Wikimedia Movement

About Wikimedia Movement


With rare diseases affecting the daily lives of millions of people worldwide and treatment often being extremely difficult, it makes sense that rare disease patients need reliable information they can obtain on the Internet.

Wikipedia can help by making reliable information about rare diseases widely available in as many languages as possible. In English the content is quite extensive, but there is a tremendous lack of articles related to rare diseases on most other language versions of Wikipedia. On the occasion of Rare Disease Day, we’re launching the Wikipedia Rare Disease Awareness Editathon for February-March 2021, hoping that it will be established as an initiative for years to come.

Editors from multiple language communities are joining efforts to spread the idea to a growing list of Wikipedias. We have drafted a list of articles that are missing in Greek and Arabic, and we welcome other language communities to join.

In the first week of the editathon 14 of the suggested 40 new articles were created on Greek Wikipedia, and we’re hoping to complete – and why not, expand! – the list by the end of the event.

Anyone can get involved, as Wikipedia is the biggest free and open knowledge project on the Internet. Moreover, it is funded entirely by donations and there is absolutely no advertising on any of the 15 sister projects. Read more about our initiative on our dedicated page

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Rare_Disease_Awareness_Editathon_on_Wikipedia/February_2021 and join our effort!

(For those not familiar with the Wikipedia community, don’t hesitate to reach out to us on the discussion pages in the link above. You don’t need an account to edit Wikipedia, but registering for an account is free and it’s  useful for keeping track of your edits.)