# Fund oncologists to maintain cancer articles on Wikipedia in many languages

Source: https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-moon-wikipedia-oncology-fellowships/  
OnCo record `idea-moon-wikipedia-oncology-fellowships` (Idea). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

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.

## Summary

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.

## Fields

- Kind: Idea
- Last checked: 2026-09-08
- 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.
- Proposed test: Fund twenty fellows for one year; compare quality scores, currency and page views for maintained versus unmaintained articles.
- Maturity: early-clinical
- Actor: philanthropy

## Sources

- WikiProject Medicine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine

## Connected records

- bottlenecks: [Knowledge reaches practice too slowly](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-knowledge-diffusion/), [Misinformation and unproven therapies](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-misinformation/), [Most of the world has almost no cancer care](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-global-access/)

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JSON: https://onco.cc/api/v1/entities/idea-moon-wikipedia-oncology-fellowships.json