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A few days after my post regarding the confusion of the wiki editorial system, comes this news:

 The Medpedia Project today announced the formation of the world’s largest collaborative online encyclopedia of medicine called Medpedia. Physicians, medical schools, hospitals, health organizations and public health professionals are now volunteering to collaboratively build the most comprehensive medical clearinghouse in the world for information about health, medicine and the body. This free public site will officially launch at the end of 2008, and a preview site becomes available today at www.medpedia.com.

Harvard Medical School, Stanford School of Medicine, the University of California Berkeley School of Public Health, the University of Michigan Medical School and dozens of health organizations around the world are contributing to The Medpedia Project in various ways. Many organizations will contribute seed content free of copyright restrictions. Harvard Medical School will publish content to uneditable areas that members of their faculty have created as part of a medical school wide effort. Others organizations, such as University of Michigan Medical School will encourage members of their faculty to edit Medpedia as individuals.

In a perfect application of my previous observation about the limitations of wikipedia — namely, the core audience is the juncture of encyclopedia geeks, bloggers, and open-source Web fans — comes the news that accredited medical authorities will begin to collaborate on a free project to provide health information to the world.

The ambitious goals of this project are:

1. To unseat WebMD as the premier provider of online health content

2. To position the affliated institution as knowledge leaders (Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley Public Health, U of M)

3. To add more to-do’s for young, upstart medical residents in off-hours

It’s the further commoditization of healthcare information into brands — but now hospital brands!   And, if it intends to be as consumer friendly as it sounds, will pose a threat to all online and offline content providers. 

Medpedia is perhaps the best example of a human SETI@home project: find extra cycles (students) and employ them to process a large amount of focused data.  That’ll keep them from talking bad about professors on Facebook!

Craig Stoltz from the Health Care Blog writes:

There are many good reasons to deplore Wikipedia, not the least of which is its authors’ cultish smuggery about the righteousness of their cause and the rightness of their content.

Of course there is also its internecine complexity of processes. The documentation tracing the petty bitchery about an entry is often longer than the entry that is produced. The international collectivist negotiation over matters of “fact” is beginning to remind me of the United Nations, but without the fancy New York headquarters.

A brief diversion from usual topics, but I too have been listening to the “wisdom of crowds” nonsense for long enough.

Wikipedia is great, but it has a limited ability to do a few things well: reign in pop culture to a reasonable degree and make anyone with an iPhone at a cocktail party the final arbiter on any topic.  (Full admission: I am an iPhone user.)

But even their model has broken down.  To wit, there is a long and extensive series of gatekeepers who review articles and decide if they are worth keeping.  As Craig writes, much of this reasoning is circumspect, and now, Wikipedia is going to make it even harder to publish on their site.

What you talking ’bout, Wikipedia?

As much as they might downplay it, there is still a chain of human command laboring behind the curtains of Wiki.   The crowd wisdom has little to do with the success of wikipedia; what’s truly amazing thing is that by appealing to basic emotions of all humankind — the need for fame, the need to judge others — most of these writers and editors do work for free.

You could get the same results if you dumped a series of photos, videos, ancient texts, etc. that were all authored by a small group and set the wiki admins loose on organizing it.   See Amazon.com and their wishlist series – it’s a neat way for me to bring order to a disordered set of data; Amazon provides an incentive for me to do so –small amounts of fame and the hope that someone might buy me a gift. 

I’m curious, didn’t we use to call this job “being a librarian?”

What I find increasingly strange about the Wiki-universe is how distrustful it is of its own fans.   There is now a sniff-sniff, Wikipedia is too good for that kind of attitude regarding certain types of content.   Articles that are not “relevant” or “news-worthy” — again, decided by the overly-invested, unpaid admins – are deleted.  So what if the article on historical Christian hairstyles wasn’t good enough to make the grade, isn’t the point that Wikipedia has no limits — that because it is the very antithesis of an encyclopedia set, which once bound and printed is limited — so it should be able to encompass all kinds of knowledge, however random?

But here’s the last laugh.  Wikipedia is now authoring an encyclopedia.  (One wonders, Will they e-mail out updates?  Will digital ink self-correct?) 

Such a move is proof that the printed word — the book that you can hold in your warm, Kindle-less hand — is still something the crowd aspires to, whether ’tis wise for the Wiki franchise or not.