It's time for a health check. I don't mean the health check your health care professional might do. Let's check our most important health articles and ensure they are fit for purpose in 2026.

The Vital Signs 2026 campaign is doing exactly this. Within the WikiProject Medicine we've identified our 101 most important articles. The campaign is trying to make sure that all of these meet the B-class criteria by the end of the year. At the moment, there are "only" 15 C-class articles in this list. But medical content has this tendency to get out of date quickly as science progresses, so it's likely that most articles need at least a bit of TLC, including those listed as good articles (27%) and featured articles (10%).

Editing medical content is not as difficult as you'd think. Biomedical content has its own sourcing guideline. In a nutshell, most sources need to be secondary sources published in the last 5 years. This can be (international) clinical guidelines, review papers, WHO reports, book chapters, or information pages from trusted organisation such as the NHS. On the talk page of each medical article, there is a link to PubMed to find review papers that meet these requirements. Because the source requirements are stricter, there are usually fewer sources to read before you can jump in.

The difficulty level of review papers varies significantly, but most of the other sources are written in plain(ish) English, so that folks should be able to understand them. When you start editing medical articles, you may want to initially skip the causes and mechanism (pathophysiology) section of articles, as they are more difficult. The prognosis section can be a good one to start with. Diagnosis and treatment are usually covered well in clinical guidelines, so provide another good place to start editing medical content.

In terms of campaign tasks, there are big ones and small ones. A few to get started:

1. Help assess articles for the Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Vital_Signs_2026#Progress_table
2. Update how many people have a condition and related mortality using the latest Global Burden of Disease study.
3. Check Commons for better images in text-heavy articles
4. Add WP:ALT descriptions to images for WP:ACCESSIBILITY
5. Check the lead for understandability and leave a talk page message if you cannot resolve it yourself

If you have more time, why not adopt one of the articles? Read it top-to-bottom, update key facts and statistics and remove the overly technical details not relevant to our likely readers.

In the age of AI, Wikipedia is losing pageviews, partially because Google is pushing its inaccurate AI into search. And maybe that's not a bad thing with the state of some of our medical articles at the moment. Before this campaign started, we scared readers with cancer survival data more than 10 year out of date. The management section in asthma was even more dated. Google rightly punishes websites for being out of date. But these big articles are the ones that can attract readers in high numbers. And only if we have readers can we have folks fall into our rabbit hole and join the community. It is a vicious cycle that we can turn into a virtuous one.

And there's more to do. We have articles like Borderline personality disorder, where AI misuse is suspected and requires cleaning, breast cancer which is using 2013 sourcing to question the usefulness of screening for it. Our obesity article does not yet mention GLP-1 agonists like Ozempic in the lead, and has a statistics section (in addition to a more standard epidemiology section), dedicated only to the US.

Editing medical content is impactful. Despite the pandemic-era drop in pageviews, our top-importance medical articles get read by 164,000 people every day last year, 60 million views in total. And more importantly, people often read these articles when they are ill, or their loved ones are. After every medical GA or FA I’ve rewritten, I’ve had people contact me saying how they benefitted from the updated information. Will you join us?