[WikiEN-l] Health advice from the web

[David Goodman]

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, geni<geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/7/31 Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews at 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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