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Trust your doctor, not Wikipedia, say scientists

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An Encyclopedia Is Not A Medical Journal. Film at 11. (Score: 4, Interesting)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-05-29 16:26 (#1YP)

I read through most of that. They compare WP summaries with peer reviewed scientific journals, and find discrepancies.

What if they had compared against a print encyclopedia? Against a batch of NY Times articles? Against a stack of Dr. Oz books and videos? How would these other popular layperson resources stand up to this same scrutiny?

This seems like a stretch for attention on someone's part (the study authors or the subsequent publicizers).

Frankly I think Wikipedia does a great job of explaining most things, and completely unlike the other popular resources available to people (including most medical sites) WP cites the heck out of its claims right in the article.

Re: An Encyclopedia Is Not A Medical Journal. Film at 11. (Score: 1, Insightful)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-05-30 12:44 (#1Z4)

I remember the days when Wikipedia was "not to be used as a reference". People still pay lip service to this principle, but increasingly I see myself and others using Wikipedia as the first go-to-place to quickly get up to speed on something unfamiliar. One can progress to more "authoritative" texts, of course, but in so many cases the Wikipedia summaries are sufficient. I actually think the new mantra could be "you can use Wikipedia for a reference and you will only be penalized for doing so if it is shown that a given Wikipedia summary was wrong."

Moderation

Time Reason Points Voter
2014-05-30 14:46 Insightful +1 rocks@pipedot.org

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Marked as [Not Junk] by evilviper@pipedot.org on 2015-01-04 00:16