On Thu, May 8, 2014 at 8:17 AM, Anthony Cole ahcoleecu@gmail.com wrote:
Regarding expert review, Doc James has just announced that a version of Wikipedia's article "Dengue fever" has passed peer review and been accepted for publication by the journal Open Medicine. I think this is a special moment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:MED#This_conversation_is_notabl...
Anthony Cole http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Anthonyhcole
The article will apparently be listed on PubMed. That's indeed an achievement to be proud of. Well done!
There was a discussion earlier in this thread about the likely quality of Wikipedia's medical articles, and the curatorial work of WikiProject Medicine.
I note that in the same post in which Doc James announced this on en:WP, he also said:
---o0o---
How good is our content? Having looked at much of it I have an okay idea. We have about 100-200 high or excellent quality medical articles. We have about 20,000 that are short and just starting out. We have a couple thousand that are okay ish. We have another few hundred to maybe few thousand or so that are a complete disaster. So in summary article quality is variable with a randomly selected article likely to be of moderate to low quality.
---o0o---
Given his qualifications and his longstanding work in WikiProject Medicine, James' guess is probably better than most. But it's not something you could cite.
On Thu, May 8, 2014 at 3:02 PM, rupert THURNER <rupert.thurner@gmail.com
wrote:
Andreas, you seem to have pre-determined that Wikipedia's medical
articles
are all terrible and riddled with errors.
And I think you are being needlessly defensive. I have an open mind as
to
what the results might be. What I am sure of is that neither you nor I
nor
the Foundation really know how reliable they are. Why not make an
effort
to
find out?
Anybody interested can do it. Now. Anybody interested can improve it.
Now.
Why it does not happen? It happened for other domains as well.
In my experience there is only one single measure to improve quality:
point
out the single error which cam be corrected. If you can propose a system, either human or automatic, to do this, feel free.
What imo is the bigger problem: many medical articles are written in a language a mortal cannot understand any more.
Realistically, they're amongst the most likely to receive professional editing and review -
Wikiproject
Medicine does a much better job than people are willing to credit
them.
Yes, and many editors there are sorely concerned about the quality of medical information Wikipedia provides to the public.
This is the core value of wikipedia since its beginnings: provide a big enough gap to fill.
Incidentally, there was a discussion of the JAOA study in The Atlantic today:
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/05/can-wikipedia-ever-be-a-de...
A member of WikiProject Medicine is quoted in it, as is the study's
author.
—o0o—
So both sides acknowledge: There are errors in Wikipedia’s health
articles.
And that’s a problem, because people use them.
Internet literacy includes learning beeing sceptical on what you read i guess .... Wikipedia is not Jesus and never will be, in no domain :)
Rupert _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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