On 5/4/2010 5:16 PM, Yao Ziyuan wrote:
Thomas Dalton wrote:
>
> We definitely do not want to be giving medical advice to people. If
> you get that wrong, people die. Medical advice should be got by going
> to the doctors. Can you give another example of what your idea could
Yes, medical troubleshooting is both extremely useful and extremely
sensitive, and that's why I said "Like Wikipedia, WikiTroubleshooting
should cite credible references." We could put a warning and a
disclaimer on every medical troubleshooting page telling the visitor
to check cited references and other sources before adopting any
advice.
A disclaimer would probably shield us from lawsuits, but there would
still be a lot of ethical issues in "the free medical advice anyone can
edit" (since we know most people won't check sources, especially print
sources). Setting aside the issues of vandalism, even a good intentioned
edit by someone who doesn't have adequate medical training could cause
problems if they misread a source or use a source that isn't as reliable
as they think. A lot higher standard for "reliable" would be needed for
something like that.
How can a wiki implement a troubleshooting wizard? A
wizard is a set
of pages. Each page assumes you have specified certain symptoms (e.g.
symptom1, symptom3, symptom5) of your problem and asks you a question
to specify a new symptom (e.g. symptom10); then it redirects you to a
next page that assumes you have specified symptoms 1, 3, 5 and 10 and
asks you yet another question or shows you possible causes and
solutions for the symptoms you have specified so far (1, 3, 5, 10).
Therefore they're just static HTML pages where each page can link to
one or more "next pages". This is exactly what a wiki can do.
The main issue I can see (other than that for medical advice and the
like), is that troubleshooters don't lend themselves as well to
incremental building. A Wikipedia article with only a few sentences or a
Wikibook with only a couple chapters are still slightly useful. A
troubleshooter with only a couple steps is much less so.
Say you have a troubleshooter for a printer not working:
1. Is the printer plugged in and on?
Yes
2. Is there paper loaded?
Yes
3. Sorry, that's all this troubleshooter can help you with for now.
--
Alex (wikipedia:en:User:Mr.Z-man)