2019:Health/VideoWiki - Improving access to healthcare information for people with low literacy
 | This is an Accepted submission for the Health space at Wikimania 2019. |
Description[edit | edit source]
VideoWiki makes Wikipedia more accessible by adding a visual and audio layer to Wikipedia, ensuring that in the future, the 'sum of all human knowledge' is not limited to just text.
India has 500+ million internet users, second only to China. Further, since 2016, India is leading the world in mobile data consumption, after the entry of Reliance Jio into the market. This has allowed many Indians to “join the internet” and connect to Wikipedia.
However, 1 in every 4 Indians (330 million individuals) lack the ability to read text and therefore are unable to access Wikipedia, a predominantly text-based encyclopedia. The preferred mode of accessing information for people who are unable to read text is via videos. Unfortunately, there is no neutral (reliable) source of information on YouTube that provides unbiased medical information.
To increase the access to reliable medical videos to such new users, VideoWiki is currently working on building “neutral”, “reliable”, and “verifiable” videos in Indian languages, starting from Hindi. Website: https://videowiki.wmflabs.org/en
Relationship to the theme[edit | edit source]
This session will address the conference theme — Wikimedia, Free Knowledge and the Sustainable Development Goals — in the following manner:
- SDG 3 - Quality Health and Well-being - VideoWiki is working with WikiProjectMed Foundation to improve access to reliable healthcare information for people with low literacy (low ability to read Wikipedia)
- SDG 4 - Quality Education - By adding a visual layer to Wikipedia, VideoWiki enables users to access information in different mediums.
- SDG 9 - Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure - VideoWiki's tool enables collaborative video editing on Wikipedia for the first time.
Session outcomes[edit | edit source]
At the end of the session, the following will have been achieved:
- How to create a collaborative video on a healthcare topic of your interest
- Features of VideoWiki
- Road ahead of VideoWiki
Session leader(s)[edit | edit source]
- Ian Furst
- Pratik Shetty
Session type[edit | edit source]
Each Space at Wikimania 2019 will have specific format requests. The program design prioritises submissions which are future-oriented and directly engage the audience. The format of this submission is a:
- Lightning talk, or
- Lecture
Requirements[edit | edit source]
The session will work best with these conditions:
- Room:
Projector + Screen + Speakers (for Audio)
- Audience:
Users who are interested in making healthcare information accessible in developing countries such as India.
- Recording:
Single fixed location would suffice. The video can be licensed under CC.
Questions[edit | edit source]
- Sounds great. Doc James (talk) 19:09, 11 June 2019 (UTC)
- Not really a question but a thought process: this way of disseminating knowledge with videos, not only medical, could be of specific interest to oral source communities. The session Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing. Except we’re not... , which is dedicated to sourcing oral source language wikipedia articles, made me think of this. I'm not a specialist nor personally concerned by both subjects, but a collaboration between your teams could be interesting. Djiboun (talk) 05:30, 14 August 2019 (UTC)
- @djiboun: Sounds interesting. do you know any user who is involved in the 'oral citations' project?