- What is the idea behind starting Wikipedia Swastha?
Wikipedia SWASTHA stands for Special Wikipedia Awareness Scheme for The Healthcare Affiliates. We are launching Wikipedia Swastha after two to three months. The 19th anniversary of the Wikipedia community in India was on January 15. We see that most information available on the Internet is as per other countries. Through Swastha, we aim to give information to the Indian user with respect to the Indian scenario. And we will be focusing on encouraging media professionals to contribute to the world’s largest encyclopaedia in the medical field.
- How will this be different from other health portals?
According to a recent Google-KPMG report - over 500 million Internet users will use regional languages by 2021, which would be mainly dominated by Indian regional languages. India’s Internet users have more faith in content that’s not in English. The idea is to reach the ground level where the first language is a more fluent one. Hence, we are starting Wikipedia Swastha in a few vernacular languages. The programme will be launched this year seeking contributors to contribute in English or other 10 regional languages mainly, Hindi, Marathi, Kannada, Maithili, Odiya, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Gujarati and Urdu. And later, we want to expand it to as much as 21 Indian languages.
- How will Wikipedia go ahead with the platform?
We have started with various awareness workshops for the same in different cities.
Through the new programme, Swastha, we want to tap contributors to write on the platform in various languages. Through Swastha, we will help Wikipedia communities channelise outreach efforts to enhance healthcare information on the web. Swastha will reach out to medical professionals, medical colleges and other professionals wanting to contribute in English and other regional languages. We are currently in talks with various medical colleges and will be collaborating with them in the near future.
Also, nationwide free Wikipedia workshops will be conducted for those who wish to host Wikipedia workshops.
- What content that will be available on Wikipedia Swastha?
Like I have said earlier, we want the Indian audience to have information related to India. We have shortlisted 10 diseases like tuberculosis, family planning, maternal mortality rate (MMR) and other topics that we will be focusing on at the primary stage. Later on, other topics will also be included.
