[Cz-health-sci] [Cz-biology] Merck proposal

[Anthony Sebastian]

All,

The Merck Manual supplies seemingly authoritative articles, with many
assertions, but no source-citations.  Linking CZ articles to corresponding
Merck Manual articles implies a recommendation without disclaimer.  I would
vote against external links of that sort, even by Ph.D's/M.D.'s if they
receive pay from a for-profit organization.

Content, one thing; source-cited content another.  Especially about medical
conditions.

Anthony.Sebastian

P.S. CZ authors/editors might profit by consulting the Merck Manual, for
example, to see if they missed some potentially important aspect of a topic,
but then research that from primary sources or creditable secondary sources,
and put the source-citations in their article.


-----Original Message-----
From: cz-biology-bounces at mail.citizendium.org
[mailto:cz-biology-bounces at mail.citizendium.org] On Behalf Of Larry Sanger
Sent: Tuesday, October 30, 2007 12:45 PM
To: 'Biology Workgroup List'; cz-health-sci at mail.citizendium.org
Subject: [Cz-biology] Merck proposal

All,

The following is a proposal we received.  I have some comments after it.

========
First, let me applaud your effort to provide a wiki with content from expert
contributors. There is a great deal of information available free online,
though not all of it is reliable.

Second, I propose a collaboration between Citizendium and the Merck Manuals
department at Merck & Co., Inc. This department, of which I'm a staff member
(Executive Editor, Electronic Publications), publishes The Merck Manual, a
print and online textbook created by expert contributors.

We are prepared to place links in your External Links section of Citizendium
topics to related material in our online version of The Merck Manual. Two
examples:

Subject: Guillain Barre Syndrome. 
Your page: http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Guillain-Barre_syndrome 
The link in External Links would go to:
http://www.merck.com/mmpe/sec16/ch223/ch223d.html

Subject: Otitis Externa. 
Your page: http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Otitis_externa  
The link in External Links would go to:
http://www.merck.com/mmpe/sec08/ch088/ch088c.html

Unfortunately, we are not in a position to author material for you, but we'd
be delighted to add value to your pages with links to our material. We
invite you to visit The Manual at http://www.merck.com/mmpe/index.html to
determine for yourself whether links to this content is acceptable and
desirable. In a preliminary review, I found 40 to 50 Citizendium topics to
which we could contribute.

Please let me know if you are interested in such a collaboration.
========

I can say (publicly on this list) that this would be welcome to me.  Merck
has an excellent reputation, and it seems unlikely that there would be
anything in their manuals that we should not send users to.

More important, perhaps, is that this very small request (it's basically
just a request to add 50 links to CZ) might be the beginning of a useful
collaboration.

I'm inclined to say "yes," but I wanted to get your feedback first.

--Larry

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