On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 5:46 PM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: There's really two arguments here, a legal argument and a moral one. Legally, the talmudic list of general disclaimers (which no sane person reads) probably covers us, but is that enough? Should we stop there? The moral argument says that we should make sure that people don't rely on only our information when it comes to serious decisions with serious consequences. I don't think it would be a bad thing at all if at the dosage section of an article on drugs we say "Consult your physician before taking medication" or on the article on nitroglycerin, have a small little disclaimer in the "Manufacturing" section saying "It is extremely dangerous to try this yourself if you are not a trained chemist". --Oskar

Jeneral Disclaimer: Do not believe everything you read, and only half of what you see. All rights wronged. The sky is falling. All wrongs reversed. May your doings return. Firestone's Law of Forecasting: Chicken Little only has to be right once. The problem with being a lemming in the stock market is that if you will be putting your money into commodities too late, and when the price of the stock you sold goes up to something fair, you will hav sold it.

2008/11/25 Carcharoth <carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com>om>: The essential problem is: we can't absolve the reader of the responsibility to think about what they read. Readers who think they should be absoved of this responsibility are the core of the "Wikipedia is unreliable!" argument. We can only do our best to be as good as we can - thinking for those who won't or can't is a bit much to ask. - d.

Label on Coffee: Caution. Hot. No shit, SherLock. What was your first clue? Reminds of the Simpson's episode where Homer puts a sign on everything. That edit tab at the top of your page isn't a joke. Children of ten years get the same thing. Consider what that means.

2008/11/25 Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com>om>: I like that one. Links to standard information sheets, that sort of thing? So what will it take for us to get this switched on for en:wp? - d.

2008/11/25 Charlotte Webb <charlottethewebb(a)gmail.com>om>: I hope Jimbo doesn't do it against community wishes (I'm not sure the sysadmins would go along with it anyway), that would just cause a massive drama. I think it's become clear that a consensus isn't going to happen (I really don't understand people's objections, though), so perhaps a referendum is called for?

There is only one way to prove any of that, though, and that's giving it a go. If we only make the flagged rev the default version for articles that are currently (semi-)protected keeping up with the sighting would be easy - that's the version of the proposal that should be completely uncontroversial.

2008/11/25 geni <geniice(a)gmail.com>om>: Um, yeah, so that non-English speakers can read Wikipedia. It's not really fair for us to expect them to do all our dirty work, is it? There are so many different possible configurations of the software (and differences between the different language projects to start with) that I'm not sure we'll get meaningful conclusions from anyone else's implementation.

On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 4:01 PM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: [snip] Except we only do that *most of the time*. Millions of people per month come to Wikipedia and instead see pages in some greater or lesser degree of damage. There are few products where an acceptable failure rate of multiple percent is acceptable, certainly not in anything which is possibly life-critical. It may not be in our power to fix that problem satisfactorily, but I'd have no problem convincing an objective outsider that we're hardly even trying. Don't make the error of assuming that the contributors all care about serving the public as many do not. What then when our public duty is "unwiki"? On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 4:09 PM, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote: DE has it, and it's still ticking away. Go look at the discussions on EnWp: the counter is "De is not En". Quite true. Proof really isn't possible, and that really is what some people are *demanding*. On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 4:06 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote: You would think— But thats only true if the resistance is driven by a risk analysis, it's not true for resistance driven by either a hard philosophical objection (The "unwiki" position taken by many in the discussions) or due to an attempt to thwart change in general. In either of these cases you could demonstrate that it works great and those opinions would not change. Moreover, the possibility that a test may be successful and dispel fears is a reason to oppose testing for opponents whom care about things other than success. In any case, what you're saying has been proposed multiple times and in multiple forms. It has failed to obtain consensus. So much for completely uncontroversial. On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 3:55 PM, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote: Well there is only one way to get *proof*, so we have a Catch-22. Sure, persuasive evidence... we can get that, as far as I can tell, we've always had it: If things were so fragile that twiddling a knob will irreparably ruin it over night we would have been screwed long ago.... but you're pretty much right on in saying that people are demanding *proof*. But we can't have proof without doing it. This is also true for any other change. Unexpected stuff happens. I'd argue that for much of what we do or could do the unexpected results are more numerous and significant than the expected ones. So the argument you expressed is basically saying that we can't change anything ever. (I'm careful to not call it yours— because I do not believe that you're a proponent of it, but it's an argument I've seen other people make on English Wikipedia in all seriousness) I wonder what aspects of EnWP culture contribute to the audacious solipsism of believing that its members can "no-consensus" away forces as universal as change. Not that I'm in favour of some non-consensus massive change: I'd prefer reasonable stepping stones (like mostly replacing protection with default-view flagging) to help build knowledge and confidence and to allow an *informed* consensus to form. But that too is resisted, after all— it's admittedly a possible stepping stone. This unwillingness to *test* and explore possibilities with uncertain outcomes is why I tend to characterize EnWP's behaviour as a foolish attempt to avoid change, rather than the result of a reasonable decision making process. What can not change will die.

2008/11/25 Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com>om>: Given the historic grow rate of semi protect from replacement for full protection in some cases to turning up all over the place the fundamental assumption of that argument (that it would only be used where semi protect would be used) can probably be rejected along with the argument itself. -- geni

On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 6:25 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote: The community does not trust the community.

You are preaching to the choir here. I have audibly espoused the concept that perhaps OSHA is not doing the country a service (the USA, for those of you in OTHER countries) due to the fact without OSHA protecting them, more idiots would die and clean the gene pool of idiots. Mind you, I was half joking............ but only about half. Durova wrote:

On 11/25/08, Durova <nadezhda.durova(a)gmail.com> wrote: This would probably backfire due to the lack of correlation between immune system and intellect. The raw-pizza-eater would, with our luck, just contaminate other people and cause them to die instead (despite having the sense not to eat uncooked foods). Pandas with e. coli may have difficulty transmitting it to other pandas, or so I've read... —C.W.

2008/11/25 Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com>om>: De's default is that you don't see the sighted version. So their current results are fairly useless. Nope. Everything I listed is a known potential problem I'm not asking you address the possibilities of unknown problems. Doesn't help of course that since IP page creation stayed off (we probably need to turn it back on unless you want to get used to saying second largest encyclopedia) without a proper review people have little trust in claims that something is experimental. Schoolwatch would be the first group to use it effectively. -- geni

We have a megaphone at our disposal, the question is how to use it effectively. Warnings are pointless - we put all sorts of warnings on the medications we dispense, but I attend probably two to three lectures a year on how ineffective these warnings are. People don't read them - we're lucky if they read and understand the directions. Some states require spoken counseling on instructions and side effects because so few people read warnings and other information when they receive medication. Warnings on Wikipedia drug articles are unlikely to be all that effective, and if you start putting specific disclaimers on these you will need to start doing it on hundreds of other categories of articles as well. We do have the {{drugbox}} infobox template, it contains all sorts of handy links. But it is very clearly directed at medical professionals - most people won't have a clue what the various bits of information mean, or what to look for when following the links. I think it would make sense to redesign the template to be more accessible to the regular reader (including such information as a link to a gallery of dosage form images, common side effects with percentages, class in lay terms [i.e. antidepressant instead of SSRI], maximum safe dosage for a child and an adult, pregnancy category [again, in lay terms instead of the letter], etc.). I'm not sure that keeping the dosage information has much beneficial impact - on the one hand you discourage self-medicating, but on the other you don't tell people what the maximum dosage is, and that information might be crucial if they are in fact self-medicating. Nathan -- Your donations keep Wikipedia running! Support the Wikimedia Foundation today: http://www.wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

2008/11/25 Nathan <nawrich(a)gmail.com>om>: It's useful for scale, I think. When seeing "20mg of X three times daily", what a lot of people want to know is - how much *is* this? Is it a low dose, or a high dose? If you take it all in the morning, is it a dangerous thing, or is the harmful dose two orders of magnitude more? The trick is treading the line between this sort of contextual information and giving detailed advice. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

2008/11/26 Charlotte Webb <charlottethewebb(a)gmail.com>om>: Because providing information on how to kill yourself is really going to help our public image (although I don't oppose including LD50 values). This is an area where we really can't win. -- geni

Manufacturing section?...that's {{howto}} or [wikiversity], isn't it? If innocuous things like How to Clean a Fish Tank aren't here... ----- Original Message ----- From: "Oskar Sigvardsson" <oskarsigvardsson(a)gmail.com> To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Sent: Tuesday, November 25, 2008 9:56 AM Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] How's our coverage of medications?

On Sun, Nov 29, 2009 at 8:06 AM, Jay Litwyn <brewhaha(a)edmc.net> wrote: Not necessarily. Manufacturing processes can be incredibly significant; consider the [[Haber process]] for producing ammonia, or the [[Bessemer process]] for producing steel. Neither one comes anywhere *close* to being how-to content. ("Step 1: Buy a steel mill"?)