Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-10-10/In the news

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• On the one hand, Wikipedia is NOT designed to dispense medical advice, and should not be used in place of a trained medical professional. On the other hand, people use Wikipedia for self-diagnosis with alarming regularity. I believe that we should reach out to medical professionals and make every effort to bring our medical articles to the highest standard, so that they can continue to be used by the public (despite the fact that we're enabling a very unhealthy practice), while continuing our unwavering stance that Wikipedia does not dispense medical advice. Anything else would be a disservice, and possibally a danger, to our readers. Sven Manguard Wha? 10:32, 11 October 2011 (UTC)

  Aye. If people are poking themselves with the needles in our garbage, we can yell at them to stop all day long, but in the end it would be wise to sanitize the damned needles at some point. --Cryptic C62 · Talk 02:41, 12 October 2011 (UTC)

• Deliberately posting this late rather than make this a story in itself, but did we really need to repeat the more serious of the BLP violations? Acknowledge the specific case and coverage by all means, but I don't think we needed to dignify vandalism by repeating it. If mine is a minority view, we should at least in future preceed "allegations" with "false" or "unreferenced" as appropriate, to show that we are not giving credence to such claims. —WFC— 20:20, 15 October 2011 (UTC)

  I have to agree with the comment above - quoting BLP violations in the Signpost, even in a droll paraphrase as here, is a bad idea that can only encourage the vandals. It should simply say the article has been vandalised and leave it at that. In this case, the edit in question has been redacted from the article history under WP:RD2, which makes it seem especially odd to repeat the allegations here. Robofish (talk) 21:41, 15 October 2011 (UTC)