1. There are hundreds of thousands of places where similar harm could be do--safe uses of a chemical, or the like. We could guard against it by using flagged revisions on these pages. 2. We need not give only the US dose. 3. Saying according to the official USDI, the usual does is " " is as safe as any quotation can possibly be. I am not aware of any litigation due to a mis=print in PubMedPlus or the similar. I recall one major correction in the print Merck a few editions back--they made it very prominent. An error in print is much more dangerous than online, because there is no way of ensuring that all copies get corrected. 4.Though we do not give medical advice, it is entirely appropriate to indicate where reliabler advice can be found. 5. How a substance is used is encyclopedic information. It's necessary to actually make use of our reference work. Example: A person will come across a newspaper article discussing an overdose & giving the amount. They will go to the encyclopedia article to put it in context.
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG On Sun, May 24, 2009 at 12:20 PM, Nathan <[email protected]> wrote: > It's a good guideline - there are few enough instances on Wikipedia where > simple vandalism can lead directly to serious physical harm, and this is > one. Statistics and reported numbers are vandalism targets throughout > Wikipedia every day, and dosage information would be a particularly popular > target. We could put the dosage information in templates, and protect the > templates, but that doesn't allay the range of other problems associated > with including such information. We have to ask ourselves why someone would > use Wikipedia to look up this sort of information - are those needs we want > to fulfill? > > It's also important to note that there are many other sources for this sort > of information for medical professionals. Institutional or office > subscriptions to electronic/online references like Micromedex are not > prohibitively expense, there are a number of free or cheap physical > reference books, and I even have a free and comprehensive reference on my > phone. > > Nathan > _______________________________________________ > WikiEN-l mailing list > [email protected] > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l > _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
