It's time for a health check. And no, I don't mean the health check your healthcare professional might usually offer to you. Let's rather check our most important health articles and ensure they are fit for purpose in 2026.

This is exactly the main goal of the Vital Signs 2026 campaign. 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 But medical content often tends to get out of date quickly as science progresses, so it's likely that most articles need at least a bit of TLC, including those listed as good articles (27%) and featured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 guidelines. In a nutshell, most sources need to be secondary sources published in the last five years. This can be (international) clinical guidelines, review papers, WHO reports, book chapters, or information pages from trusted organisations 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.

Most of these sources are written in plain(-ish) English, so you do not need a medical degree to understand them. A subset of review papers is written in highly technical language, but you can set these sources aside at first. When you edit medical articles, you initially may want to skip the causes and mechanism (pathophysiology) section of articles, as they are more difficult to grasp, especially for beginners. On the other hand, the epidemiology section can be a good one to start with. Diagnosis and treatment are usually covered well in clinical guidelines, so they 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 campaign's Progress table
2. Update how many people have a condition and related mortality by using the latest Global Burden of Disease study.
3. Check Commons for better images in text-heavy articles
4. Add alternative 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 (entirely) a bad thing, given the state of some of our medical articles at the moment. Before this campaign started, we scared readers by providing them with cancer survival data more than ten years out of date, and 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 are most likely to attract readers in high numbers: therefore, only if we have more readers, we can also have more folks falling into our "rabbit hole" and joining the community. We can make a virtuous cycle out of a vicious 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 campaigns for the disease; our article on obesity does not even mention GLP-1 agonists – like Ozempic – in the lead yet, 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 post-pandemic drop in pageviews, our top-importance medical articles were read by 164,000 people every day last year, amounting to 60 million views in total. And most importantly, people often read these articles when they are going through illness themselves, or when their loved ones are. After every medical GA or FA I’ve written, people have written to tell me how the updated content helped them, something you don't get in many other areas of Wikipedia. Will you join us checking Vital Signs?