HIV-AIDS project

The purpose of this project is to make the most important HIV/AIDS knowledge available where it is currently unavailable. The initial focus is on creating and translating content for the larger indigenous languages of Sub-Saharan Africa where the risk from HIV/AIDS is high and the Wikipedia coverage is currently poor - and on filling any relevant gaps in the European languages widely spoken in the regions. The resulting material will be delivered in wiki, spoken, printable and offline-readable form, and will be at least GFDL and CC-by-SA3, where possible PD. Of course, anyone is welcome to reuse material or ideas form this project to support other initiatives in other languages or fields, at any time. And no-one should let the existence of this project stop them doing things that are in-scope on their own if they wish to. Moreover there are certain /additional items that are important but are out of scope for the time being.

What we need

For more details on this topic, see /Products.

Primarily the project needs experts' time. Experts in tailoring the health information to the needs of this project, experts in the languages (both written and spoken), experts in Wikipedia and so forth. An outline of the things that need to be created is in the diagram below.

Timeline

Due to the wiki-nature of the project anyone can jump in and start writing/translating at any time.

However I intend to put together a Gant chart once the project structure is finalised.

Motivation

HIV/AIDS (SIDA) currently causes about 1.3 million deaths in Sub-Saharan Africa every year. The current Wikipedia coverage in Sub-Saharan languages is scanty at best. If improving this coverage can better inform even a small percentage of those at risk from contracting AIDS, the potential saving of life and suffering is significant. Moreover the free license nature of Wikipedia means that the content can be swiftly and effectively leveraged both by the Wikimedia movement and other agencies.

Results

The project will be successfull when it has produced the following:

Encyclopaedic HIV /AIDS public and personal health information made available in 10 Sub-Saharan languages on Wikipedia
Package of freely licensed content
Process for adding extra languages
Process for curating content
Team of curators

Possible additional outputs

Improve coverage in other languages, notably other African languages and European languages in wide use in Africa
Process for replicating this project for other subject areas
Wikibooks in some or all of the languages