James Heilman on expanding the reach of Wikipedia’s medical information – Wikimedia Blog

ab1630's bookmarks 2018-03-14

Summary:

"A conversation with emergency room physician James Heilman, who is working to get medical information into Internet-in-a-Box—a physical device that provides Wikipedia and other content in areas without internet access.

Senior Program Manager Anne Gomez leads the New Readers initiative, where she works on ways to better understand barriers that prevent people around the world from accessing information online. One of her areas of interest is offline access, as she works with the New Readers team to improve the way people who have limited or infrequent access to the Internet can access free and open knowledge.

Over the coming months, Gomez will be interviewing people who work to remove access barriers for people across the world. In this installment, she interviews emergency room physician James Heilman, an active contributor to WikiProject Medicine and a member of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. Heilman has also worked to get medical information into Internet-in-a-Box, a physical device that provides Wikipedia and other content in areas with no or limited internet access. His conversation with Gomez is below.

Gomez: We’ve talked about your goals of creating a production storefront for the Internet-in-a-Box with medical content. Could you describe your vision for our readers?

Heilman: The goal of the project is to allow anyone to package Wikipedia and other content for use in offline devices such that people without internet access can browse these educational resources. Currently we have to balance the cost of storage with the amount of storage space that typical users need for inexpensive devices preventing us from providing all of Wikipedia. While we have been concentrating on medical content as of late, the idea for a “production storefront” is for all areas of knowledge — not just medicine...."

Link:

https://blog.wikimedia.org/2018/03/13/offline-access-medical-information/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » ab1630's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.new oa.wikipedia oa.stem oa.medicine oa.access oa.hardware oa.people oa.south oa.humanitarian oa.funding oa.floss oa.awareness oa.wikimedia

Date tagged:

03/14/2018, 12:13

Date published:

03/14/2018, 08:13