QUOTE(Newsfeed @ Thu 24th July 2008, 9:30pm)
•Medical Schools Start Wikipedia Version, Google Wiki Goes Live
AHN -5 hours ago
Menlo Park, CA (AHN) - Google Inc. and four medical schools vie for a share of Wikipedia's patron base with the launch of their respective versions of the ...View the articleWell, there's nothing "live" about it, yet. They're still collecting SME accreditations (starting yesterday) and doing nothing at all so far.
This is Medpedia, which according to its FAQ wants to be all things to all people, from a wikified WebMD for people who have a high school education, to a Wikified COCHRANE Review for professionals trying to think their way past journal articles and pharma ads, to a wikified
Nature Medicine for biomedical researchers trying to develop ideas. And all with some medical Wikis that have a few extra TALK pages-- one for debate, one for "technical stuff" (
gee, how technical can this be?), and one that seems to serve as a respository for copyrighted or otherwise unchangable reference materials so it can be referenced if it disappears off the server(s) elsewhere. There are also supposed to be "scrub room" pages where crap that comes in from other sources like drugmakers can be deloused and sanitized before being used.
It's spun to be highly credentialized and SME based, but nobody gets paid nada. Seed money comes from Ooga Labs, an SF company that gets money from somewhere for humanitarian medical purposes and bills themselves as a "technology greenhouse." By which language I understand that they're proposing to keep the adsense revenue from this stuff that the drug companies provide and the doctors write.
Some capitalists somewhere looking to make a few bucks from a doctors' version of Memory Alpha hosted on a Wikia which doesn't pay them.
We'll see. It doesn't actually launch for a couple of months. I predict something like no activity, followed by TALK page squeeling that sounds like it came out of an episode of HOUSE.
Then somebody's going to have to figure out who wins in a giant battle of the egos. Back to administration. Since no money is involved, perhaps the fights will be even nastier (nod to Henry Kissinger about smaller stakes and meaner people in "pure" academia).