For trivia and simply Jeopardy style questions yes Wikipedia is King. I am sure this version of Watson would not rely on Wikipedia. There are much better sources out there for medical content. Anyway who would base an expert system for medicine on Wikipedia would be a fool. I am sure the people at IBM are not.

James Heilman

On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 11:59 PM, James Salsman jsalsman@gmail.com wrote:

Recently IBM announced that their Watson natural language processing system will be used for "utilization management" decisions in lung cancer treatment by health insurance company WellPoint at Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center.

I would like to urge everyone to review http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilization_management -- it seems very likely that Watson will be making treatment decisions similar to those which have colloqually been rerred to as "death panel" decisions in the US over the past four years.

The IBM Watson team has frequently stated that they rely on Wikipedia in essentially all of their interpretation and question answering processing, more than any other source.

What are the legal liability issues involved with an artificial intelligence system based on Wikipedia making life-or-death medical decisions?

I'm not convinced James' post isn't just trolling for attention, but computer-assisted utilization management has been around a long time, has nothing at all to do with "death panels", will never rely on Wikipedia for clinical data, and poses no legal risk to the WMF or any editor.