Within
Normal Limits
of
Reason

"Chance is the very guide of life"

"In practical medicine the facts are far too few for them to enter into the calculus of probabilities... in applied medicine we are always concerned with the individual" -- S. D. Poisson

June 07, 2006

Crowdsourcing topics in medical research



Not much activity here at the Within Normal Limits of Reason blog lately. Looking over the traffic to this blog, I found that my short post on "post-hoc analysis" was getting a lot of referrals from the major search engines. I decided to port that into Wikipedia. Then, seeing the lack of entries on specific topics in medical research, I started to contribute to other articles... and now I'm hooked! I'm adding bits and pieces on entries related to medical research like randomized clinical trials and EBM, and initiating a couple of entries like post-randomized consent and interim analysis--mostly works in progress.

The quality of the Wikipedia entries are generally pretty good, and given the editorial oversight and the informal peer review by the entire English-reading internet there really isn't as much misinformation as one might fear. There is some link-spamming but that is generally obvious and unobtrusive. As Wired magazine put it, Wiki has really harnessed the power of crowdsourcing and proved it can work.

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