Comment by jebus989 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jebus989 | Hacker News Reader

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> Wikipedia creates an enormous barrier to better information due to its size and scope, and its co-dependent relationship with Google.

Too silly to address.

> Wikipedia's medical information is unreliable and dangerous.

Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia not a DIY medical textbook. If you see dangerous information please feel free to edit it out — Wikipedia emphatically does not give medical advice (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Medical_disclaimer).

> The wiki layout is useless for certain content types, such as video.

New-ish media viewer allows video playback fullscreen or inline, it's no youtube but unclear in which way you consider this useless.

> So giving free access to Wikipedia, over other sites is not actually in the public good at all. The answer is more competition.

Firstly Wikipedia Zero does not preclude, and indeed hasn't precluded, Facebook zero etc. Regarding competition, you know Wikipedia is CC-BY-SA right? You and everyone else has a right to fork the entire project, along with the mediawiki software...

>Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia not a DIY medical textbook. Wikipedia emphatically does not give medical advice.

That disclaimer (hidden in the terms and conditions section) does not change the fact that many people do use Wikipedia for medical information. Each page that contains medical content should have its own disclaimer stating that the information contained in it has not been checked by doctors for accuracy and could have been changed by anyone at any time and could be incorrect. As this article points out [1]:

They discovered that 90% of the entries made statements that contradicted latest medical research. Lead author Dr Robert Hasty, of the Wallace School of Osteopathic Medicine in North Carolina, said: "While Wikipedia is a convenient tool for conducting research, from a public health standpoint patients should not use it as a primary resource because those articles do not go through the same peer-review process as medical journals."

>If you see dangerous information please feel free to edit it out

But how would I know if it's dangerous? I'm not a doctor. Your comment encapsulates the problem. You are asking me, a non-trained person, to make medical judgments on behalf of others.

When Google chooses Wikipedia pages to be the top result for medical queries, instead of peer-reviewed information then that is an enormous barrier to entry.

[1]http://www.bbc.com/news/health-27586356

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