Too late, already blown fuse. (Actually snowed in for ages, but finally got a frontloader up here. So, no blown fuses for a while.)Mancunium wrote:I prefer to think of my molecules this way:Poetlister wrote:Before enwikibadscience blows a fuse, I must explain that atoms aren't really colour-coded like that.Mancunium wrote:I had never heard of modafinil before. It looks like this:
One must logged in to read the rest of this report:Wikipedia is being cited as a reference in medical literature published in peer-reviewed, high-impact journals such as the BMJ, Nature and Gastroenterology, even though anyone can edit Wikipedia entries at any time, a new study finds. Nearly 1500 health-related papers in 1000 journals have Wikipedia citations, with most of these published in the past three years, the authors from the University of Ottawa in Canada found in their search of online databases such as PubMed. Papers citing Wikipedia have been published in a wide range of journals including prestigious publications such as the Lancet, BMJ, Nature, Diabetes Care, Gastroenterology and Annals of Internal Medicine.
The total number of Wikipedia citations increased each year since 2001 [...]
However, the complete text of the study referred to is here:This site is intended for Registered Medical Practitioners.
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How odd it is to think that the British Medical Journal has published a study on the scholarship of a shack-dweller working from an outpost whose principal claim to notability is as regional headquarters of the Rocky Mountain Forest District of East Kootenay.Abstract
Objectives
To examine indexed health science journals to evaluate the prevalence of Wikipedia citations, identify the journals that publish articles with Wikipedia citations, and determine how Wikipedia is being cited.
Design Bibliometric analysis.
Study selection Publications in the English language that included citations to Wikipedia were retrieved using the online databases Scopus and Web of Science.
Data sources
To identify health science journals, results were refined using Ulrich’s database, selecting for citations from journals indexed in Medline, PubMed, or Embase. Using Thomson Reuters Journal Citation Reports, 2011 impact factors were collected for all journals included in the search.
Data extraction
Resulting citations were thematically coded, and descriptive statistics were calculated.
Results
1433 full text articles from 1008 journals indexed in Medline, PubMed, or Embase with 2049 Wikipedia citations were accessed. The frequency of Wikipedia citations has increased over time; most citations occurred after December 2010. More than half of the citations were coded as definitions (n=648; 31.6%) or descriptions (n=482; 23.5%). Citations were not limited to journals with a low or no impact factor; the search found Wikipedia citations in many journals with high impact factors.
Conclusions
Many publications are citing information from a tertiary source that can be edited by anyone, although permanent, evidence based sources are available. We encourage journal editors and reviewers to use caution when publishing articles that cite Wikipedia.
Universities ban students from citing Wikipedia in papers, and even the web site itself warns academics against referencing its articles, which any Internet user can alter at any time. But a new Canadian study has found that thousands of peer-reviewed papers in medical journals have cited Wikipedia in recent years — and the numbers of references are increasing fast. The trend – apparent even in some of the world’s most influential medical publications — raises the possibility of spreading misinformation and “could potentially affect care of patients,” researchers from the University of Ottawa say in a paper just published by the British Medical Journal (BMJ). Articles in the BMJ itself have had 13 references to Wikipedia in the last decade, they note. What struck the study authors most, though, is that the citations began to multiply in the last three years. “The biggest surprise was the trend,” said Dr. Sylvain Boet, an Ottawa Hospital anesthetist and health researcher who headed the study with Dr. Dylan Bould, another anesthetist. “It’s exponential … It goes against all the principles of scientific reporting and referencing.”
The problem is not only the accuracy of the information [...] but that Wikipedia articles are constantly changing, and tend to only summarize primary or secondary information sources, rather than containing original research themselves, the authors say. Some of the “high-impact,” or most influential, journals found to have had Wikipedia references could not be reached for reaction this week, or declined to comment on the findings. [...] Though each article can be edited by users, mistakes tend to be corrected by others relatively quickly, with one 2005 study rating a sample of Wikipedia entries similar in accuracy to Encyclopedia Britannica. What is more, health-related articles are overseen by an expert group, WikiProject Medicine .
Indeed, it is common for medical students and young doctors to turn to Wikipedia as an initial source, admitted Dr. Boet. The problem, though, is that there is no guarantee the information at any given time is, in fact, wholly accurate, and a Wikipedia entry cited by a journal paper one day may be quite different soon after, unlike a conventional article or book, he said. That makes it harder for expert readers to assess research or, potentially, try to duplicate it themselves, said Dr. Boet. Also, the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors urges that journal authors reference original, primary research — like the results of a clinical trial — not someone else’s summary of it. In fact, Wikipedia articles often do provide those kind of primary references, yet some researchers ignore them and still cite the Wiki article instead, the study notes. Doing so is likely “quick and easy,” especially if a scientist has limited access to the original source, speculated Dr. Boet.
“The possibility for the spread of misinformation from an unverified source is at odds with the principles of robust scientific methodology and could potentially affect care of patients,” his paper concludes. In fact, Wikipedia makes much the same point itself, noting that “for many purposes, but particularly in academia, Wikipedia may not be an acceptable source.” It reminds readers that “anyone in the world can edit an article, deleting accurate information or adding false information.” [...] Dr. Boet and colleagues discovered more than 1,400 journal articles from 2001 to the beginning of 2012 that referenced Wikipedia. The numbers started to soar in 2011, and 1,600 or more Wikipedia-citing papers were published in each of 2012 and 2013. They appeared in some of the world’s foremost journals, including Nature, Science, The Lancet Infectious Diseases and The Annals of Internal Medicine. [...]
Making hospitals more dangerous every day:Wikipedia is being cited as a reference in medical literature published in peer-reviewed, high-impact journals such as the BMJ, Nature and Gastroenterology, even though anyone can edit Wikipedia entries at any time, a new study finds. Nearly 1500 health-related papers in 1000 journals have Wikipedia citations, with most of these published in the past three years, the authors from the University of Ottawa in Canada found in their search of online databases such as PubMed. Papers citing Wikipedia have been published in a wide range of journals including prestigious publications such as the Lancet, BMJ, Nature,Diabetes Care, Gastroenterology and Annals of Internal Medicine. [...]
Wikipedia: Footnotes with volatile soles
Wikipedia has evolved in recent years, the world's largest encyclopedia, which is used frequently by researchers. Even nine years ago gave 17 percent of the Nature authors in a survey that they consult the online glossary at least once a week. Since then, the frequency should be increased further. Junior doctors to inform According to another study, 70 percent also on Wikipedia. [...] Other problems arise when Wikipedia is called in scientific work in the footnotes as the source, as is increasingly the case. As M. Dylan Bould and staff from the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario in Ottawa have identified in a study (BMJ 2014, 348: g1585), footnote to find evidence from Wikipedia today in most scientific journals with medical content. Also, Nature, Science or the BMJ tolerate Wiki-links. Usually it is about definitions or descriptions that are taken from Wikipedia. Also, historical information or country statistics are often taken up.
This is understandable. Scientists also need to manage their time, and the search for the original source for a mentioned in the introduction incidental information is not always worth the effort. How common sources are taken from other work, it was recognized early in the many spelling errors that result in sources in other languages by the whispers of copying. Since then can be transferred from PubMed via copy & paste, they have become less frequent. It becomes problematic when study results, ie primary sources, are taken over by the tertiary source Wikipedia. One danger is that information at Wikipedia are volatile. In a revision of an article on the so anyone can participate, facts can also disappear. Then stay while in the version history researched. The effort to find them there, but it can be significant. A targeted search on Google leads then often faster to the source.
Amin Azzam gained a measure of crowdsourcing cachet last year by conceiving of a class where medical students would receive course credit for editing Wikipedia pages about various diseases. The idea landed him on a panel at a conference where another participant, Jared Heyman, asked him to help get his students involved in a more ambitious project: diagnosing patients they had never met. Heyman is the founder of CrowdMed, a company where patients with difficult-to-diagnose ailments post their symptoms online, offering cash rewards to people in exchange for correct assessments. [...] To get the project moving, Heyman needed to build a stable of qualified people interested in spending time poring over medical records for pocket money. The system operates like Wikipedia, with entry open to anyone. [...]
Azzam had access to medical students, and jumped at the idea to sign them up. He’s working to get CrowdMed onto the curriculum at the med schools at the University of California in San Francisco and Berkeley, where he teaches, and he hopes to have a pilot running by the next academic year. [...] To use the system, a patient uploads information about his condition online and sets a reward to be given to anyone who can come up with a diagnosis that can be carried back to a physician. The platform itself is a sort of prediction market, based on algorithms that seek common threads among the opinions voiced. On average the bounties range from $165 to $300, split between everyone who gives the right answer; CrowdMed itself takes 10 percent. About 170 people have gone through the 90-day process so far, with 80 percent getting what they saw as a useful diagnosis. [...]
When asked about growth, Heyward gives an outlandish goal typical of a startup entrepreneur: He says that he wants millions of patients using this every year. The real windfall would come if he can convince insurance companies to foot the bill for their customers. [...] It’s a vision that falls in line with one of the current beliefs of the tech industry: that the right answers will inevitably bubble up if you can just collect enough opinions. And while it’s not clear that this actually gives results that on average are better than what you’d get from a few visits to specialists, it could theoretically attract insurance companies by being far cheaper. [...]
How often do you turn to Google to find health information? Most doctors don’t recommend we look up our ailments on the Internet. But a new study finds Wikipedia is being referenced more often by medical researchers. The study, published in the British Medical Journal, looked at references to Wikipedia in academic health sciences articles since the site launched in 2001. University of Ottawa researchers found a couple of thousand citations of the online encyclopedia; most are from after December 2010, and the practice is on the rise
Researchers say the apparent spike suggests reviewers, authors and editors don’t fully understand how the site even works — that anyone can edit an entry. They say so far, referencing Wikipedia isn’t too common, but it’s becoming more of a trend, and the potential for spreading misinformation from an unverified source could affect patient care.Researchers add using an unverified source goes against the principles of scientific methodology. They suggest reviewers and editors insist that primary sources be cited where possible.
As described in several posts above, last year's UCSF/WikiProject Medicine project was judged to have been a failure by all the participants, with Wikipedia "Ambassadors" doing all the work of the five student participants, no editor retention, and no improvement of the medical articles.The Joy wrote:Anyone noticed this?
Education Program:University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)/Expanding WikiProject Medicine (April 2014) (T-H-L)
Universities ban students from citing Wikipedia in papers, and even the website itself warns academics against referencing its articles, which any Internet user can alter at any time. But a new Canadian study has found that thousands of peer-reviewed papers in medical journals have cited Wikipedia in recent years - and the number of references is increasing fast. The trend - apparent even in some of the world's most influential medical publications - raises the possibility of spreading misinformation and "could potentially affect care of patients," researchers from the University of Ottawa say in a paper just published by the British Medical Journal (BMJ). "The biggest surprise was the trend," said Dr. Sylvain Boet, an Ottawa Hospital anesthetist and researcher who headed the study with Dr. Dylan Bould, another anesthetist. "It's exponential ... It goes against all the principles of scientific reporting and referencing." [...] Indeed, it is common for medical students and young doctors to turn to Wikipedia as an initial source, admitted Dr. Boet. The problem, though, is that there is no guarantee the information at any given time is, in fact, wholly accurate, and a Wikipedia entry cited by a journal paper one day may be quite different soon after, unlike a conventional article or book, he said. [...]
vide supraMANY of us turn to the net when we want to diagnose some rash or lump. A Canadian study has found top medical researchers do the same thing. The study, reported in the British Medical Journal, found that the collaborative online encyclopedia Wikipedia has become a primary source for researchers. A scan of health science literature revealed over 1400 research papers citing Wikipedia as evidence for their claims.
linkSome of the changes to the simple English version of Leishmaniasis are excellent and I am combining them into the main EN version. Agree that our last attempts were a failure. Also agree that we may not be able to find a version which is both sufficiently simple for Simple En and sufficiently broad for translation. Plan to continue working in a work space on main En. For example it matter that there are two types of African trypanosomiasis for translation as the treatments for one does not work for the other. Not sure if Simple En wants this sort of detail.
Agreed. Doc James and his failures have been reported in the New York Times on three occasions. He's convinced himself that he's the Nobel-worthy President of the Wiki Project Med Foundation (look, it has it own Facebook page link), overstates his professional credentials, and obviously doesn't give a damn about the health of people in the Third World.eagle wrote:Can medical coverage be dumbed down and simplified?
In early 2012, our hero Doc James (T-C-L) came up with a plan to have his project and Translators Without Boarders translate various medical articles into Simple English as a first step and then have those articles translated into various foreign languages for posting on other Wikipedias. link link This did not well-received because Simple English Wikipedia uses reading difficulty scores based in large part on the length of words. Simplified medical articles came in at around the 11th grade reading level, and the SE editors chopped away until the articles hit the 8th grade level, with a loss of a lot of valuable information. Sections on how to treat an illness were dropped completely.
Well, Doc James is back, trying to relaunch the plan a second time:linkSome of the changes to the simple English version of Leishmaniasis are excellent and I am combining them into the main EN version. Agree that our last attempts were a failure. Also agree that we may not be able to find a version which is both sufficiently simple for Simple En and sufficiently broad for translation. Plan to continue working in a work space on main En. For example it matter that there are two types of African trypanosomiasis for translation as the treatments for one does not work for the other. Not sure if Simple En wants this sort of detail.
I still believe that this will end badly, and that the volunteer translators will end up working from the regular English Wikipedia. It is troubling that the medical information being distributed to the Third World is being arbitrarily cut and slashed by SE editors who have no desire to disseminate useful medical information to people who desperately need it and want to use it.
Links to this study, and further comments thereon, have been posted earlier in this thread. Doc James and his team of "health-savvy" make-believe medical experts playing doctor are public health hazards.Universities ban students from citing Wikipedia in papers, and even the web site itself warns academics against referencing its articles, which any Internet user can alter at any time. But a new Canadian study has found that thousands of peer-reviewed papers in medical journals have cited Wikipedia in recent years — and the numbers of references are increasing fast. The trend – apparent even in some of the world’s most influential medical publications — raises the possibility of spreading misinformation and “could potentially affect care of patients,” researchers from the University of Ottawa say in a paper just published by the British Medical Journal (BMJ). Articles in the BMJ itself have had 13 references to Wikipedia in the last decade, they note. What struck the study authors most, though, is that the citations began to multiply in the last three years. “The biggest surprise was the trend,” said Dr. Sylvain Boet, an Ottawa Hospital anesthetist and health researcher who headed the study with Dr. Dylan Bould, another anesthetist. “It’s exponential … It goes against all the principles of scientific reporting and referencing.”
The problem is not only the accuracy of the information [...] but that Wikipedia articles are constantly changing, and tend to only summarize primary or secondary information sources, rather than containing original research themselves, the authors say. Some of the “high-impact,” or most influential, journals found to have had Wikipedia references could not be reached for reaction this week, or declined to comment on the findings. [...] Though each article can be edited by users, mistakes tend to be corrected by others relatively quickly, with one 2005 study rating a sample of Wikipedia entries similar in accuracy to Encyclopedia Britannica. What is more, health-related articles are overseen by an expert group, WikiProject Medicine .
Indeed, it is common for medical students and young doctors to turn to Wikipedia as an initial source, admitted Dr. Boet. The problem, though, is that there is no guarantee the information at any given time is, in fact, wholly accurate, and a Wikipedia entry cited by a journal paper one day may be quite different soon after, unlike a conventional article or book, he said. That makes it harder for expert readers to assess research or, potentially, try to duplicate it themselves, said Dr. Boet. Also, the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors urges that journal authors reference original, primary research — like the results of a clinical trial — not someone else’s summary of it. In fact, Wikipedia articles often do provide those kind of primary references, yet some researchers ignore them and still cite the Wiki article instead, the study notes. Doing so is likely “quick and easy,” especially if a scientist has limited access to the original source, speculated Dr. Boet.
“The possibility for the spread of misinformation from an unverified source is at odds with the principles of robust scientific methodology and could potentially affect care of patients,” his paper concludes. In fact, Wikipedia makes much the same point itself, noting that “for many purposes, but particularly in academia, Wikipedia may not be an acceptable source.” It reminds readers that “anyone in the world can edit an article, deleting accurate information or adding false information.” [...] Dr. Boet and colleagues discovered more than 1,400 journal articles from 2001 to the beginning of 2012 that referenced Wikipedia. The numbers started to soar in 2011, and 1,600 or more Wikipedia-citing papers were published in each of 2012 and 2013. They appeared in some of the world’s foremost journals, including Nature, Science, The Lancet Infectious Diseases and The Annals of Internal Medicine. [...]
I have always discouraged students from using Wikipedia as a reference source and as their only learning material. I avoid using it when writing articles as I worry about the validity of some of the content. Even my children have been taught at school to avoid using Wikipedia too. I was therefore interested to read an article in this week’s BMJ* which was a bibliometric analysis which examined publications to find the prevalence of Wikipedia citations in indexed health science journals. [... methodology of the study ...] Wikipedia citations were present in many journals with high impact factors. The authors felt that only 4% of these Wikipedia citations were actually appropriate. [...] An interesting editorial in the same edition of the BMJ clearly states that Wikipedia should not be cited as a source of information. [...] As medical information is now so readily and easily accessed from the Internet by doctors and patients, it is imperative that we are very careful what we use as our reference sources. We should all ensure that we equip ourselves with the necessary skills to determine the quality and reliability of the information we are accessing.
*BMJ 2014;348:g1585
[...] According to "Engaging Patients Through Social Media," a survey report released in January by the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics, Wikipedia is now the leading single source of healthcare information for patients and healthcare professionals. The report shows that the top 25 Wikipedia healthcare pages were each accessed more that 2 million times in a 12-month period [...] As many as three-quarters of patients with Internet access in the United States search for healthcare information online; in Europe, the figure is as high as 80%. Almost half of US physicians using the Internet for professional purposes reference Wikipedia; it could be as high as 75% in Europe. A recent post on the eConsultancy digital marketing blog reported that Wikipedia entries are likely to feature heavily in any web search, second only to brand names or related URLs. eConsultancy's "Wikipedia and SEO" post claims that where searches are focused on more generic information, disease states for example, Wikipedia is likely to rank first. [...]
The rub is the general public and HCPs are regularly accessing occasionally inaccurate and potentially dangerous health information online. "The combination of trust in Wikipedia and its vulnerability to both mistakes and author bias has caused concern..." say the IMS Institute's "Engaging patients" authors. Wikipedia itself makes it very clear that the information on the site is not necessarily accurate. At the top of its general disclaimer page, in big, bold capital letters, it says "WIKIPEDIA MAKES NO GUARANTEE OF VALIDITY." [...] It's what patients and practitioners do with this information that raises the prospect of Wikipedia becoming a public health problem . [...] WikiProject Medicine, a loose coalition of 500 volunteer editors, most with some level of medical or pharmaceutical expertise, has set out to try to correct some of the problems with health-related content on English Wikipedia. The group, including experienced medical editors, is aware of Wikipedia's shortcomings. Veteran Wikipedian Anthony Cole is a participant in the group and says, "We are very conscious of our responsibility at or near the top of every search-engine result." [...]
Wikiproject Medicine is currently focusing on 85 articles deemed to be of top importance, striving to get them to at least Wikipedia's "B" standard, where the content is mostly complete and accurate without major problems. To date, Wikiproject Medicine has achieved this for 80% of the targeted articles. It has also set a target for 80 up-to date "Featured Articles" (Wikipedia's top quality ranking) and 300 "Good Articles," that have passed an official review. While this work is incredibly valuable, it seems like a drop in the ocean. That's why Cole would be delighted to see the pharmaceutical industry get involved. [...] Cole is not overly concerned that pharma will overrun Wikipedia with information that smacks of self-promotion. [...] "My perception, and that of at least one other veteran medical editor, is that, so far, the companies have been no problem at all to us," says Cole. "I don't think I've confirmed one instance of company editing in eight years here, and where I've suspected it, it has been benign." Cole does however, have an alternative—he would like to see paid editors reviewing medical articles on Wikipedia. The idea is that named, highly-regarded scholars review for accuracy, balance and comprehensiveness articles that have reached Wikipedia's top "Featured Article" standard. Those that pass review would then be locked down. [...] He believes this approach would also overcome one of Wikipedia's biggest problems—the reluctance of experts to contribute.
"Because any Randy in Boise can do what he likes to our articles, experts just don't bother," says Cole. Randy is the archetypal "relentless but uniformed" Wikipedia editor first mentioned in a 2006 Wired essay. Cole says few academics are willing to waste their time composing a brilliant article only to have it descend into drivel as well-meaning amateurs or academics from outside the discipline "correct" it. "And they don't have the time to argue with Randy for weeks about why vaccines don't cause autism," he says. Cole believes that if this model was adopted it would not only improve the quality of content on the site, it would also increase the volume of quality content. With a new, reliable class of Wikipedia article developed, genuine experts would be happy to write for Wikipedia, for free. "Members of the different disciplines would informally adopt the articles in their areas of interest, producing a thousand times the quantity of quality content than even the pharmaceutical industry could afford to pay for," says Cole. [...] Late last year, a discussion started on the Wikiproject Medicine pages around the idea of adding disclaimers to all medical articles on Wikipedia. Common sense you might think, but the discussion thread around wording, positioning and design of any disclaimer runs to almost 40 screens and ends without any consensus almost three months later.
Until a system of article review and approval is created, and accepted, should pharma companies take the task on themselves? Given the broad usage of Wikipedia content by big Pharma's target audience, the site's presence at the very top of the search engines and company focus on ROI, you might have thought they would already be courting Wikipedia aggressively. Easier said than done—there isn't really a Wikipedia to talk to. Cole describes it as "an incoherent bunch of individuals with radically different opinions on just about everything, especially on the best way forward." But he and other Wikipedia medical editors are keen to discuss the best way to ensure the reliability of pharmaceutical content while safeguarding the independence and neutrality of the encyclopaedia. "I believe all large companies should have one or two Wikipedia experts on their payroll," he says. This is an idea put to the industry in an open letter from Hungarian Medical futurist Bertalan Meskó, in June 2012. His idea was simple: pharmaceutical companies should name an employee who could make 100%-transparent edits to Wikipedia entries related to their own products. Two years on, he says has had acknowledgement from several pharma companies that this is the correct way for them to tackle Wikipedia content, but none have actually done it.
Social business evangelist and STweM health conversation blog author Andrew Spong is a strong supporter of the pharma Wikipedians concept, but doesn't think companies recognize Wikipedia as a business-critical need. [...] Spong pointed to the February 2014 informal guidance on digital communications from the UK's Prescription Medicines Code of Practice Authority. "When an industry's own regulators observe that pharma could consider taking a more "proactive" role with regard to Wikipedia, the only conclusion one can reach is that the industry is being too conservative in its approach," he say. Like Wikipedian Cole, Spong doesn't see any major conflict in pharma companies getting involved in the creation and editing of Wikipedia content. Contrary, he believes whatever public health risk there is in Wikipedia content would be mitigated rather than exacerbated by the industry's direct involvement. "The active curation of all entries relevant to its business would provide each pharmaceutical company with a copper-bottomed means of becoming the authoritative source of information on the Internet about its own products," Cole says. [...] "In my opinion, the pharmaceutical industry has a moral and ethical duty to assume an active role in the editing of relevant Wikipedia entries," he says. "The trust-generative, credibility-boosting benefits that a visible and enduring commitment to editing Wikipedia in a balanced, approvable manner would also bring are secondary, but surely also valuable." [...]
This should be of interest to WikiProject Medicine, the WikiProject Med Foundation, and to Wikipedia Users Jmh649 (T-C-L) and Eysen (T-C-L), whose rationale for using Foundation funds to pay their JMIR (link) to publish Wikipedia medical articles was the lack of open-source research journals: Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Collaborative_publication#JMIR_Wiki_Medical_Reviews (T-H-L)For years, two of the world’s largest research funders — the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Wellcome Trust in the United Kingdom — have issued a steady stream of incentives to coax academics to abide by their open-access policies. Now they are done with just dangling carrots. Both institutions are bringing out the sticks: cautiously and discreetly cracking down on researchers who do not make their papers publicly available. Neither agency would name those who have been sanctioned. But the London-based Wellcome Trust says that it has withheld grant payments on 63 occasions in the past year because papers resulting from the funding were not open access. And the NIH, in Bethesda, Maryland, says that it has delayed some continuing grant awards since July 2013 because of non-compliance with open-access policies, although the agency does not know the exact numbers. [...]
I'm sort of surprised that you didn't mention "Free Access to the Worlds Poorest".thekohser wrote:At least Heilman admits with his graphic that Wikipedians are not academics.
I assumed he was referencing Wikimedia Mercury, Wikimedia Venus, and Wikimedia Mars. Not sure whether the gas giants can physically support data centers.Mancunium wrote:I'm sort of surprised that you didn't mention "Free Access to the Worlds Poorest".
Sorry. I'm just catching up with my reading. I'm responding to your 14/4/14 comment, Mancunium.Mancunium wrote:This should be of interest to WikiProject Medicine, the WikiProject Med Foundation, and to Wikipedia Users Jmh649 (T-C-L) and Eysen (T-C-L), whose rationale for using Foundation funds to pay their JMIR (link) to publish Wikipedia medical articles was the lack of open-source research journals: Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Collaborative_publication#JMIR_Wiki_Medical_Reviews (T-H-L)
Excuse me? So you don't think that Wikiproject Medicine and its precious little "foundation" is doing a bang-up job, and that Heilman is some kind of infallible genius? Because that's the vibe I get from the people associated with him.Anthonyhcole wrote:(I supported the WMF funding such a project initially, but withdrew my support for the project because I thought the reviewer selection process needed more rigor.)
I'm on the board of WikiProject Med Foundation, but won't be after Wikimania. There are a variety of opinions on the best way forward for en.Wikipedia's medical content. James and I disagree on many aspects of that. One thing of which I am certain, though, is James is animated by altruism. Do you have any evidence of him asking for money from the WMF?EricBarbour wrote:Excuse me? So you don't think that Wikiproject Medicine and its precious little "foundation" is doing a bang-up job, and that Heilman is some kind of infallible genius? Because that's the vibe I get from the people associated with him.Anthonyhcole wrote:(I supported the WMF funding such a project initially, but withdrew my support for the project because I thought the reviewer selection process needed more rigor.)
Jmh649 (T-C-L)Anthonyhcole wrote:Sorry. I'm just catching up with my reading. I'm responding to your 14/4/14 comment, Mancunium.Mancunium wrote:This should be of interest to WikiProject Medicine, the WikiProject Med Foundation, and to Wikipedia Users Jmh649 (T-C-L) and Eysen (T-C-L), whose rationale for using Foundation funds to pay their JMIR (link) to publish Wikipedia medical articles was the lack of open-source research journals: Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Collaborative_publication#JMIR_Wiki_Medical_Reviews (T-H-L)
To the best of my knowledge, James has never asked for or received a penny from the WMF. They supplied legal support in the WikiTravel vs. WikiVoyage situation and possibly on another occasion but he pays all his own travel and other expenses for everything he does for Wikipedia. I can't recall or even imagine him expecting WMF to fund the submission of Wikipedia articles to JMIR Wiki Medical Reviews. Can you please check your sources on that?
(I supported the WMF funding such a project initially, but withdrew my support for the project because I thought the reviewer selection process needed more rigor.)
Thus is the Foundation to which I refer: Wiki Project Med Foundation linkNote: I am entirely a volunteer here. I do not accept money or honorariums for any efforts related to wiki's, Wikipedia or the Internet. I do accept travel costs for speaking events by organizations that can afford them. I do not and have never accepted pharmaceutical funding.
Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Collaborative_publication (T-H-L)I thought it would be a good idea to draft up a donor appeal letter for future use when we try to solicit for money. The Google Docs for it can be found here. This is of course a collaborative effort so feel free to change it in any way you please. Thoughts, questions, concerns? Peter.C (talk) 15:23, 2 June 2013 (UTC)
[...]I appreciate the precedent you have set in writing this. The content is fine, but besides the letter itself, I think that Wiki Project Med should track when and to whom it sends such letters, and also to maintain version control over them. It should track conversations it has with any funder, because very often donations come after a funder has thought about solicitations for years.
To improve this letter, I recommend tying it to a Google spreadsheet which also notes the version of the solicitation letter sent out, when any letter is sent, to whom it was sent, if the letter got a reply, and other such information. I am talking about this with some other organizations, particularly the Open Knowledge Foundation. I am wondering if the OKFN can help Wiki Project Med as well as the WCA to develop templates and practices for office management. Blue Rasberry (talk) 15:46, 3 June 2013 (UTC)
At the last Wiki Project Med meeting some people were asking about banking. As of now, the organization does not have a bank account. Some people suggested that the bank ought to be in New York City, since the organization is incorporated in New York. [...] Might the board of Wiki Project Med Foundation be interested in having a partnership with Wikimedia NYC for the purpose of sharing work managing financial reports, banking concerns, and the collection of community feedback on funded projects? If so, I will talk to more people at Wikimedia NYC and see what they think. Blue Rasberry (talk) 15:45, 4 June 2013 (UTC)
I see no benefits to "partnering" with WMNYC. If we were to use an international bank we can do business virtually anywhere instead of being limited to Capital One locations (which is what WMNYC uses). From my understanding Doug already bares this responsibility. As I do not see any benefits, I do not think we should get involved in this. Peter.C (talk) 21:55, 5 June 2013 (UTC)
I suspect that you are overrating the scope of an "international" bank. For example, Citigroup would be on most people's list of such banks, but if you open an account at Citibank in the US, it doesn't do you any good in Germany, even though the logos look the same on the buildings. Your little local bank or credit union is just as "international" in practice: your bank debit card will work in many ATMs out of the country and you can wire money back and forth.
Before you decide where to open an account, ask yourself what you realistically expect to do with that account during the next year or two. If the answer is "reimburse Board members in multiple countries for postage or telephone calls", then you probably want PayPal rather than a traditional bank.
(In terms of accounting process, you need at least two people involved.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:03, 5 June 2013 (UTC)
[...] WPMF seems poised to process at least tens of thousands of dollars in the next year with in-kind donations. So far several members - in independent capacity - have received funding to travel to conferences relevant to WPMF. When they have gone, it was for reasons in addition to WPMF goals, but WPMF could be noting the activity of its members and take some credit for when its members go out and do things in its name. It might be prudent to note donated travel funding in the organization's records of donations, if those receiving the funding would agree that they received the money as WPMF representatives or project partners. It seems likely that the WPMF will also be supporting Wikipedians in Residence in the future, and although those people will not be paid through the WPMF, I still feel that noting that this organization was a player in the creation of the jobs would be appropriate, and the salaries paid to people who take such jobs are a sort of in-kind donation to WPMF and could be noted as such if the employee agreed. Keeping records of projects and funding is essential for other grant writing and funding requests.
It could well happen that WPMF receive funding directly to send other people to conferences or to develop materials. If that happens, it would be ideal to have a bank on hand if there are no significant additional costs to doing it sooner rather than later. I see opening a bank account somewhere in the world to be a reasonable goal of any organization which might ever solicit donations, and free accounts are available. Paypal might not be appropriate for processing travel or anyone's salary, if funding ever appeared for those things. Thoughts? Blue Rasberry (talk) 14:52, 6 June 2013 (UTC)
In-kind donations do not (cannot) use a bank account.
PayPal is probably fine for travel. (The main challenge is getting money in, not out.) If you're paying an employee, then you have so many other things to deal with that setting up a bank account will seem trivial in comparison.
Large banks almost never offer free checking accounts to organizations. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:02, 6 June 2013 (UTC)
In kind donations do not use a bank account, but the reason why the donations were in-kind is partially because the funding involved could not have been processed through WPMF. I recently traveled to a medical conference and paid a significant amount of money out of my own pocket to do so, pending reimbursement. I am fortunate that I was able to pay this and wait for the reimbursement, but suppose that someone cannot wait and does not have their own money; or otherwise suppose that WPMF found some benefit in being able to collect donations and report that other organizations funded it. It would be nice if, upon learning that a trip is funded, WPMF could front the money to the conference attendee and then wait for the sponsor to reimburse WPMF with a direct donation. This could be essential especially if someone from a developing country gets invited to a conference and for some reason is not pre-paid. Wikimania itself, for example, has a default policy of asking scholarship recipients to buy their own plane tickets and seek reimbursement later. If there is going to be money associated with WPMF projects, then there are advantages to having that money pass through WPMF. In that sense, WPMF might want to decide whether it wants to accept funding or to reject it and tell the donor to make an in-kind donation instead. In either case, I think it would be meaningful if WPMF tracked when people invested money in its projects.
I am fairly sure that there are options for free banking with a minimum balance in the range that WPMF can manage. If the organization wants to have a bank account then this and other problems can be addressed. Someone expressed a desire for banking in NYC and I am just sharing an option which will persist indefinitely. There are many other options. Paypal may be a great one. Blue Rasberry (talk) 20:35, 6 June 2013 (UTC)
A number of banks offer no fee bank accounts. Here is one [3] Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 09:21, 10 June 2013 (UTC)
The main advantage of these collaborations would be providing high quality academic peer review and editorial support to create a corpus of professional-grade medical articles. [...] Funding will be needed to cover the XML tagging / copy-editing of articles before publication. This will require in the range of $1200CAD per article. Funding sources will need to be found. Many people publishing articles will have access to funds through their universities, however some will not. External funding sources for those without sufficient financial resources will be needed to ensure sustainability. [...] JMIR Publications is currently (Jan 2013) pilot-testing an innovative peer-reviewed journal JMIR Wiki Medical Reviews [2] which sets out to publish Wikipedia (Review) and Wikiversity (Original Works) papers. Authors who have made significant contributions to Wikipedia articles are invited to submit the article to http://wikimedical.jmir.org/author
JMIR Wiki Medical Reviews (JMIR Wiki Med Rev) is an innovative journal which takes the best wikipedia articles in medicine, peer-reviews them, and publishes them as citable scholarly review article, with the goals to 1) Improve Wikipedia articles, 2) enhance public trust in the accuracy of medical Wikipedia articles, 4) improve visibility and indexing of outstanding Wikipedia articles (e.g. by indexing in bibliographic databases and featuring them on JMIR), 5) to acknowledge authors who volunteer their time on wikipedia to improve articles by listing them as authors in a "citable" publication, 6) to add an additional layer of formal peer-review to wikipedia articles (JMIR Wiki Med Rev - About us/Focus and Scope) JMIR Publications will publish the first 20 articles free of charge, deposit them in PubMed Central, and will apply for PubMed indexing. JMIR Wiki Medical Reviews is hoped to become the first peer-reviewed journal publishing Wikipedia articles.
Dr James Heilman has agreed to serve as Editor-in-chief, other editorial board members are to be recruited (ideally active in Wikipedia Medicine). Editorial board members encourage Wikipedia authors to submit their articles to the journal for peer-review, select external peer-reviewers, and guide articles through the peer-review process. The publisher (JMIR Publications, represented by Dr Gunther Eysenbach) will coordinate production, which includes converting the Wikipedia article into XML, and depositing the articles in various bibliographic databases and full text databases. It is hoped that the journal will be Medline-indexed and will receive an impact factor. For the latter it is important to primarily publish articles which will be highly cited.
I believe Dr Heilman does read this thread. On 27 November 2013 he removed from his User page the long-standing claim to be a Clinical Assistant Professor, University of Saskatchewan link, and did so only after it was pointed out here that he was no such thing, and never had been.Anthonyhcole wrote:I'm on the board of WikiProject Med Foundation, but won't be after Wikimania. There are a variety of opinions on the best way forward for en.Wikipedia's medical content. James and I disagree on many aspects of that. One thing of which I am certain, though, is James is animated by altruism. Do you have any evidence of him asking for money from the WMF?EricBarbour wrote:Excuse me? So you don't think that Wikiproject Medicine and its precious little "foundation" is doing a bang-up job, and that Heilman is some kind of infallible genius? Because that's the vibe I get from the people associated with him.Anthonyhcole wrote:(I supported the WMF funding such a project initially, but withdrew my support for the project because I thought the reviewer selection process needed more rigor.)
The thing is, you and Mancunium are saying some very nasty stuff about an identified person. Your opinions are very welcome, but it is important when dealing with the reputation of a living, feeling person to make the distinction between opinion, conjecture and fact very clear.
I have asked James to join in here but he's chosen not to and, given your behaviour (in particular) and Mancunium's toward him, I can fully understand and respect his choice to not dignify either of you with a response. He doesn't read this forum and I doubt he ever will. So I'd very much appreciate it if you would both exercise a lot more discipline over what you smear onto this thread.
By focussing on petty libels and imperfections you're kicking up dust and obscuring the real problem with Wikipedia's medical content - and to some extent are just adding to the problem. By colonising this topic with your sleazy personal attacks and innuendo, you and Mancunium are ensuring those who could contribute to a serious debate won't touch this thread with a bargepole.
When Mr Cole was being interviewed by Peter Houston, it would have been helpful to point to this thread. If he had, it is unlikely that he would have written: "WikiProject Medicine, a loose coalition of 500 volunteer editors, most with some level of medical or pharmaceutical expertise, has set out to try to correct some of the problems with health-related content on English Wikipedia. The group, including experienced medical editors, is aware of Wikipedia's shortcomings."Mancunium wrote:Fixing Wikipedia
PharmExec, 10 April 2014 link[...] According to "Engaging Patients Through Social Media," a survey report released in January by the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics, Wikipedia is now the leading single source of healthcare information for patients and healthcare professionals. The report shows that the top 25 Wikipedia healthcare pages were each accessed more that 2 million times in a 12-month period [...] As many as three-quarters of patients with Internet access in the United States search for healthcare information online; in Europe, the figure is as high as 80%. Almost half of US physicians using the Internet for professional purposes reference Wikipedia; it could be as high as 75% in Europe. A recent post on the eConsultancy digital marketing blog reported that Wikipedia entries are likely to feature heavily in any web search, second only to brand names or related URLs. eConsultancy's "Wikipedia and SEO" post claims that where searches are focused on more generic information, disease states for example, Wikipedia is likely to rank first. [...]
The rub is the general public and HCPs are regularly accessing occasionally inaccurate and potentially dangerous health information online. "The combination of trust in Wikipedia and its vulnerability to both mistakes and author bias has caused concern..." say the IMS Institute's "Engaging patients" authors. Wikipedia itself makes it very clear that the information on the site is not necessarily accurate. At the top of its general disclaimer page, in big, bold capital letters, it says "WIKIPEDIA MAKES NO GUARANTEE OF VALIDITY." [...] It's what patients and practitioners do with this information that raises the prospect of Wikipedia becoming a public health problem . [...] WikiProject Medicine, a loose coalition of 500 volunteer editors, most with some level of medical or pharmaceutical expertise, has set out to try to correct some of the problems with health-related content on English Wikipedia. The group, including experienced medical editors, is aware of Wikipedia's shortcomings. Veteran Wikipedian Anthony Cole is a participant in the group and says, "We are very conscious of our responsibility at or near the top of every search-engine result." [...]
Wikiproject Medicine is currently focusing on 85 articles deemed to be of top importance, striving to get them to at least Wikipedia's "B" standard, where the content is mostly complete and accurate without major problems. To date, Wikiproject Medicine has achieved this for 80% of the targeted articles. It has also set a target for 80 up-to date "Featured Articles" (Wikipedia's top quality ranking) and 300 "Good Articles," that have passed an official review. While this work is incredibly valuable, it seems like a drop in the ocean. That's why Cole would be delighted to see the pharmaceutical industry get involved. [...] Cole is not overly concerned that pharma will overrun Wikipedia with information that smacks of self-promotion. [...] "My perception, and that of at least one other veteran medical editor, is that, so far, the companies have been no problem at all to us," says Cole. "I don't think I've confirmed one instance of company editing in eight years here, and where I've suspected it, it has been benign." Cole does however, have an alternative—he would like to see paid editors reviewing medical articles on Wikipedia. The idea is that named, highly-regarded scholars review for accuracy, balance and comprehensiveness articles that have reached Wikipedia's top "Featured Article" standard. Those that pass review would then be locked down. [...] He believes this approach would also overcome one of Wikipedia's biggest problems—the reluctance of experts to contribute.
"Because any Randy in Boise can do what he likes to our articles, experts just don't bother," says Cole. Randy is the archetypal "relentless but uniformed" Wikipedia editor first mentioned in a 2006 Wired essay. Cole says few academics are willing to waste their time composing a brilliant article only to have it descend into drivel as well-meaning amateurs or academics from outside the discipline "correct" it. "And they don't have the time to argue with Randy for weeks about why vaccines don't cause autism," he says. Cole believes that if this model was adopted it would not only improve the quality of content on the site, it would also increase the volume of quality content. With a new, reliable class of Wikipedia article developed, genuine experts would be happy to write for Wikipedia, for free. "Members of the different disciplines would informally adopt the articles in their areas of interest, producing a thousand times the quantity of quality content than even the pharmaceutical industry could afford to pay for," says Cole. [...] Late last year, a discussion started on the Wikiproject Medicine pages around the idea of adding disclaimers to all medical articles on Wikipedia. Common sense you might think, but the discussion thread around wording, positioning and design of any disclaimer runs to almost 40 screens and ends without any consensus almost three months later.
Until a system of article review and approval is created, and accepted, should pharma companies take the task on themselves? Given the broad usage of Wikipedia content by big Pharma's target audience, the site's presence at the very top of the search engines and company focus on ROI, you might have thought they would already be courting Wikipedia aggressively. Easier said than done—there isn't really a Wikipedia to talk to. Cole describes it as "an incoherent bunch of individuals with radically different opinions on just about everything, especially on the best way forward." But he and other Wikipedia medical editors are keen to discuss the best way to ensure the reliability of pharmaceutical content while safeguarding the independence and neutrality of the encyclopaedia. "I believe all large companies should have one or two Wikipedia experts on their payroll," he says. This is an idea put to the industry in an open letter from Hungarian Medical futurist Bertalan Meskó, in June 2012. His idea was simple: pharmaceutical companies should name an employee who could make 100%-transparent edits to Wikipedia entries related to their own products. Two years on, he says has had acknowledgement from several pharma companies that this is the correct way for them to tackle Wikipedia content, but none have actually done it.
Social business evangelist and STweM health conversation blog author Andrew Spong is a strong supporter of the pharma Wikipedians concept, but doesn't think companies recognize Wikipedia as a business-critical need. [...] Spong pointed to the February 2014 informal guidance on digital communications from the UK's Prescription Medicines Code of Practice Authority. "When an industry's own regulators observe that pharma could consider taking a more "proactive" role with regard to Wikipedia, the only conclusion one can reach is that the industry is being too conservative in its approach," he say. Like Wikipedian Cole, Spong doesn't see any major conflict in pharma companies getting involved in the creation and editing of Wikipedia content. Contrary, he believes whatever public health risk there is in Wikipedia content would be mitigated rather than exacerbated by the industry's direct involvement. "The active curation of all entries relevant to its business would provide each pharmaceutical company with a copper-bottomed means of becoming the authoritative source of information on the Internet about its own products," Cole says. [...] "In my opinion, the pharmaceutical industry has a moral and ethical duty to assume an active role in the editing of relevant Wikipedia entries," he says. "The trust-generative, credibility-boosting benefits that a visible and enduring commitment to editing Wikipedia in a balanced, approvable manner would also bring are secondary, but surely also valuable." [...]
Mancunium wrote:It was nice of NCurse (T-C-L) to let JIRM know about his conflict of interest. I guess it's not necessary for the maintainer of Portal:Medicine (T-H-L) and of Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine (T-H-L) to do the same on his Wikipedia User page.
"Client" means they give you money, right? You're paid by Bayer (T-H-L), Johnson_&_Johnson (T-H-L), Sanofi (T-H-L), Merck_&_Co. (T-H-L), Abbott_Laboratories (T-H-L), Bristol-Myers_Squibb (T-H-L)GlaxoSmithKline (T-H-L) and so on, but that's not worth mentioning on your User page?
I think you're smart enough to know better, because I've read your LinkedIn profile:linkSingularity University: linkBertalan Meskó, MD, PhD's Summary
Current
Medical Futurist at The Medical Futurist
...
Education
FutureMed at Singularity UniversityThe Medical Futurist: linkThank you to our FutureMed Sponsors! Genentech, GE, Biogen Idec, California HealthCare Foundation, Celgene Cellular Therapeutics & Healthcare Innovation by Design, medGadget, Medical Devices Group
Bertalan Mesko's confession:
Do you think I muse for my own amusement? You should take your complaint of mean and spiteful and sometimes genuinely slanderous musings to the authors of the numerous media reports on this thread, including the British Medical Journal: linkAnthonyhcole wrote:Eric. Just to clarify, when I said above, "Your opinions are very welcome", I meant to say you're welcome to your opinions. I could do without your and Mancunium's mean and spiteful and sometimes genuinely slanderous musings.
And: WikiProject Medicine is not the monolith you imagine. Pick any random day and read through the talk page. Some days are more robust than others, depending on the topic.
Mancunium, those open-access journals you point to can't publish Wikipedia articles because Wikipedia's content is covered by a CC-BY-SA license and none of those journals will publish under that license (as the "SA" - "share alike" - demands).
I encourage you to read the entire paper.References that anyone can edit: review of Wikipedia citations in peer reviewed health science literature
BMJ 2014; 348 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.g1585 (Published 6 March 2014)
M Dylan Bould, staff anesthesiologist1,
Emily S Hladkowicz, research assistant2,
Ashlee-Ann E Pigford, research assistant2,
Lee-Anne Ufholz, director3,
Tatyana Postonogova, research associate4,
Eunkyung Shin, research assistant5,
Sylvain Boet, staff anesthesiologist6
Author Affiliations
Correspondence to: M D Bould dbould@cheo.on.ca
Accepted 10 February 2014
Abstract
Objectives To examine indexed health science journals to evaluate the prevalence of Wikipedia citations, identify the journals that publish articles with Wikipedia citations, and determine how Wikipedia is being cited.
Design Bibliometric analysis.
Study selection Publications in the English language that included citations to Wikipedia were retrieved using the online databases Scopus and Web of Science.
Data sources To identify health science journals, results were refined using Ulrich’s database, selecting for citations from journals indexed in Medline, PubMed, or Embase. Using Thomson Reuters Journal Citation Reports, 2011 impact factors were collected for all journals included in the search.
Data extraction Resulting citations were thematically coded, and descriptive statistics were calculated.
Results 1433 full text articles from 1008 journals indexed in Medline, PubMed, or Embase with 2049 Wikipedia citations were accessed. The frequency of Wikipedia citations has increased over time; most citations occurred after December 2010. More than half of the citations were coded as definitions (n=648; 31.6%) or descriptions (n=482; 23.5%). Citations were not limited to journals with a low or no impact factor; the search found Wikipedia citations in many journals with high impact factors.
Conclusions Many publications are citing information from a tertiary source that can be edited by anyone, although permanent, evidence based sources are available. We encourage journal editors and reviewers to use caution when publishing articles that cite Wikipedia.
And isn't it a shame this isn't Wikipedia, where you can go on a noticeboard and shriek WP:CIVILITY and WP:OUTING all day long until an administrator notices it, and silences me? If we are "slandering" Heilman, why isn't he suing people on this forum?Anthonyhcole wrote:Eric. Just to clarify, when I said above, "Your opinions are very welcome", I meant to say you're welcome to your opinions. I could do without your and Mancunium's mean and spiteful and sometimes genuinely slanderous musings.
Obviously, since many of its members are NOT qualified to write about medical or pharmacological subjects, and yet are allowed to do so openly, and even encouraged. Not to mention the actual medical professionals who appear to be either personal shills (Otto Placik, anyone? Russell Barkley, anyone?) or paid drug-company shills, or both.And: WikiProject Medicine is not the monolith you imagine.
"His User page is an unusually-detailed biography. He makes no secret of the fact that he is Jacob "Jake" Orlowitz, a 30-year-old resident of Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. He received a BA in 2005, and then worked as a children's tutor in Colorado from 2005 to 2009; he was also employed by the State of Colorado's Division of Insurance. He explains that he "went a little nutty" in 2009 and, as a result, moved back to Pennsylvania. His only travel outside the US was a brief trip to Nepal, where he saw Mount Everest from a safe distance: this was literally the high point of his existence to date.
"He describes his interests as a transhumanism, singularitarianism, libertarianism and Bitcoin, and he created a website called "The Ron Paul Database". Wikipedia is his life. He has been an admin since January 2013, and is a board member, and the Outreach Coordinator, for Wiki Project Med Foundation. He is trying to organize a position as Wikipedian-in-residence at the medical research NPO Cochrane_Collaboration. LinkedIn explains his source of income as "Wikimedia Foundation Grantee"; the first grant, of $10,000, was to allow him to design the ill-fate Wikipedia Adventure, and the current $7,500 WMF grant pays him to "expand and combine partnerships into The Wikipedia Library"."
"He is a self-styled COI expert, and has presented workshops on COI Wikipedia editing to the United States Department of Defense, the Public Relations Society of America, Monitor Deloitte, Occidental Petroleum and Eli Lilly and Company."
until some internet nutcase edits them. Duh.Anthonyhcole wrote:Wikipedia articles dominate the results of most searches for a medical term. Most of them are OK - at least ...
The only strategy that would work would be to lock all the articles and allow only carefully selected identified and verified experts to edit them. Anything short of that would mean that vandals or well-meaning non-experts could damage them.Anthonyhcole wrote:Are you interested in discussing a strategy for making the top search for all medical terms accurate and reliable?
Is that so? Sure about that?Poetlister wrote:The only strategy that would work would be to lock all the articles and allow only carefully selected identified and verified experts to edit them. Anything short of that would mean that vandals or well-meaning non-experts could damage them.Anthonyhcole wrote:Are you interested in discussing a strategy for making the top search for all medical terms accurate and reliable?
I know that. Duh.TungstenCarbide wrote:until some internet nutcase edits them. Duh.Anthonyhcole wrote:Wikipedia articles dominate the results of most searches for a medical term. Most of them are OK - at least ...
Be fair to Anthony. Please. He does his best in an imperfect environment.Anthonyhcole wrote:I know that. Duh.TungstenCarbide wrote:until some internet nutcase edits them. Duh.Anthonyhcole wrote:Wikipedia articles dominate the results of most searches for a medical term. Most of them are OK - at least ...
From my perspective, sure enough to say that it is a moral certainty. Of course, I would never expect a true believer in the myth of Wikipedia exceptionalism to grasp that.Anthonyhcole wrote:Is that so? Sure about that?Poetlister wrote:The only strategy that would work would be to lock all the articles and allow only carefully selected identified and verified experts to edit them. Anything short of that would mean that vandals or well-meaning non-experts could damage them.Anthonyhcole wrote:Are you interested in discussing a strategy for making the top search for all medical terms accurate and reliable?
That will never happen. Anyone wishing to trash medical articles on Wikipedia would be well-advised to be subtle and careful. Such vandalism is liable to last for months or even years, and might even result in deaths due to people proceeding on the basis of misinformation. Yes, that applies to medical professionals, who should know better than to diagnose using Wikipedia but often do it anyway.Poetlister wrote:The only strategy that would work would be to lock all the articles and allow only carefully selected identified and verified experts to edit them.Anthonyhcole wrote:Are you interested in discussing a strategy for making the top search for all medical terms accurate and reliable?
That is easy. Convince Google, Bing, and Yahoo! to remove Wikipedia pages from the first 10 search results.Anthonyhcole wrote:Are you interested in discussing a strategy for making the top search for all medical terms accurate and reliable?
I agree with Eric, there. It'll never happen.EricBarbour wrote:That will never happen.Poetlister wrote:The only strategy that would work would be to lock all the articles and allow only carefully selected identified and verified experts to edit them.Anthonyhcole wrote:Are you interested in discussing a strategy for making the top search for all medical terms accurate and reliable?
Not easy. I think you mean simple. It may happen after a few more Wikipedia Seigenthaler biography incidents - or their medical equivalent - but I wouldn't count on it even then; and there is no guarantee the results that displace Wikipedia will be any more trustworthy. My personal experience has been that (leaving aside the low-hanging-fruit, the major class topics like "Cancer" and "Neuropathy") there just isn't much out there by way of free, reliable, comprehensive, lay-reader-oriented medical content, so the result of removing Wikipedia from the top of Google would be internet searchers reading even-less-reliable stuff.thekohser wrote:That is easy. Convince Google, Bing, and Yahoo! to remove Wikipedia pages from the first 10 search results.
Thanks to the selfless diligence of Recent changes:Medicine patrollers, most egregious stuff gets reverted within a couple of hours. Not all of course, and that may sit for years before a knowledgable reader picks it up. At least as far as Wikipedia medical content goes, the information is totally unreliable but surprisingly accurate (paraphrasing Freeman Dyson on Wikipedia).Poetlister wrote:I can certainly assure Anthony that Wikipedia is full of articles that at one time had no serious errors and now they do. I can't immediately point to any medical ones, but it is inconceivable that medicine is somehow exempt. I suppose that if he has people watching al the medical articles around the clock, he can ensure that no error survives for long, but by bad luck someone might look at an article during the half hour or so before the correction is made.
That is a point that people here often overlook. Rubbish on the Internet is far from confined to Wikipedia, and while thare are excellent sources that get pushed down by Wikipedia, equally there is total garbage that does not even have Wikipedia's correction system.Anthonyhcole wrote:there is no guarantee the results that displace Wikipedia will be any more trustworthy.
Sounds plausible.Anthonyhcole wrote:Thanks to the selfless diligence of Recent changes:Medicine patrollers, most egregious stuff gets reverted within a couple of hours. Not all of course, and that may sit for years before a knowledgable reader picks it up.
The energy and altruism of the crowd can just as easily be harnessed for a Book_burning (T-H-L) or a Witch-hunt (T-H-L) or Total_war (T-H-L).Anthonyhcole wrote:Thanks to the selfless diligence of Recent changes:Medicine patrollers, most egregious stuff gets reverted within a couple of hours. Not all of course, and that may sit for years before a knowledgable reader picks it up. At least as far as Wikipedia medical content goes, the information is totally unreliable but surprisingly accurate (paraphrasing Freeman Dyson on Wikipedia).Poetlister wrote:I can certainly assure Anthony that Wikipedia is full of articles that at one time had no serious errors and now they do. I can't immediately point to any medical ones, but it is inconceivable that medicine is somehow exempt. I suppose that if he has people watching al the medical articles around the clock, he can ensure that no error survives for long, but by bad luck someone might look at an article during the half hour or so before the correction is made.
It would be possible to harness the energy and altruism of the crowd while ensuring what we publish is reliable, though.
So we have at least two "veteran medical editors", and 500 other expert "medical editors", keeping watch over the 20,000 Wikipedia medical articles.WikiProject Medicine, a loose coalition of 500 volunteer editors, most with some level of medical or pharmaceutical expertise, has set out to try to correct some of the problems with health-related content on English Wikipedia. The group, including experienced medical editors, is aware of Wikipedia's shortcomings. Veteran Wikipedian Anthony Cole is a participant in the group and says, "We are very conscious of our responsibility at or near the top of every search-engine result." [...] Cole is not overly concerned that pharma will overrun Wikipedia with information that smacks of self-promotion. [...] "My perception, and that of at least one other veteran medical editor, is that, so far, the companies have been no problem at all to us," says Cole.
So it seems that medical editing is not just a hobby for amateurs.Our MDs, PhDs, and board-certified editors in the life sciences offer medical editing and rewriting services as well as proofreading and copyediting of medical and scientific manuscripts, book-length projects, CME materials, grant applications, dissertations, theses, and other technical documents in most disciplines of biology, biomedicine, and biotechnology.
May I presume that one third of these qualified medical editors are to be found in WikiProject Medicine, "a loose coalition of 500 volunteer editors, most with some level of medical or pharmaceutical expertise"?The World Association of Medical Editors or WAME (pronounced “whammy”) is a nonprofit voluntary association of editors of peer-reviewed medical journals from countries throughout the world. It was established in 1995.[1] As of April 30, 2008, WAME had more than 1500 members representing more than 965 journals from 92 countries.
The selfless diligence of who? Of the 500 qualified medical editors claimed by WikiProject Medicine? Are qualified people really attending to this: Special:RecentChangesLinked/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Lists_of_pages/Articles (T-H-L)?Thanks to the selfless diligence of Recent changes:Medicine patrollers, most egregious stuff gets reverted within a couple of hours.
I have no medical or editing qualifications. I used the term "medical editor" in that conversation in reference to people who regularly edit Wikipedia's medical content, and the journalist knew what I meant. Out of that context, I agree, it sounds weird and even deceitful. I'll address your other very reasonable points later, when I've had some sleep.Mancunium wrote:The energy and altruism of the crowd can just as easily be harnessed for a Book_burning (T-H-L) or a Witch-hunt (T-H-L) or Total_war (T-H-L).Anthonyhcole wrote:Thanks to the selfless diligence of Recent changes:Medicine patrollers, most egregious stuff gets reverted within a couple of hours. Not all of course, and that may sit for years before a knowledgable reader picks it up. At least as far as Wikipedia medical content goes, the information is totally unreliable but surprisingly accurate (paraphrasing Freeman Dyson on Wikipedia).Poetlister wrote:I can certainly assure Anthony that Wikipedia is full of articles that at one time had no serious errors and now they do. I can't immediately point to any medical ones, but it is inconceivable that medicine is somehow exempt. I suppose that if he has people watching al the medical articles around the clock, he can ensure that no error survives for long, but by bad luck someone might look at an article during the half hour or so before the correction is made.
It would be possible to harness the energy and altruism of the crowd while ensuring what we publish is reliable, though.
But we are considering the information contained in this article:
Fixing Wikipedia
PharmExec, 19 April 2014 linkSo we have at least two "veteran medical editors", and 500 other expert "medical editors", keeping watch over the 20,000 Wikipedia medical articles.WikiProject Medicine, a loose coalition of 500 volunteer editors, most with some level of medical or pharmaceutical expertise, has set out to try to correct some of the problems with health-related content on English Wikipedia. The group, including experienced medical editors, is aware of Wikipedia's shortcomings. Veteran Wikipedian Anthony Cole is a participant in the group and says, "We are very conscious of our responsibility at or near the top of every search-engine result." [...] Cole is not overly concerned that pharma will overrun Wikipedia with information that smacks of self-promotion. [...] "My perception, and that of at least one other veteran medical editor, is that, so far, the companies have been no problem at all to us," says Cole.
"Medical Editor" is a professional designation. The first Google result for the term is The Medical Editor linkSo it seems that medical editing is not just a hobby for amateurs.Our MDs, PhDs, and board-certified editors in the life sciences offer medical editing and rewriting services as well as proofreading and copyediting of medical and scientific manuscripts, book-length projects, CME materials, grant applications, dissertations, theses, and other technical documents in most disciplines of biology, biomedicine, and biotechnology.
Post-graduate certifications in medical editing are granted by universities, e.g. Medical Writing and Editing, University of Chicago: link;
one may also be certified by the American Medical Writers Association: link.
There is a World_Association_of_Medical_Editors (T-H-L)May I presume that one third of these qualified medical editors are to be found in WikiProject Medicine, "a loose coalition of 500 volunteer editors, most with some level of medical or pharmaceutical expertise"?The World Association of Medical Editors or WAME (pronounced “whammy”) is a nonprofit voluntary association of editors of peer-reviewed medical journals from countries throughout the world. It was established in 1995.[1] As of April 30, 2008, WAME had more than 1500 members representing more than 965 journals from 92 countries.The selfless diligence of who? Of the 500 qualified medical editors claimed by WikiProject Medicine? Are qualified people really attending to this: Special:RecentChangesLinked/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Lists_of_pages/Articles (T-H-L)?Thanks to the selfless diligence of Recent changes:Medicine patrollers, most egregious stuff gets reverted within a couple of hours.
Since almost all of them prefer to be anonymous, we may never know.
Tony, do you have something blocking your ears?Anthonyhcole wrote:Meanwhile, do you have a strategy to get the top Google result for medical terms reliable and readable?
No. I use one of these in the shower.They're awesomethekohser wrote:Tony, do you have something blocking your ears?
The first link, Medline Plus, has, I think, 900 articles. Rochester Uni encyclopedia lists 550. There's unlikely to be overlap. Then there's Mayo Clinic. Mmm. enWP has 30,000 articles tagged "of interest to WikiProject Medicine." But you've prompted me to examine some assumptions.thekohser wrote:I can't believe you have the gall to ask such a question!
