How were choices made about who is allowed to be an Editor?
Health and medical information is a special form of information because it has safety implications. Physicians and Ph.D.s in the biomedical fields have gone through extensive training and screening before receiving their degrees, and those degrees can serve as an efficient proxy for the Medpedia community to judge an Editor’s ability to contribute accurate and up to date information to the encyclopedia. Also significant is that the veracity of an applicant’s degree status is discoverable. It has been pointed out that not all physicians and Ph.D.s are fit to edit. The goal is that the transparency of the system will help reveal if there is an Editor who may not be qualified to continue editing even if they have a degree. On the other hand, it’s been pointed out that there may be people like nurses and expert patients who have valuable knowledge and could contribute an incredible amount. (Clearly there are many people who fall in that camp, and those people can thus create a profile on t
