2010/7/27 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
On 27 July 2010 11:56, Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
A friend of mine woke up in the middle of the night with a belly-ache. He googled it (in Hebrew) and the first result was the Hebrew Wikipedia article about appendicitis. The symptoms matched, so he went to the hospital and it indeed was appendicitis.
Wikipedia may have saved his life and this story may make a good testimonial video - but are we sure that we would want to do it in the light of [[Wikipedia:Medical disclaimer]]?
I'm not at all sure we should. We shouldn't be encouraging people to diagnose themselves using Wikipedia. What if your friend had found the article on indigestion and found that his symptoms seemed to match (the symptoms can be pretty similar) so just went back to bed?
That's exactly what i meant to say.
Testimonials may be great, but the message must be safe. A video about bringing quality-tested articles as teaching aids to schools in poor areas may be safer. (We may not have actually done it, but we might...)