[WikiEN-l] How's our coverage of medications?

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 11:56 AM, Oskar Sigvardsson
<oskarsigvardsson at gmail.com> wrote:
[snip]
> The moral argument says that we should make sure that people don't
> rely on only our information when it comes to serious decisions with
> serious consequences. I don't think it would be a bad thing at all if
> at the dosage section of an article on drugs we say "Consult your
> physician before taking medication" or on the article on
> nitroglycerin, have a small little disclaimer in the "Manufacturing"
> section saying "It is extremely dangerous to try this yourself if you
> are not a trained chemist".

The problem is that for almost any question of fact you can construct
a scenario where having wrong information may be seriously harmful.
For example, I've pulled formulas from articles on mathematics and
electrical-engineering related subjects which could create significant
fire hazards if they were wrong and I applied them uncritically, to
things like a nuclear physicist creating another Chernobyl incident if
he believes our figures on the neutron cross section of various
materials, to someone losing a high dollar value bet based on some
information we have on pokemon.

Even if you ignore the sillier possibilities we're still talking about
a considerable chunk of the project which could present a risk of harm
to people if they fail to apply appropriate scepticism and were the
information incorrect or incomplete.

Once the warnings are more than something rare and highly targeted
people will just suffer banner blindness and not even see them.
Messages few people notice will not improve our moral position (and I
agree in terms of pure-legal CYA we're already as covered as much as
reasonable).

It's pretty easy to demonstrate that notices are almost totally
ineffective. We could anon-notice "*Wikipedia is untrustworthy, do not
take risks based on information included or potentially excluded from
this page!*", and many people would simply ignore it.


Allow me to suggest these steps:

(1) Better public education about how Wikipedia works so the general
public gives it the appropriate grain of salt. The "Ten things you
didn't know about wikipedia" as a anon-notice was that kind of effort.
We should do more things like that. (This could also include WMF
organized press events, like a "Wikipedia Reliability day")

(2) For things like prescription drugs where there exists external
notable and basically reliable materials on safety we should adopt a
standard highly visable infobox field that link people to these
resources.

(3) Adopt revision flagging so we have a tool to make efforts like (2)
effective: Getting good information in is ineffective when ~2% of page
views (millions of people) are to vandalized versions which may omit
the good information.

None of these would require more disclaimers that people will just
ignore, and I think they stand a better chance of improving people's
safety when they use Wikipedia.