If I may jump into the conversation with an ethical question:
It has occurred to me that sometimes people legitimately can't get to
a doctor (or other professional) that will help them. Sometimes they
can't even *get* to a doctor to begin with. If they are lucky to have
the internet, it would make sense to use it. Wikipedia is on the
internet, and so it does make some sense (less sense than say,
checking a medical website, but still some sense) to check it.
What obligation does Wikipedia have to these people?
Emily
On Aug 3, 2009, at 3:11 PM, David Goodman wrote:
People are always going to mistreat and misdiagnose;
let them at least
have correct information, which is more likely to guide them right
than incomplete information. Not doing this when in one's power is as
immoral as telling deliberate lies.
Considering only public information for now, I think there are no
exceptions at all to the requirement to give full information in all
cases and all subjects, except for young children, and except for
information intended to specifically & unjustly harm a private
individual. I mean it quite literally, essentially following JS Mill.
For those who do think we have a responsibility not to tell the public
what they might use improperly, I remind them, first, that this is
the explanation used for all censorship--censorship is the classic
valid example of a slippery slope. And second, that this is
information the governments of the English-speaking countries not only
permit but require to be publicly available, and that is in fact
widely available. We are not breaking new ground here.
In any case, I cannot see how standard drug dosage information is more
harmful than any other facet of medicine.
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 12:11 AM, Ben Kovitz<bkovitz(a)acm.org> wrote:
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
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