2009/5/29 Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com:
And what about the potential uses of information that could save people's lives? One of the uses is to *check* a prescription, and this is a valid use that is much less likely to cause harm.
For the sake of the record, I've ended up using a Wikipedia article to check a prescription - I'd been given an antibiotic which I'd seen mentioned as used in treatment of the condition, but at a dosage about eight times lower. It turned out - and our article explained quite clearly and with detail - that there were two treatment regimes; one is basically a "short sharp shock", and the other runs over a week. I'd been placed on the second, but had only seen reference to the first. Score one to Wikipedia; I felt quite reassured knowing that.
I can think of a number of cases where we could pose much more immediate risk to someone using Wikipedia as a quick-reference - household wiring, for example! "Oh, live is *blue*, right..."
To be honest, this worry seems a bit presumptive about the suggestibility of our users. On the whole, people are much more likely to ring up a pharmacy and say "excuse me, are you sure this instruction is right?" than they are to decide the writing on the bottle was clearly wrong and they should take twenty tablets each morning rather than two... do people *really* decide to self-medicate based entirely on one thing they read on the internet, and go off and acquire the medication and so on without ever noticing anything to the contrary?