OnCo
ideasIdea

Fund expert editors for the cancer pages of Wikipedia and Wikidata

Wikipedia is where most people first read about their cancer. Pay clinicians and librarians to keep the cancer pages accurate, current and readable in many languages.

Wikipedia's medical pages receive billions of views; cancer pages are among the most read and are often out of date on treatment. The proposal funds a small standing team of oncology editors and translators (as Cochrane and WHO have done in partnership with Wikimedia) to maintain cancer articles against living guidelines, add structured data to Wikidata (linking to trial and drug identifiers), and measure accuracy over time.

Hypothesis
Funded editing will raise the accuracy and currency of the 200 most-read cancer articles to guideline-concordant status and reduce the presence of unproven therapies presented as effective.
Rationale
Cochrane-Wikipedia and WikiProject Medicine partnerships have improved article quality where sustained; cancer is the highest-traffic area without dedicated funding.
What would test it
Audit accuracy of the top 200 cancer articles against guidelines; fund editors for two years; re-audit and compare with untouched control articles.
Maturity
speculative
Who has to act
philanthropy
Cost to try
Small (under $1M)
Years to first evidence
1
Bottlenecks it attacks

Connected

3top