Wikimedia user groups/Applications/Wiki Project Med

Approved

This Wikimedia user group application has been approved by the Affiliations Committee.

Proposed name of Wikimedia user group: (There are some templates at Step-by-step user group creation guide#Naming of user groups.)

Proposed name of your user group
Wiki Project Med Foundation

1. Who are the people behind this application?

Please see the list of board members at Wiki_Project_Med#Board_members and the list of supporters at Wiki_Project_Med#People_interested.
1a. How many?
We have 10 board members and 107 named supporters.


1b. Active in which Wikimedia projects, if any?
Most work is done on English Wikipedia, but the project members have made substantial contributions to at least 50 other language Wikipedias, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikidata. Minor contributions have been made in other places.
1c. How are they geographically distributed?
Board members are from the Canada, England, the United States, Brazil, Australia, and Germany. The named supporters are from perhaps 20 additional countries, and project contributors have been from perhaps 50 countries in addition to those.


1d. Do you have any highly active or prominent (on local or international level) Wikimedians / Wikipedians? If so, please name a few. (provide user names and wiki of origin)
The constituents of the board are all internationally active and prominent in the Wikimedia community.


1e. How many people do you expect will eventually want to join?
Probably not more than a few hundred more people will join over the next few years.


2. For the application and final agreement we will require two contact persons that can sign the Wikimedia User Group Agreement on behalf of the group. Who will those be? (please provide user names and wiki of origin) Please also include email addresses for these users either on this page or in your initial email to the Affiliations Committee (AffCom(_AT_)lists.wikimedia.org).

User:Doc James and User:Jfdwolff Affcom has our emails


3. Please give a short summary of your time path from the founding up to now.

The organization was founded in July 2012 after being informally organized on English Wikipedia's WikiProject Medicine.

4. Which geographical area and context do you cover (or plan to cover) with your entity?

The organization already works in languages spoken in most geographical areas. We would like to support all languages, and try to do so already.

5. Have there been any activities/meetings etc. of this group of people? If yes, please briefly describe some examples.

The group has had an annual meeting at Wikimania since 2012 and other informal meetups throughout the year. Many local health meetups are supported by the organization and at these meetups, people talk about the nature of health content on Wikimedia projects.


6. Do you keep any monthly/half-yearly/yearly reports of your activities? If yes, please provide links.

We have some reports here WMMED/Reports however have not done the best job in keeping these updated. More formal reporting has not been carried out as the group has been mostly self funded. The best archives of activity is on English Wikipedia in WikiProject Medicine's forum. Another great place to look for a summary of activity is in the logs of the Translation Task Force on English Wikipedia. The Meta-Wiki project page is a good summary of many listed projects.


7. What kind of activities are planned for the future in the user group?

The organization is working on a number of efforts. Major continuing projects including improving English Wikipedia articles related to medicine and translating them into every other language in the world in collaboration with a number of partners; engaging other nonprofit health education organizations to contribute to Wikimedia projects; increasing participation in Wikipedia by medical school students and classes; and collecting good health photos and non-text media for upload and sorting to Wikimedia Commons. Additionally we have developed and will continue to develop a bot to detect copy and paste issues and we are encouraging other organization to release content under an open license. Some members of the organization are exploring opportunities to share health datasets on Wikidata. We intend developing a process of rigorous independent expert review of our medical content, to bring our best articles to the same standard of reliability that we expect of our best sources.


8. Is your entity already legally registered? Do you intend on becoming a legally registered entity in the next thirteen months?

Since December 2012 the organization has been a legally registered United States nonprofit organization based in New York.


9. Do you have a bylaws for you entity? If yes, have the bylaws been reviewed by a lawyer/specialist?

Yes, they are at Wiki_Project_Med/Bylaws, and yes, they have been reviewed by a lawyer.


10. How can the Affiliations Committee and the Wikimedia Foundation help your group?

We feel that an official association between our two organizations will be beneficial to all involved. We are already collaborating with many other Wikimedia chapters, the Education Foundation and the WMF. A number of other Wikimedia organizations send our way those specifically interested in health and we help connect our partners to those within the WMF when they are able to support specific work such as Wikipedia Zero.

Submitted: Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 20:09, 1 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Acknowledged: Active review as of 1 November 2014 --Varnent (talk)(COI) 08:05, 9 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]