[WikiEN-l] Health advice from the web

[Ben Kovitz]

Steve Bennett wrote:

> Ben Kovitz<bkovitz at acm.org> wrote:
>> attention to tags?  I know it's 2009, and I know tags will never go
>> away, but most tags still strike me as both anti-wiki and page
>> clutter.  If a page has a problem, fix it.
>
> That attitude is "anti-wiki". I can diagnose far more problems than I
> have time, knowledge or inclination to fix. Fixing is better than
> tagging. Tagging is better than ignoring.

This is a good point.  The traditional wiki way is to always be  
"live": no "under construction", no tags, just a real, functioning  
product right now.  To make an improvement, you just make the  
improvement.  But, as I frequently need to be reminded, "Wikipedia is  
not typical".  While I have seen some wikis degenerate into vast sets  
of pages that offer almost no content right now, but promise lots of  
content and fixes in the future, that hasn't happened on Wikipedia.   
By and large, tagging has worked well.

It sounds like tagging would work well with drug safety information,  
but as David Goodman has pointed out, the real issue is not how to get  
the attention of editors, but conscious disagreement about whether  
that information belongs on Wikipedia. Indeed this might not be best  
resolved in the usual "just do it" wiki way. Or perhaps there is a  
"just do it" approach that would address the concerns of the people  
who have opposed posting the information.

Ben