That our own foolishness. this is information that essentially everyone in the world considers basic reference information, that is available in authoritative form for all the english speaking countries (slightly different in each), and could easily be adding with absolutely impeccable official references, but which the medicine wikiproject refuses to add.
why? people might misinterpret it; we shouldn't tell people how to treat illnesses, this is the role of physicians, it's different in different countries, it changes frequently, there are all sort of special considerations, and so on. (The arguments against each should be obvious: we tell people everything else about treating the illnesses, physicians should not hold a monopoly of medical care, we can easily give the different approved dosages just as we give the different drug names, everything else relative to medicine changes also & we update the encyclopedia, everyone understands that there are exceptions as with everything else in the world.) The professionals at not just New Scientist but everyone professional that analyzes our medical information consider it a defect. Not us. Everyone is out of step but Wikipedia.
There's an unfortunate paternalistic tradition that sites & references for laypeople don't make it easy to find key toxicity information on human lethal does for medicines, for fear it might be used by potential suicides. We uniquely don't give it for the safe use either, a disgrace to the concept of free information. Classic example of ownership, in several senses.
Yes, I've discussed it at the wikiproject and made no headway. Maybe some more general attention will help dislodge the obscurantists.
My profession has been providing biomedical information to anyone who wants it. Not hiding it. That's why I don't work on this topic in Wikipedia--to follow the current guideline in this field would be unethical for a librarian.
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 11:54 PM, genigeniice@gmail.com wrote:
2009/7/31 Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com:
Ben Kovitz wrote:
"The site's other major flaw is its incompleteness. Wikipedia was able to answer only 40 per cent of the drug questions Clauson asked of it. By contrast, the traditionally edited Medscape Drug Reference answered 82 per cent of questions. 'If there is missing safety information about a drug, that can be really detrimental,' Clauson points out."
The good news is that the template {{missing}} exists. The bad news is that it appears hardly to be used (backlinks for [[Template:Missing]]). Could we do more to make clear to the public that there is such a template to add? They have caught on quite well to {{fact}}.
Charles
The bad news is a considerable amount of the stuff they considered to be missing (dosage information and the like) we probably wouldn't consider encyclopedic.
-- geni
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