ideasIdea
Fund oncologists to maintain cancer articles on Wikipedia in many languages
Wikipedia is the most-read medical reference on Earth. Pay expert editors to keep its cancer pages accurate, current and available in the languages most patients speak.
Cancer articles on Wikipedia receive enormous traffic and feed AI assistants and search results, but quality and currency vary and non-English coverage is thin. WikiProject Medicine coordinates volunteers. The proposal is funded fellowships for oncologists, pharmacists and translators to update the top 500 cancer articles against current guidelines, translate them into the twenty most-spoken languages, and maintain them, with the work tracked publicly.
Hypothesis
Fellowship-maintained articles score higher on expert quality review and are updated within months of guideline changes, and their translated versions capture a majority of non-English cancer page views.
Rationale
Where people actually read is where accuracy pays; the marginal cost of expert editing is tiny compared with its reach.
What would test it
Fund twenty fellows for one year; compare quality scores, currency and page views for maintained versus unmaintained articles.
Maturity
early clinical
Who has to act
philanthropy
Cost to try
Small (under $1M)
Years to first evidence
1
Bottlenecks it attacks
- Misinformation and unproven therapies · Patients are sold unproven treatments and frightened away from proven ones.
- Knowledge reaches practice too slowly · Knowledge diffusion is slow: it takes years for a proven result to change what most patients receive, and no one can keep up with the literature.
- Most of the world has almost no cancer care · Seven in ten cancer deaths happen in low- and middle-income countries, where radiotherapy, pathology, surgery and drugs are scarce.