Perhaps Brain Surgeons Do Use Wikipedia...
from the brain-surgery? dept
I have a good friend who's a surgeon at a big, well-known hospital. Not so long ago, he told me that he'd often use Google to look up details on a surgery he was about to perform, as it was often a great way to remind him of certain things, or even to reacquaint himself with a few important points for the surgery. He thought it was silly that doctors bashed such things, as it wasn't like all of his medical training and surgical experience and knowledge went out the window by reading up on things online. It reminded me of one of the typical complaints against Wikipedia: that you wouldn't want your brain surgery conducted by the crowd reading Wikipedia, but by a surgeon trained at a medical school. That, of course is a silly strawman, since (a) you wouldn't want someone to conduct brain surgery if they learned about it solely from any written source, rather than going to medical school and (b) it assumed that of all the people looking at and editing Wikipedia, none of them were brain surgeons themselves.I'm thinking of this, as I see this story noting that 50% of doctors admit to doing research on Wikipedia. I'd guess a few of them are even brain surgeons. So can we get rid of this stupid claim that Wikipedia isn't trustworthy? The studies mentioned in the article found that medical info on Wikipedia has a very high level of accuracy. No, no one's learning brain surgery from Wikipedia, but to pretend its not a useful resource among many others is simply ignoring reality.
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Filed Under: brain surgery, doctors, wikipedia
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Re:
The great thing about Wikipedia is its dedicated following of hundreds of people who will go out of their way to check what people have put up.
It's a vary good place to go to settle drunken bets.
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Especially if you changed the article just before making the wager.
But yeah, criticims of wikipedia are generally idiotic, as if just about any other source doesn't have its own inaccuracies. In my opinion, this is actually one of its greatest strengths; people know that the info may not be accurate, so they take it with a grain of salt. Other sources claim to be trustworthy, even if they are not or portray a very skewed view of an issue. If people read everything with the same mindset they read Wikipedia, we'd be a much more intelligent society.
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Trustworthy?
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Re: Trustworthy?
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Wikipedia accuracay
It is at its worst in areas of controversy that are more accessible to the general public.
As a University Lecturer in Computer Science I am quite happy to send students there as a reference in preference to many textbooks. In these areas it has the advantage of being reviewed and edited by many hands.
I would guess it is the same for brain surgery - if you aren't a brain surgeon you won't know enough to make an even halfway plausible post there.
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Re: Wikipedia accuracay
Right, because ALL people with technical backgrounds are inherently trustworthy and would never possibly get a fact wrong. Give me a break.
Some of them can't even spell properly, even as simple a word as "accuracy."
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Re: Re: Wikipedia accuracay
For example, I would not trust my brother to write his own resume becuase he struggles with writing the english language. But if I need some work done on high power electrical equipment, or some power poles climbed and hardware replaced, well then I'm calling him. And by the way, they have to have a working knowledge of high level math to intimatly understand what is going to happen if the cross A with C. And not just that it may be something bad.
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Re: Re: Re: Wikipedia accuracay
Bunk. While I suppose they may exist, I've never known a lineman with a "working knowledge of high level math". It certainly isn't required.
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Re: Wikipedia accuracay
the problem arises in general knowledge topics that get lots of traffic from people who don't have any expertise in the field. there are idiots who add/edit things based on total hearsay ("my friend said that if you're driving 20 mph over the speed limit, and 3 other cars are also driving at the same speed as you, you can't get a ticket"), political wanks, and then there are even bigger dumbasses who edit real world topics based on "physics education" they obtained from silicon valley and hollywood.
the articles on firearms/wars are the best because you get the anti-gun political nutjobs/pacifists trying to villify guns/wars, the clueless moviegoers and gamers trying to look cool talking about head shots and sniper kills in some specific war, and then the rare guys who actually know something ... pointing out that the guns in the game weren't even invented at the time of that war, and that barrel shrouds and free float tubes don't conceal the gun better, or give it more ammo, or make it shoot faster, or make it shoot farther.
moral of the story: the article on pantothenic acid is probably a lot more accurate than the articles on abortion, copyright, or assault rifle.
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Re: Wikipedia accuracay
Huh? The information on WP is supposed to all come from other, authoritative sources. Even if you have a technical background in some subject, you aren't supposed to post your own knowledge there directly. That's known as "original research" and is prohibited. That applies even If you are an world renowned authority on some subject. Instead, you are supposed to get a respected publication to publish your information. If they do, then that information can be brought into Wikipedia using that source as a citation.
In these areas it has the advantage of being reviewed and edited by many hands.
Yes, but be wary of any information that someone may have slipped in that isn't backed up by a valid reference.
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I presume that your friend the brain surgeon uses it to twig his memory, in which case his extensive education qualifies as a corroborating source, so that doesn't strike me as inherently problematic. But Chronno, if you see fewer inaccuracies in Wikipedia than you do in (admittedly inaccuracy-ridden) mainstream news sources, you're not looking at Wikipedia with a sufficiently critical eye.
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In reality, much of the news is assembled from agency dispatches processed by interns or young inexperienced journalists. Journalists may be required to cover many topics, so a single journalist may cover "the reliability of Wikipedia" one day, and something totally different the other day.
The amount of errors in science-related articles is staggering, with mistakes that would not be tolerated in highschool.
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Bit of a leap
Possibly, but the things they're checking on WikiP are unlikely to be brain-surgery-specific stuff, given the low proportion of informed contributers, which make that statement true, but misleading.
If I want to know what the capitol of Iceland is, I pretty much trust WikiP. If I want to know what is going on with Kaupthing Bank, at least at the moment, I'm guessing that it's in flux, to put it kindly.
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There might be. Or there might be zero. Or there might be twenty, all of which are fansites maintained by fourteen year olds. Or they might be NASA-affiliated, but the sources might not reflect the content that they're nominally supporting.
Wikipedia is not reliable. But "not reliable" is not the same thing as "useless", in most contexts.
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The point is, readers should recognize that all sources are potentially untrue. Wikipedia has the advantage of being constantly reviewed by thousands of editors and being immediately enhanced with new information. With so many editors, it is also generally much deeper and well-rounded, being less prone to the biases of individual writers. Even most of the intentional vandalism is readily apparent as false.
I think that to take Wikipedia as a whole as less "reliable" than less open sources is to give to much credit to the latter.
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wiki
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There might be. Or there might be zero. Or there might be twenty, all of which are fansites maintained by fourteen year olds. Or they might be NASA-affiliated, but the sources might not reflect the content that they're nominally supporting.
Wikipedia is not reliable....
CAN YOU READ? I repeat: Can you read? The point of my post (and this blog post)was to assert that a statement such as "wikipedia is unreliable" or "wikipedia is reliable" are illogical. Since any given Wikipedia article, like any given Encylopedia article, may have many sources, or few, as you point out, each article must be judged on it's own merits. The best that can be said is that "Wikipedia CAN be reliable" as a source, since it is, AGAIN (CAN YOU READ?!)multiple sources. Also for many subjects, wikipedia is FACTUALLY proveable to be a reliable source. Then again my suspicion is that you're just trolling in which case, kindly STFU.
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Plus, if you've ever had a doctor come in and listen to your symptoms and then leave and come back and give you a diagnosis (or possibilities), then there's a good chance they looked something up. Yes, even in the days before the interpipes. They would go look stuff up in their medical books.
What I do expect from doctors is for them to have the training to diagnose a problem. When I look symptoms up on WebMD, sometimes I get back hundreds of possibilities. Doctors' knowledge and experience should help them to narrow that list down.
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As mentioned above, historical, we checked reference books, which are usually 5 to 10 years behind current practice due to the time it takes to publish. Journals are more up to date, but have not been as easily searched and read. May doctors would tear our interesting articles to file them in a cabinet for "easy" reference, but the filing system was frequently inadequate.
Now with Google we can search many more journals than before. The only problem is DRM which sometimes prevents us from reading what appears to be the prefect article for a particular case, but all we get is the abstract. The rest is locked behind a pay wall.
Also as mentioned above Wikipedia is a great starting point for some of the less common esoteric diagnoses and to refresh ones memory.
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Only when you type in all caps.
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Bashing Wikipedia is popular in certain circles -
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