[WikiEN-l] Docs look to Wikipedia for condition info: Manhattan Research

[David Goodman]

1. There are hundreds of thousands of places where similar harm could
be do--safe uses of a chemical, or the like. We could guard against it
by using flagged revisions on these pages.
2. We need not give only the US dose.
3. Saying according to the official USDI, the usual does is " " is as
safe as any quotation can possibly be. I am not aware of any
litigation due to a mis=print in PubMedPlus or the similar. I recall
one major correction in the print Merck a few editions back--they made
it very prominent. An error in print is much more dangerous than
online, because there is no way of ensuring  that all copies get
corrected.
4.Though we do not give medical advice, it is entirely appropriate to
indicate where reliabler advice can be found.
5. How a substance is used is encyclopedic information. It's necessary
to actually make use of our reference work. Example: A person will
come across a newspaper article discussing an overdose & giving the
amount. They will go to the encyclopedia article to put it in context.




David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG



On Sun, May 24, 2009 at 12:20 PM, Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com> wrote:
> It's a good guideline - there are few enough instances on Wikipedia where
> simple vandalism can lead directly to serious physical harm, and this is
> one. Statistics and reported numbers are vandalism targets throughout
> Wikipedia every day, and dosage information would be a particularly popular
> target. We could put the dosage information in templates, and protect the
> templates, but that doesn't allay the range of other problems associated
> with including such information. We have to ask ourselves why someone would
> use Wikipedia to look up this sort of information - are those needs we want
> to fulfill?
>
> It's also important to note that there are many other sources for this sort
> of information for medical professionals. Institutional or office
> subscriptions to electronic/online references like Micromedex are not
> prohibitively expense, there are a number of free or cheap physical
> reference books, and I even have a free and comprehensive reference on my
> phone.
>
> Nathan
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