David Goodman wrote:
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.)
Would it accurate to say that the main concern is blame-avoidance?
That is, giving out certain kinds of information carries legal or
ethical responsibility, because people will take important action
based on that information. Legal and medical information are the
classic examples.
However, the great strength of Wikipedia is its approach of "better to
make errors and let people fix them than to get nowhere by trying to
prevent errors before they happen". That's how Wikipedia grew, and it
goes head on against the arguments you mentioned above. It's a
strange thing for Wikipedians to oppose including a certain broad
category of information, which everyone agrees is valuable and
noteworthy, simply because errors and misinterpretations are possible.
Now, medical information is particularly prone to a certain kind of
dangerous misinterpretation. Naïve readers want simple claims they
can rely on, like "X cures Y". The reality is that drugs always have
trade-offs, and there's enough variation among people that treatments
affect different people in different ways. Naïve readers are prone to
lift statements out of context or simplify them dangerously:
"Wikipedia said X cures Y, but all I got was hives!" when actually the
text said, "X cures Y in 60% of people, and it causes hives in 0.2% of
people"--perhaps in a big table, mixed in with lots of other
information. On top of that, those numbers are usually statistical
extrapolations, open to debate, and the medical consensus is always
shifting, and there is always dissent.
Maybe the folks here can brainstorm a way around this. Can you tell a
few specific bits of information, say, about just one specific drug,
that would be nice to include, but that raise the blame-related
objections?
(Or, if I've got the underlying concern wrong, please post about that.)
Ben