I just commented on knol: content w/out context, collaboration, capital, or coruscation, here are my thoughts regarding health issues in both Wikipedia and Knol.
I believe that health knowledge is too important to be left under the sole control of the pharmaceutical industry and their so-called experts. Mainstream medicine has a long history of ignorance, failures, lies, and financially-driven interests.
Most oncologists continue to deny the role of the immune system in fighting cancer thirty years after the discovery of Natural Killer (NK) cells in the 1970s. This denial prevents most oncologists from recommending better nutrition and other environmental improvements after chemotherapy that could prevent the mutation of low-stage cancers into hopelessly deadly metastatic cancers.
There are a large number of diseases uncured, some of which are frighteningly increasing in rate such as allergies and cancers. Current medical practices are failing to not only cure these but also to prevent their progression.
After all, health is still a work in progress with more open questions than definitive answers. People need to have access to all available knowledge and opinions, because health is also a matter of opinion when facing a deadly disease for which conventional medicine offers you no hope (Metastatic cancers, Alzheimer, ...).
Wikipedia Neutral Point Of View (NPOV) policy requires that all opinions be expressed as opinions and no bias towards a subset of opinions. This is going in the right direction and enables more knowledge about any subject to be represented in a single location. I don't see how Knol will ever be able to address this issue.
That said Wikipedia is far from perfect and still biased indirectly due to the pressure of notability guidelines. These guidelines require that any knowledge provided comes from so-called reliable sources, which means mainstream media, which is in turn controlled by financial interests which means advertising and in the end the pharmaceutical industry as far as health is concerned. This prevents the inclusion of knowledge and opinions coming from other cultures and experiences that are not red-stamped by the FDA or other well-founded research lobbied by the pharmaceutical industry and other financial concerns (including the billion dollars supplements industry which have been proven to have no effect in many cases). I don't understand why Wikipedia, which is a pure product of the Internet has such disregard for internet-borne content. Unless this is the result of a kind father-son complex.
I believe that all opinions need to be represented especially in the cases where definitive cures to deadly diseases do not exist. These opinions need to be clearly represented as such to enable readers to understand quickly the origin of such research, yet enabling the centralization of such knowledge and research. This could easily be stated under a specific section untitled 'Controversial Opinions'.
What also needs to be acknowledged is that new generation, internet-age, readers know that knowledge cannot be 100% trusted and that skepticism is the rule rather than the exception. They know this thanks to the widespread dissemination internet scams, spam, viruses, and other lunatic opinions now available. They also have been able to learn that so-called mainstream media is nothing more than opinions.
What is changing with the Internet is not just what is available as units of knowledge but the trust that people now put in all past, present and future knowledge. The result is higher scrutiny and better ability to make personal choices. Both Knol and Wikipedia need to understand this or the void will be filled by new venue.
Other Wikipedia-related posts:
Who are the customers of Wikipedia?
Where do people find the time to contribute to Wikipedia and Open-Source?
Comments [0]