Health for All: making knowledge easier to reach
A bilingual Wikipedia editathon connecting health expertise and open-knowledge communities.
A shared editorial task
Health for All brought together people who could contribute in different ways: reviewing, editing, translating and creating Wikipedia content. The original event website offered an entry point in Spanish and English.
My contribution sits in the connection between technical organisation and open knowledge. A shared workspace, an understandable task and someone available to help can make it much easier for a new volunteer to begin.
Exhibit 1DiagramRead left to right
Specialists and volunteers in one workspace
Knowing a subject and helping someone encounter it clearly are different skills. The editathon put them in the same room, online, for four days.
The event and its record
The 16–19 November 2021 editathon connected WHO and Cornell specialists with Wikimedia and Creative Commons volunteers. Our report, published in February 2026, records 45 registrations from 12 countries, 19 active editors and 22 new articles. I am its first author.
The edited content accumulated more than 406,000 page views. That is a measure of recorded readership, not a demonstrated improvement in health. The paper documents both the activity and its limitations.
Exhibit 2NumbersEach figure links to the record that states it
What the record states
Exhibit 3TimelineFilled points are my milestones; hollow points are the context they sit in
From an event to a published record
Different kinds of expertise
Knowing a subject and helping someone encounter it clearly are connected skills. Translation, references, structure and technical support all influence whether knowledge can be used by another person.
This project brings that practical work into view. It is also a record of collaboration: specialists, editors, translators and organisers contributing different pieces to a common result. The publication makes that experience available to people interested in organising similar activities.
Exhibit 4ResourcesOpen the thing itself, not a description of it