This project is funded by an Individual Engagement Grant

This Individual Engagement Grant is renewed

Medical Translation Project

Final Report

Status of the project: 2015–2016

Summary[edit]

Persian
Swahili

In a few short sentences, give the main highlights of what happened with your project. Please include a few key outcomes or learnings from your project in bullet points, for readers who may not make it all the way through your report.

The renewal of the Medicine Translation Project Community Organizing IEG has focused on scaling and building upon what was successful in the first period. Much of the work has been behind the scenes, coordinating between different parts of the project. This report primarily focuses on measurable outcomes — see the final report for the first IEG period for a background introduction and information about which languages we operate in. Future case reports will also be created in order to publicize the project.

Deeper collaborations with our partners; such as Rubric.
Following up on the new partnership from the first IEG-period, we have a foundation going for translating articles on sanitation, vaccines and neglected tropical diseases into African and Asian languages. This collaboration continues to bear fruit and we detailed in a Wikimedia Foundation blog post at: Wikipedia’s coverage of essential vaccines is expanding
Better tracking: One of the first things we did was to revamp the tracking so that it could accommodate our higher number of translations. Fixing minor kinks and various issues has been a large part of the IEG work — essentially maintenance work that keeps the project running.
A new app: Together with Kiwix we at Wikiproject Med Foundationhave built dedicated Offline medical apps in different lanauges, populated by our translated content. By having a dedicated app we can reach people who only have intermittent access to the internet (100+ million people across the world).
Better workflows — Everything that adds complexity loses us translations. For every minute of work a translator needs to put into the maintenance and upkeep of this project: we lose at least two minutes which they could have spent translating life-saving information. Their expertise is in translating, and that is what they want to spend their time doing. Our goal is to streamline the process so that translating is as easy as finding an article in a list and hitting a button: translate. Simpler integration into the Wikimedia-supported CX-tool has been part of the IEG.
A higher rate of translations As can be seen in the graph in the outcomes section, the pace of translations has picked up since point 2, where the IEG originally started. Over a thousand translations have been performed during that time!

Methods and activities[edit]

The second period of the IEG built upon much of the work I had performed during the first IEG. As such much of this reads the same as the prior final report, albeit now running at a larger scale and from a somewhat less hands-on perspective, where others are able to take upon work as well.

Coordinating volunteers: Coordination is one of those tasks that is hard to define, and includes contacting people though Wikipedia/Wikimedia projects, sending mails and being available to fix minor issues or explain problems.
Fixing back-end issues: Keeping articles correctly formatted, fixing template and interface issues across different Wikipedias is the type of work that is hard to find volunteers for. It can be seen as the less sexy "grunt work" that needs to be done in order that our volunteers can translate and integrate articles. It basically entails all work that is not immediately obvious to the reader or average editor, such as making sure templates can easily be localized across languages.

Outcomes and impact[edit]

Please list and describe the activities you've undertaken during this grant. Since you already told us about the setup and first 3 months of activities in your midpoint report, feel free to link back to those sections to give your readers the background, rather than repeating yourself here, and mostly focus on what's happened since your midpoint report in this section.

Offline medical app[edit]

Over the period of this IEG we've worked to integrate our translations into the work of other groups such including the CX-Translation Tool built by the language engineering team as well as building an Android and Windows offline medical Wikipedia app together with the Kiwix team.

After clearing a few major hurdles, this app is now live and is being considered for wider integration into Wikimedia projects and a sidebar is displayed on many of our medical articles: see Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/App

Both these collaborations have benefited from work by the Translation Task Force directly and we're collaborating on new releases and integrating our workflows into their systems. We've discussed plans with the Language Engineering team to build tools specifically for our project that can later be used by others, such as automated tracking and potential integration into the notifications system.

Sustained translation[edit]

Over the course of the IEG translations have increased. This is down to several factors:

Increased knowledge of the project
Simplified workflows
Continual on-hand help to overcome issues and problems

Simplified workflows & CX-tool integration[edit]

With any major multi-step project each added step or hurdle risks the loss of volunteers. As long as we don't have paid staff to ensure that each step is monitored it is only natural that everything that adds complexity to the task of translating makes us lose translations. Ideally we'd want translators to land on our welcome page and just have to press a button to start translating. We're not there yet, but we very well may be soon. During this IEG the following was done:

Created simpler overview lists
Direct integration into the content translation tool

Integration with the CX-tool makes our work much easier, because it enables translators to simply click on an article to see if it exists in their language:

Once that has been determined it is easy as a single button click to get up the translation tool dialogue:

Other outcomes[edit]

Expanding our topics
We've seen an exponential increase in the number of articles we've prepared during this IEG period, probably owing to the fact that James is stuck with less maintenance work.
New main page with news
The new main page (screenshot right) is easier to understand at a glance, and includes a news section where it is possible to see what is happening in the project.
Tool integration
Quick single click translate links are available and make it easier to just get started.

Outcomes and impact[edit]

Please discuss the outcomes of your experiments or pilot, telling us what you created or changed (organized, built, grew, etc) as a result of your project.

The primary impact is 1182+ newly translated articles during the IEG, and a project that continues to generate new content. The rate of translation has increased, and more articles are being pushed to Wikipedia — which means more people are able to access essential health information.

Progress towards stated goals[edit]

Please use the below table to:

List each of your original measures of success (your targets) from your project plan.
List the actual outcome that was achieved.
Explain how your outcome compares with the original target. Did you reach your targets? Why or why not?

Planned measure of success (include numeric target, if applicable)	Actual result	Explanation
Deepen Continuity of Core Engagement Develop a system to measure editor activity and continual-repeated-engagement Run survey with responses from 25 language communities to better understand integrator and target-community needs and priorities Write status/progress document with each unique community’s problems and solutions	Community profiles (not public)	Repeat engagement was followed more closely by integration with the Wikipedia Content Translation tool as well as directing translators to immidiately publish their work through Wikipedia. This was in large part done together with Lucas who also works part-time on the project. Community profiles so far consists of internal documentation of the various projects and their. It was strengthened by an increase in the number of editors to sign up since last year. Currently there are some privacy issues, but an edited version will be released. The survey was set on hold, following a large increase in community response and time-constraints.
Improve efficiency Develop baseline for translation-to-integration timeline Get editors permission to place TWB work orders Code and implement ready-to-integrate automessage	Baseline is instantant integration Some progress Redundant	We've done much work to implement the content translation tool that was created by the Content Translation Team. Using this tool integration is immidiate, and there is no need to have a separate integrator role. Some editors have taken up the job of placing work orders, likely increasing now that they may also see it as a venue to reqruit new editors. As part of using the Content Translation tool there is a tracking system and Amir has expressed interest in helping us overcome technical hurdles by taking in our feedback. While this message no longer serves any purpose we hope to see other technical solutions come through in the future.
Expand scale Number of articles for translation: 75+ new ready-for-translation English articles Number of articles integrated: 300+ newly integrated articles in target languages on Wikipedia Number of editors involved: 500+ editors engaged in the project in these 6 months Number of communities involved: 5 new communities or chapters Research a system to track number of pageviews of integrated articles	Done Done Done (data collection needed) Done WIP	The first 4 objectives were unceremoniously smashed, while the last is actually in progress. We are currently tracking mobile as well as Wikipedia Zero views in English. This system can be ported across languages, it will simply need time and effort. We may plan on doing this as part of an academic paper that is forthcoming.
Build towards Sustainability Write sustainability plan: goals and methods for the future of the project Produce document ‘What James does’, in case he ever leaves Mentor 3 editors to handle Carl’s main tasks Develop Rolling News section on home page Use Wikimania presentation to attract 4 new community leaders	See below Good ledes Done Done Done	See future outcomes/goals below Beyond getting the project off its feet by creating and maintaining the project James's major job has been writing and reviewing the simplified articles that are translated. A new quality standard has been set up, and is being implemented. A number of articles written by others than James have been created, including my own article on the Heart. Most tasks are now done by several individuals. I've had to retain some of my tasks for myself despite my best efforts, but with an increasing number of volunteers and staff things move smoother. The rolling news section is live, and requires manual updating roughly once a month. It helps the project show signs of life and that we are commited to our work. Wikimania was a major success, however whether or not my three presentations mattered most, or if it was the time spent talking to all the wonderful people, I honestly can't say.

For the most part we've managed to blast past the various goals that I set. Some of the goals I found to be untenable simply because of the size the project has grown too. I've prioritized sustained growth over some of the minor tasks, forcing myself to focus on the important parts of the project. I feel this is a good problem to have, and while I would have liked to have finished some of the other tasks — they were sidelined by my need to manage the sheer amount of growth. For example: I found it made no sense to use a large amount of time surveying the community of editors if the answers were no longer relevant once the answers come in and I've had time to analyze them.

Most, if not all, of my concessions have been in the areas where it mattered the least. None of the major goals were abandoned.

Global Metrics[edit]

We are trying to understand the overall outcomes of the work being funded across all grantees. In addition to the measures of success for your specific program (in above section), please use the table below to let us know how your project contributed to the "Global Metrics." We know that not all projects will have results for each type of metric, so feel free to put "0" as often as necessary.

Next to each metric, list the actual numerical outcome achieved through this project.
Where necessary, explain the context behind your outcome. For example, if you were funded for a research project which resulted in 0 new images, your explanation might be "This project focused solely on participation and articles written/improved, the goal was not to collect images."

For more information and a sample, see Global Metrics.

Metric	Achieved outcome	Explanation
1. Number of active editors involved
2. Number of new editors	N/A	Not a focus of this IEG.
3. Number of individuals involved	>300	Estimate, because exact numbers would require going through all editors to the 2,600+ translated articles as well as performing a census of Translators without Borders, Rubric and other partners.
4. Number of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages	N/A	Not a focus of this IEG.
5. Number of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects	1182 +	Number of new articles live on Wikipedia between Jun 2014 & Jun 2016
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects	+ 7,092,000	Assuming an average article is between 5000-7000 bytes

Learning question: Did your work increase the motivation of contributors, and how do you know?

See IEG final report for the first period

Indicators of impact[edit]

Once again I see the project having worked towards all three of Wikimedia's strategic priorities in equal amounts, so here is a quick roundup of what has happened within each of the fields:

Option A: How did you increase participation in one or more Wikimedia projects?

The primary goal of this IEG was to increase participation. While there is no baseline to assess what would have happened without it — I am confident that we would not have had the same amount of translations if it were not for the second IEG period.

Option B: How did you improve quality on one or more Wikimedia projects?

Our translated articles are extensively referenced, and our focus is on translating content where there is none. That means over 2,600 new articles as of July 2017.

Option C: How did you increase the reach (readership) of one or more Wikimedia projects?

Some of the data from 2014 has been analyzed and is on its way to being published in a scientific journal. What we saw is that Wikipedia's content on Ebola received higher click-through rates from Bing than other sources such as CNN, WHO or the CDC.

Project resources[edit]

Please provide links to all public, online documents and other artifacts that you created during the course of this project. Examples include: meeting notes, participant lists, photos or graphics uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, template messages sent to participants, wiki pages, social media (Facebook groups, Twitter accounts), datasets, surveys, questionnaires, code repositories... If possible, include a brief summary with each link.

Learning[edit]

The best thing about trying something new is that you learn from it. We want to follow in your footsteps and learn along with you, and we want to know that you took enough risks in your project to have learned something really interesting! Think about what recommendations you have for others who may follow in your footsteps, and use the below sections to describe what worked and what didn’t.

What worked well[edit]

What did you try that was successful and you'd recommend others do? To help spread successful strategies so that they can be of use to others in the movement, rather than writing lots of text here, we'd like you to share your finding in the form of a link to a learning pattern.

Your learning pattern link goes here

What didn’t work[edit]

What did you try that you learned didn't work? What would you think about doing differently in the future? Please list these as short bullet points.

Other recommendations[edit]

If you have additional recommendations or reflections that don’t fit into the above sections, please list them here.

Next steps and opportunities[edit]

Are there opportunities for future growth of this project, or new areas you have uncovered in the course of this grant that could be fruitful for more exploration (either by yourself, or others)? What ideas or suggestions do you have for future projects based on the work you’ve completed? Please list these as short bullet points.

Part 2: The Grant[edit]

Finances[edit]

Actual spending[edit]

Please copy and paste the completed table from your project finances page. Check that you’ve listed the actual expenditures compared with what was originally planned. If there are differences between the planned and actual use of funds, please use the column provided to explain them.

Expense	Approved amount	Actual funds spent	Difference
Community coordinator	$13,500	$14,350	+$850
Programming	$1,000	$1,000*	± $0
Promotional materials	$850	$0	-$850
Total	$15350	$15350	± $0

* No independent programmer was brought in, many issues were solved by me - and bot that was supposed to be build was postponed in waiting for integration with the CX Translation Tool.
Other programming issues could be solved through help of volunteers, or on my own. .

Remaining funds[edit]

Do you have any unspent funds from the grant?

No

Documentation[edit]

Did you send documentation of all expenses paid with grant funds to grantsadminwikimedia.org, according to the guidelines here?

Please answer yes or no. If no, include an explanation.

No — most expenditures were minor including travel with train, subway, or taxi as well as food for lunch meetings which primarily occurred surrounding Wikimania. The largest expense was a $100 attendance ticket to the Göteborg Book Fair. Owing to the comparatively small sum involved it was decided to be easier to include this under coordination costs.

Confirmation of project status[edit]

Did you comply with the requirements specified by WMF in the grant agreement?

Please answer yes or no.

Yes

Is your project completed?

Please answer yes or no.

Yes

Grantee reflection[edit]

We’d love to hear any thoughts you have on what this project has meant to you, or how the experience of being an IEGrantee has gone overall. Is there something that surprised you, or that you particularly enjoyed, or that you’ll do differently going forward as a result of the IEG experience? Please share it here!