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

[Andrew Gray]

2009/5/29 Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com>:

> And what about the potential uses of information that could save
> people's lives? One of the uses is to *check* a prescription, and this
> is a valid use that is much less likely to cause harm.

For the sake of the record, I've ended up using a Wikipedia article to
check a prescription - I'd been given an antibiotic which I'd seen
mentioned as used in treatment of the condition, but at a dosage about
eight times lower. It turned out - and our article explained quite
clearly and with detail - that there were two treatment regimes; one
is basically a "short sharp shock", and the other runs over a week.
I'd been placed on the second, but had only seen reference to the
first. Score one to Wikipedia; I felt quite reassured knowing that.

I can think of a number of cases where we could pose much more
immediate risk to someone using Wikipedia as a quick-reference -
household wiring, for example! "Oh, live is *blue*, right..."

To be honest, this worry seems a bit presumptive about the
suggestibility of our users. On the whole, people are much more likely
to ring up a pharmacy and say "excuse me, are you sure this
instruction is right?" than they are to decide the writing on the
bottle was clearly wrong and they should take twenty tablets each
morning rather than two... do people *really* decide to self-medicate
based entirely on one thing they read on the internet, and go off and
acquire the medication and so on without ever noticing anything to the
contrary?

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk