[Foundation-l] Funding Sources of Medical Research, was Misplaced Reliance, was Re: Paid editing...

[John Vandenberg]

On Mon, Nov 8, 2010 at 12:28 PM, FT2 <ft2.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> Not so. The difference is we document reliable sources, we don't create
> them.
>
> A user writing "X said Y" is not verifying that Y is true. They are
> verifying that X said Y was true. They need to show evidence that any third
> party can check, why they believe "X said Y" is true.
>
> Once that's done, the status of the editor is immaterial - because they
> themselves are not creating anything so their ability to create information
> isn't at question. They are simply saying "this is what X said, this is
> where anyone can check X said it and form their own view".

The point geni was making is that while it is appropriate for journals
to publish funding information with their articles, it is not normal
for people citing those articles to note the same with each citation.

I think geni also flippantly pointed out that the potential for COI of
our contributors is the elephant in the room.  I hope you don't truly
believe that our contributors have no COI and the COI of our editors
is immaterial on the _current_ state of the content.  The hope is that
over time NPOV will rise to the top, but in many topical areas this
has yet to eventuate.

> By contrast academics and researchers writing papers are forming their own
> view. So the factors going into that are crucial to assess the quality and
> basis of that view and reliance a reader may wish to personally place on it.

The factors involved are not limited to funding; at the end of the day
we need to be discerning about which sources we use, rather than use
them all and add lots of information to the citations for the reader
to decide how biased the sources are.

--
John Vandenberg