders. It seeks to
translate a set of 80 of the most important health care articles into as
many languages as possible.
Given the state of our health care system as well as the increasing
readership of Indic language projects, there is huge positive impact that
we can have if we participate in this initiative and have these articles in
all Indic languages. The project page (referenced above) includes an
outline of the project, FAQs, useful links and a sign up for interested
volunteers.
The ways that we can participate are as follows
- English Editors to improve articles on en-wp
- English Editors to convert articles into simple English Wikipedia (so
that non-English editors who don't have a medical background can also help
out)
- Indic editors to help translating either by themselves or by helping
the translators at Translators Without Borders
Remember, you don't have to be a health care professional to help out. All
you have to do is simply care.
I am really happy to note that 5 editors from 5 Indic languages have
already signed up<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Translation_tas…>
for
this wonderful project. Of these 2 languages - Assamese and Malayalam -
have already started wiki project and started working on articles (really
big comprehensive articles) related to Medicine.
Assamese wikipedia medicine project page: ৱিকিপিডিয়া:ৱিকিপ্ৰকল্প
চিকিৎসাবিজ্ঞান<http://as.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%A7%B1%E0%A6%BF%E0%A6%95%E0%A6%BF%E0%A6%AA%…>
Some of the articles created:
- কৰ্কট ৰোগ<http://as.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%A6%95%E0%A7%B0%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%95%E0%A6%9F_…>
(Cancer)
- সৰ্পদংশন<http://as.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%A6%B8%E0%A7%B0%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%AA%E0%A6%A6%…>
(Snakebite)
Malayalam wikipedia biology project page:
വിക്കിപീഡിയ:വിക്കിപദ്ധതി/ജീവശാസ്ത്രം<http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%B4%B5%E0%B4%BF%E0%B4%95%E0%B5%8D%E0%B4%95%…>
Some of the articles created:
- ആസ്മ (Asthma) <http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asthma>
- ന്യുമോണിയ (Pneumonia) <http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumonia>
- മസ്തിഷ്കാഘാതം (Stroke) <http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroke>
Please note that this project do not involve machine translation or bots.
It is really happy to note that both in Assamese and Malayalam wiki these
projects are run by doctor (or medicine students) wikipedians :) Yes, Indic
wikipedias has editors from all wakes of life.
There is so much potential on the articles related to medicine both in
Indic and English. I encourage interested wikipedians to join this project
by adding your name
here<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Translation_tas…>
.
I welcome and invite everyone to join in.
Healthy Editing
Shiju Alex
Cross-posting to other mailing lists. Kindly ignore if you have read
this on another mailing list.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
Thanks
Tinu Cherian
Wikimedia India.
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [WMIN-Members] New Wikimedia India Portals
Date: Fri, 3 Feb 2012 08:18:34 +0530
From: Naveen Francis <naveenpf(a)wikimedia.in>
Reply-To: wmin-members(a)googlegroups.com
To: Wikimedia India Community list
<wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>, wmin-members
<wmin-members(a)googlegroups.com>
Hi all,
We are pleased to formally announce the launch of the following new
Wikimedia India Portals:
http://wikimedia.in/- The new landing page will be the gateway to the
various Project pages and Wikis.
http://wiki.wikimedia.in <http://wiki.wikimedia.in/>The public wiki is
now revamped with an all-new look and lots of information. Feel free to
add more information to the wikis.
http://members.wikimedia.in <http://members.wikimedia.in/>Wiki for India
Chapter Members
http://blog.wikimedia.in/Wikimedia India Blog - to post a blog, contact
Arjuna Rao Chavala or Tinu Cherian
We are pleased to introduce the following new Wikimedia Project gateways
for the various Indic languages:
http://wikisource.in<http://wikisource.in/>
http://wikiquote.in<http://wikiquote.in/>
http://wikibooks.in<http://wikibooks.in/>
http://wikinews.in<http://wikinews.in/>
http://wikibooks.org.in<http://wikibooks.org.in/>
http://wikisource.org.in<http://wikisource.org.in/>
http://wiktionary.org.in<http://wiktionary.org.in/>
The planned landing page for http://wikipedia.in is available here
<http://wikimedia.in/wikipedia.html>.
Efforts are currently underway to obtain control of a few more important
domains and announcements will be made as and when we get them. We
sincerely believe this initiative will help drive more traffic to Indic
language Wikimedia Projects.
We would like to express our sincere gratitude to the Wikimedia CH /
Switzerland Chapter and Manuel Schneider (Wikimedia CH / Switzerland)
for hosting our websites and portals at no cost.
A number of people need to be thanked, who helped in the this initiative.
Rajesh K Oayanchal who designed the portals and Jyothis E who gave his
webspace for the testing purposes. Anirudh, Noopur Raval, ,Surya,
Radhakrishna, Omshivaprakash, Debanjan, Saroj, Swaroop, Abhishek
Suryawanshi and others have helped in translations .
Tanvir Rahman , Tinu Cherian and Arun Ram helped in revamping the public
wiki.
We hope that you will find these portals useful and informative.
Please do get back to us with your feedback and suggestions.
Regards,
Naveen Francis
Wikimedia India Chapter
Dear All,
I have compiled the, statistical update of the Indic language Wikipedias
for the year 2011. In this report, my aim is to provide an *analysis* as
well as *my perspectives* on the health of various Indic language
communities as well as the state of various Indic language wikipedias for
the year 2011. (The period of analysis is editor contributions between 2011
January 1 and 2011 December 31). As always, a lot of the data for this
report and analysis are based on the statistical data published at
http://stats.wikimedia.org. Thanks to Erik Zachte for compiling all this
information.
I must also point out that this annual update contains a number of insights
*that are derived not only from this data but directly from community
members* who have shared a very real-world picture.
Read the annual update here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Program/Indic_Languages/Statistics/201…
I welcome your comments on this annual update. Please discuss it on the
talk page. You can also reach me at shiju(a)wikimedia.org
Thanks
Shiju Alex