On 5/4/2010 5:16 PM, Yao Ziyuan wrote: > Thomas Dalton wrote: >>> >>> We definitely do not want to be giving medical advice to people. If >>> you get that wrong, people die. Medical advice should be got by going >>> to the doctors. Can you give another example of what your idea could > > Yes, medical troubleshooting is both extremely useful and extremely > sensitive, and that's why I said "Like Wikipedia, WikiTroubleshooting > should cite credible references." We could put a warning and a > disclaimer on every medical troubleshooting page telling the visitor > to check cited references and other sources before adopting any > advice.
A disclaimer would probably shield us from lawsuits, but there would still be a lot of ethical issues in "the free medical advice anyone can edit" (since we know most people won't check sources, especially print sources). Setting aside the issues of vandalism, even a good intentioned edit by someone who doesn't have adequate medical training could cause problems if they misread a source or use a source that isn't as reliable as they think. A lot higher standard for "reliable" would be needed for something like that. > How can a wiki implement a troubleshooting wizard? A wizard is a set > of pages. Each page assumes you have specified certain symptoms (e.g. > symptom1, symptom3, symptom5) of your problem and asks you a question > to specify a new symptom (e.g. symptom10); then it redirects you to a > next page that assumes you have specified symptoms 1, 3, 5 and 10 and > asks you yet another question or shows you possible causes and > solutions for the symptoms you have specified so far (1, 3, 5, 10). > > Therefore they're just static HTML pages where each page can link to > one or more "next pages". This is exactly what a wiki can do. The main issue I can see (other than that for medical advice and the like), is that troubleshooters don't lend themselves as well to incremental building. A Wikipedia article with only a few sentences or a Wikibook with only a couple chapters are still slightly useful. A troubleshooter with only a couple steps is much less so. Say you have a troubleshooter for a printer not working: 1. Is the printer plugged in and on? Yes 2. Is there paper loaded? Yes 3. Sorry, that's all this troubleshooter can help you with for now. -- Alex (wikipedia:en:User:Mr.Z-man) _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
