Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/General Support Fund/Scaling the Team, Tech, Reach, and Impact of Wiki Project Med Foundation (Wikimedia Medicine)
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Applicant information edit
- Organization name or Wikimedia Username for individuals. (required)
- Wiki Project Med Foundation
- Do you have any approved General Support Fund requests? (required)
- No, it is my first time applying for a General Support Fund
- You are applying as a(n). (required)
- Wikimedia Affiliate (chapter, thematic org., or user group)
- Are your group or organization legally registered in your country? (required)
- Yes
- Do you have a fiscal sponsor?
- No
- Fiscal organization name.
- N/A
Main proposal edit
- 1. Please state the title of your proposal. This will also be a title for the Meta-Wiki page. (required)
- Scaling the Team, Tech, Reach, and Impact of Wiki Project Med Foundation (Wikimedia Medicine)
- 2. Do you want to apply for the multi-year funding or renewal process? (required)
- N/A
- 2.1. For how many years of multi-year funding are you applying? (required)
- N/A
- 2.2. Provide a brief overview of Year 2 and Year 3 of the proposed plan and how this relates to the current proposal and your strategic plan? (required)
N/A
- 3. Proposed start date. (required)
- 2023-12-01
- 4. Proposed end date. (required)
- 2024-11-30
- 5. Does your organization or group have an Affiliate or Organizational Annual Plan that can help us understand your proposal? If yes, please provide it. (required)
- No
- 6. Does your affiliate, organization or group have a Strategic Plan that can help us understand your proposal? If yes, please provide it. (required)
- No
- 7. Where will this proposal be implemented? (required)
- International (more than one country across continents or regions)
- Our content is used and reused all over the world, especially in Low and Middle Income Countries (LMIC). We focus in particular on Africa, the Middle East, and southeast Asia--in countries including Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Brazil, India, Lebanon, Nigeria, Pakistan, Uganda, and Vietnam. Our translation program is global with an explicit goal of reaching dozens of lesser-spoken languages in every country. The top languages--by article count--are Odia, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Farsi, Armenian, Korean, and Spanish. Our Internet In A Box (IIAB) initiative ships units to targeted LMIC countries with little, slow, or no internet access including Egypt, Yemen, Lebanon, Pakistan, and Honduras.
- 8. What are your programs, approaches, and strategies? What are the challenges that you are trying to address and how will your strategies support you in addressing these challenges? (required)
INTRODUCTION
Wiki Project Med is a 501(c)3 nonprofit approved by the Wikimedia Community to develop, organize, and distribute health care content. Its founders and board, nearly all physicians, include the top contributors to Wikipedia's medical content.
English Wikipedia has 30,000 medical articles, with over 150,000 in 280 more languages. These receive 5 billion pageviews annually, making Wikipedia one of the leading sources of health information online.
Wikipedia has been successful in addressing public health needs of a literate, English-speaking population with reliable internet access; however, most people globally do not fall within this group. More than 80% of people do not speak English, and nearly half the world is not online.
There is a global lack of access to accurate and empowering healthcare information for most people, in a language they can understand, in a format that they can benefit from. This information can improve health outcomes and potentially even save lives.
Since 2012, Wiki Project Med has been leading educational, technical, and outreach initiatives to make medical information accessible to people around the world, in their own language, online and offline.
Now, we need support to scale our programs and increase our global impact so that we can better support those saving lives around the world.
Planned activities: Organization level
- Hire Engineering/Product Manager
- Hire Principal Developer
- Hire Outreach and Partnerships Coordinator
- Convene Board Meeting
- Attend global and regional events
FOCUS AREA 1: LANGUAGE EMPOWERMENT
Problems we're driven to solve:
- The majority of healthcare content in the world is not in native speakers' languages.
- English Wikipedia has ample healthcare content but it's not designed for translation.
- Features needed for patients and health-care providers to make good decisions are not permitted on Wikipedia.
a) Our solution: MDWiki.com enhances Wikipedia, adds a layer of medical review, and makes stable versions of articles ready for translation into multiple languages. Essential content such as medication dosing, missing from Wikipedia, is included. With 5 million annual page views, MDWiki is serving content also used in our offline app and translation projects. We want MDWiki.com to grow and drive innovation across the public health information landscape.
Planned activities: MDWiki
- Import the complete history of all articles
- Add language links to other versions of Wikipedia
- Build a tool to import redirects from Wikipedia so they are hosted locally
- Add Wikidata functionality
- Improve the viewer for CT and MRI images to be faster and mobile-friendly
- Provide automated author attribution (with WhoWroteThat)
Targets: MDWiki
- Articles ready to translate: 3,100
b) Our solution: The Translation Task Force addresses needs of the other 300 languages in which Wikipedia exists. We have translated over thousands of articles, working in nearly 100 languages. This content receives tens of million of pageviews per year. We have a committed group of medical and language experts and are eager to scale our efforts.
Planned activities: Translation Task Force
- Improve the translatability of infoboxes
- Further development of the translation tracking dashboard
- Develop tools to automate formatting differences between languages
- Bring on a paid coordinator to help guide volunteer translators
Targets: Translation Task Force
- Articles translated: 3,000
- Languages translated into: 50
- Number of translators: 100
- Pageviews: 3 million
FOCUS AREA 2: GLOBAL ACCESS
Problems we're driven to solve:
- Half the globe doesn't have reliable internet access to medical content.
- Libraries and schools in many regions lack health info due to poor infrastructure.
a) Our solution: The WikiMed App allows anyone to download medical content when the internet is present and save it for future offline use. Our apps are available for free on Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, and Linux, in multiple languages. They include medicine, anatomy, pharmacology, sanitation, medication doses, how-to advice, costs by region, explanation of procedures, and over 300 videos. With over 100,000 active installs, the app is being most used by people in Pakistan, India, Nepal, Egypt and other Arabic-speaking countries, and the United States. Many users are health care providers or doctors-in-training, so improving the quality and popularity of the app will directly impact local healthcare around the world. We want to improve the app introduction pages, especially in non-English versions, and update the Apple version of the app. We are working hardest to popularize the app with Community Health Workers (CHWs). CHWs "health care workers who extend the reach of primary health care (PHC) systems to communities otherwise underserved or unserved by formal health systems…by delivering a comprehensive set of services, including preventive and curative care and health education in homes, community institutions, or peripheral health posts."
Planned activities: WikiMed App
- Update the intro pages for the non-English language versions of the app
- Update the Apple version of the app
Targets: Wiki Med App
- Active Installs: 75,000
- Ratings: 4.8
b) Our solution: Internet-in-a-Box (IIAB) allows healthcare content to be accessed where there is no internet at all. These miniature devices contain all of English Wikipedia plus several other languages and MDWiki, along with a variety of educational content like Khan Academy. The small, inexpensive unit creates a WiFi hotspot and gives access for up to 32 people within 100 meters to read, watch, learn and download. They cost $40 each to produce, and so far our volunteer-led pilot has been limited to making and mailing around 300 devices. If we could scale regional production and distribution, millions more could benefit.
Planned activities: IIAB
- Partner with the WMF store to distribute regional devices of IIAB to global markets
- Support franchises in lower and middle income countries to build and distribute IIAB regionally
Targets: IIAB
- Boxes shipped per year: 50
- Cost per-unit: 35 USD (for LMICs)
FOCUS AREA 3: RICH CONTENT
Problems we're driven to solve:
- Healthcare professionals around the world need access to more medical images to diagnose and treat illnesses.
- The majority of free medical images have a license that is currently incompatible with Wikipedia, and thus they are not achieving their full reach and benefit.
a) Our solution: NCCommons.com collects and curates Non-Commercial (NC) and Non-Derivative (ND) licensed images. With over 1 million files, many of them high-quality medical images, we've created a central repository for all NC and ND licensed content. This is the first-ever effort to collect all the world's NC and ND licensed materials. Tens of millions more medical images, as well as Khan Academy videos, TED talks, etc exist under these licenses, but we need more resources and staff in order to gather and organize them en masse in the NCCommons repository.
Planned activities: NCCommons
- Improve import functionality so when a file is imported the image itself is added
- Draft legal policy with the Wikimedia Foundation to clarify and expand use of NC content
- Expand uploads of NC and ND licensed materials
- Add the ability to export NC and ND licensed material from Commons to NCCommons.org
- Partner with Internet Archive who has offered cost-free data storage for NCCommons
- Develop extensions to allow mediawiki to seamlessly use Internet Archive's data storage
Targets: NCCommons
- Number of images: 2 million
- Adoption by Wikimedia Wikipedia's: 1
- Adoption by other wikis: 2
- Import Commons category structure: 1
b) Our solution: VideoWiki allows the collaborative creation of videos from a mediawiki based script. Text and media files are combined into full, final video, with automatic and appropriate copyright attribution. Editors can easily recompile all videos so it's easy to remain up-to-date. Videos are also easily translated to recreate content in multiple languages. VideoWiki is currently working in 15 languages of Wikipedia. Videos can be an effective way to learn content, at every level from early childhood through post-graduate. Their efficacy is improved by same-language subtitles, even for highly-literate viewers with good hearing and language skills. Wikipedia's lack of audio and video content makes it uninteresting or ineffective to many. Some internet users, both literate and illiterate, prefer or need to learn from videos. Youtube should not be their only option. Critically, hundreds of millions of people can't read. Many desperately want to learn to read, and to speak English: it's a route out of poverty in countries with both high and low rates of literacy.
Planned activities: VideoWiki
- Ability to animate still images ("Ken Burns effect", etc)
- Update version of node.js used to the latest version
- Need programming support to add more spoken languages of Wikipedia
Targets: VideoWiki
- Get VideoWiki functional in English: 1
- Languages in which VideoWiki is functioning: 11
c) Our solution: Our World in Data (OWID) provides sophisticated, modular, adjustable, integrated graphs and visualizations directly into MDWiki (and other mediawiki sites).
Planned activities: OWID
- Develop the extension to incorporate the graphs within Wikipedia itself
- Improve the switching between the tables of the graph interface
- Make the graphs multilingual
Targets: OWID
- Update at least every [x] months: 12
- How many WMF wikis it is used within: 1
- How many complete translations exist: 1
To date, all of our efforts have depended on volunteers and short-term contractors, and have been funded by microgrants or the founder’s personal funds as an emergency-room physician. Now we need funding for people, programs and operations in order to scale our efforts and grow our global impact.
- 9. What categories are your main programs and related activities under? Please select all that apply. (required)
| Category | Yes/No |
|---|---|
| Education | No |
| Culture, heritage or GLAM | No |
| Gender and diversity | No |
| Community support and engagement | No |
| Participation in campaigns and contests | No |
| Public policy advocacy | No |
| Other | Yes |
Other categories
Medicine Public Health Content Partnerships Open Source Tech Creative Commons Media
- 10. Please include a link to or upload a timeline (operational calendar) for your programs and activities. (required)
- See below. We uploaded the timeline.
- 11. Describe your team. (required)
Wiki Project Med is run by Chair James Heilman, with a talented and globally diverse board and numerous expert advisors--all of whom are unpaid volunteers.
The intent of this year's grant is to massively expand the capacity of the team beyond Doc James' charismatic and driven leadership. We want to augment this power with a group of experienced developers, outreach professionals, and administrative support staff.
Need to Hire: Tech (1 + .25 people), Outreach and Partnerships (.5 people)
We have already identified a planned technical project manager (contract) in James Hare, and will bring them on at the outset of receiving funds. That individual (.25 FTE), who is deeply knowledgeable about Wikimedia's tech stack as will as product development, will oversee the hiring and deliverables of one well-qualified full time developer/engineer (1 FTE). The full-time developer will be responsible for integrating the above technical tasks through a priority-setting process with the technical project manager. They will deliver code updates and integrations, new features and compatibility, and a broader data pipeline through work on mediawiki extensions, offline tools, and popular consumer apps.
The partnerships/outreach coordinator will be hired by Jake Orlowitz, in their volunteer capacity, through an open community call for applicants. Jake's experience developing nearly 100 partnerships through the Wikipedia library will provide guidance for the recruited outreach coordinator, whose primary role is expanding the number of translations, media partnerships, and offline wiki recipients (IIAB). The partnerships coordinator will manage communications to existing as well as new and potential partners, highlighting impactful joint work.
In all cases, Wikipedians with a history of work on community tools or projects will be preferred, while also giving weight to applicants with medicine and global or community health work.
These three total contractors (1.75 FTE) will report to James Heilman, with Jake Orlowitz acting as volunteer "contractor coordinator" if Dr. Heilman is occupied with medical emergencies or international travel. Jake and James are in full collaboration with the Board who will direct strategic changes throughout the year in response to international events and priorities.
Legal/Accounting is already hired and so is Fundraising support. We have lined up our Engineering Manager already, so we just need to hire 1 core developer and a half-time partnerships person. The trick here is that WPMED has been underfunded and understaffed for years, so these additions are just catching up.
This year the nonprofit has partnered with WikiBlueprint, a consulting company run by former Board Member and Wikipedia Library founder Jake Orlowitz. WikiBlueprint is leading the fundraising on a contingency basis.
Board Members: http://mdwiki.org/wiki/WikiProjectMed:Board#Board_members
James Heilman Anjna Harrar Alaa Najjar Stuart Ray Diptanshu Das Tim Moody Mossab Banat
Advisors: http://mdwiki.org/wiki/WikiProjectMed:Board#Special_adviser Jennifer Dawson Lane Rasberry Daniel Mietchen Sam Zidovetski Shani Evenstein Pratik Shetty Doug Taylor
- 12. Will you be working with any internal (Wikimedia) or external partners? Describe the characteristics of these partnerships and bring a few examples of the most significant partnerships. (required)
MDWiki now forms the basis of our offline EN app for android, built in collaboration with Kiwix. This app has seen more than 100,000 downloads, mostly from low and middle income countries, many of who are health care providers or students. This change allows us to be responsive to requests for improvements from our app users. The app remains highly rated at 4.68 stars from 24,100 reviews.
Our dashboard to coordinate translation from MDWiki into other languages of Wikipedia continues to be improved. We have developed an additional 1,475 summaries of key health care topics on MDWiki which adds to the prior 1,338 summaries developed on English Wikipedia.
Our partnership with Translators without Borders created 20,000 articles, representing more than 22 million words of text and worked in more then 150 languages! This translated content has received more than 3.7 billion pageviews since we began collecting data in 2015. That work was carried out by more than 3,250 translators. ProZ has now begun onboarding additional volunteer translators (n=40) to the Wikimedia movement. This has increased the number of languages in which we have worked by 14. ProZ content includes 907 articles, representing about 198,000 words translated. The resulting content has been viewed 597,000 times.
We developed an extension which allows use of Our World In Data (OWID) material securely within a mediawiki install. We have integrated about 288 of their health related graphs into MDWiki. Plus we have developed templates so that the most recent version flows into our offline efforts. We are collaborating with the technical team at OWID on making their material more multilingual.
Other partners include NIOSH (National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health) in the U.S., and the WHO (World Health Organization).
- 13. In what ways do you think your proposal most contributes to the Movement Strategy 2030 recommendations. Select all that apply. (required)
- Improve User Experience, Coordinate Across Stakeholders, Innovate in Free Knowledge, Evaluate, Iterate, and Adapt
Metrics edit
Wikimedia Metrics edit
- 14. Please select and fill out Wikimedia Metrics for your proposal. (recommended)
- 14.1. Number of participants, editors, and organizers.
All metrics provided are optional, please fill them out if they are aligned with your programs and activities.
| Metrics name | Target | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Number of all participants | N/A | N/A |
| Number of all editors | N/A | N/A |
| Number of new editors | N/A | |
| Number of retained editors | N/A | |
| Number of all organizers | N/A | N/A |
| Number of new organizers | N/A |
- 14.2. Number of new content contributions to Wikimedia projects. (recommended)
| Wikimedia project | Created | Edited or improved |
|---|---|---|
| Wikipedia | ||
| Wikimedia Commons | ||
| Wikidata | ||
| Wiktionary | ||
| Wikisource | ||
| Wikimedia Incubator | ||
| Translatewiki | ||
| MediaWiki | ||
| Wikiquote | ||
| Wikivoyage | ||
| Wikibooks | ||
| Wikiversity | ||
| Wikinews | ||
| Wikispecies | ||
| Wikifunctions / Abstract Wikipedia |
- Description for Wikimedia projects contributions metrics. (optional)
Other Metrics edit
- 15. Do you have other quantitative and qualitative targets for your project (other metrics)? (required)
- Yes
| Other Metrics | Description | Target |
|---|---|---|
| Language Empowerment | **MDwiki**
|
3100 |
| Global Access | **Wiki Med App**
|
75000 |
| Rich Content | **NC Commons**
|
2000000 |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
Budget edit
- 16. Will you have any other revenue sources when implementing this proposal (e.g. other funding, membership contributions, donations)? (required)
- No
- 16.1. List other revenue sources. (required)
N/A
- 16.2. Approximately how much revenue will you have from other sources in your local currency? (required)
- N/A
- 17. Your local currency. (required)
- USD
- 18. What is the total requested amount in your local currency? (required)
- 150000 USD
| Year | Amount (local currency) |
|---|---|
| Year 1 | N/A USD |
| Year 2 | N/A USD |
| Year 3 | N/A USD |
- 19. Does this proposal include compensation for staff or contractors? (required)
- Yes
- 19.1. How many paid staff members do you plan to have? (required)
Include the number of staff and contractors during the proposal period. If you have short-term contractors or staff, please include them separately and mention their terms.
- 5 paid contractors:
2 Tech developers 1 Outreach and Partnerships coordinator 1 Legal/Accounting support 1 Fundraising support
- 19.2. How many FTEs (full-time equivalents) in total? (required)
Include the total FTE of staff and contractors during the proposal period. If you have short-term contractors or staff, please include their FTEs with the terms separately.
- 2 FTE
Tech developers (1 + .25 FTE) Outreach and Partnerships coordinator (.5 FTE) Legal/Accounting support (.125 FTE) Fundraising support (.125 FTE)
note: all contractor costs support *programmatic* work
- 19.3. Describe any staff or contractor changes compared to the current year / ongoing General Support Fund if any. (required only for returning grantees)
- N/A
- 20. Please provide an overview of your overall budget categories in your local currency. The budget breakdown should include only the amount requested with this General Support Fund (required).
| Budget category | Amount in local currency |
|---|---|
| Staff and contactor costs | 0 USD |
| Operational costs | 40000 USD |
| Programmatic costs | 110000 USD |
- 21. Please upload your budget for this proposal or indicate the link to it. (required)
Tech and Product (1.25 FTE): 83k Outreach and Partnerships (.5 FTE): 27k Fundraising Support (.125 FTE): 15k Travel and Convenings: 10k Web Hosting: 8k Legal/Accounting Support (.125 FTE): 7k TOTAL: $150k USD
Additional information edit
- 22. In this optional space you can add any other additional information about your proposal or organization that you think can help us when reviewing your proposal. (optional)
About MDwiki:
MDwiki (MDwiki.org) is a legitimate content "fork" of Wikipedia's medical content that was created to enhance health information in novel and meaningful ways. It has over 4,000 unique articles and receives 5 million pageviews per year. It functions as a complete integrated encyclopedia, with automatic mirroring of all other links and pages present in Wikipedia.
MDWiki is written by a core of many of the top-10 most prolific medical editors on Wikipedia over the last decade. While the number of unique articles on MDWiki are modest, the impact is outsized: millions of words have been translated, which have gathered tens of millions of views in nearly 100 languages. Content from MDWiki flows into an offline app used by over 100,000 people, many who are health care providers.
MDWiki differs from Wikipedia in significant ways:
- Content pages have improved multimedia interaction and are geared for offline use.
- Encourages inclusion of video, including Non-Commerical (NC) and Non-Derivative (ND) licenses.
- Medication costs are permitted and encouraged. Also includes medication doses.
- Written for a general audience with the understanding that many people who use the resource may speak English as a second language.
- Editing is restricted to registered and approved individuals, and there is a clear code of conduct.
- Paid conflict of interest editing is not permitted (disclosed or otherwise).
- The goal is to provide the best possible content for users, and innovation is welcome.
English Wikipedia maintains that it is not a how-to manual. As such it prohibits specific treatment information, such as medicine dosages. There are also concerns that a reader/practitioner might misunderstand a dosage, misuse a medicine, or that vandalism or inaccuracy would lead to real world injury and associated liability. These concerns are understood and well-handled with MDwiki's prominent MEDICAL DISCLAIMER, which makes Wiki Project Medicine, and MDwiki editors, no more liable than any Wikipedia editor or Wikimedia organization.
For comparison, WikiEm, the world's largest open licensed global emergency medicine wiki also includes dosages. It is impractical, and counterproductive, to provide health information that is almost sufficient for educating practitioners in remote and impoverished locations but to stop at the actual dosages of medicines used.
English Wikipedia resists using more common words that promote translation and human understanding. A preference for technical jargon (i.e. "renal" instead of the more familiar "kidney") makes for a tension between editor and reader. At MDWiki we are aligned with the interest that the reader, who may be a less-educated, lower-income, non-English speaker, should still be able to comprehend every article.
Lastly, English Wikipedia is opposed to video versions of articles (VideoWiki), which reduces accessibility and viral impact. It's hard to share many screens worth of text, and many people prefer to consume information in an audiovisual format. English Wikipedia has made clear that video versions of existing articles are not wanted and are in tension with the article's more important written-language. MDWiki is not limited in the formats we offer; indeed, we know that alternatives to text improve public health outcomes.
By submitting your proposal/funding request you agree that you are in agreement with the Application Privacy Statement, WMF Friendly Space Policy and the Universal Code of Conduct.
We/I have read the Application Privacy Statement, WMF Friendly Space Policy and Universal Code of Conduct.
- Yes
Feedback edit
- Please add any feedback to the grant discussion page only. Any feedback added here will be removed.