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too much comment spam, disabled comments until i can find the time to fix it. sorry! check back in a day or two if you want to comment

UPDATE: Comments are available again after much reconstructive surgery. (Note to Jay Allen, author of MT-Blacklist: the plug-in breaks with some weird international character sets.)

UPDATE II: oops, mt-commentz.cgi is not spelled mt-commentz.cti, now is it. Comments fixed. Please don't spam me, he said, knowing full well he would be inundated with a new wave of comment spam....

WikiNews? How about WikiHealth?

The community that brought us Wikipedia is considering a new, all-volunteer news service called Wikinews. The idea is that articles in Wikipedia tend to be highly compressed summaries of information, whereas articles in Wikinews would be able to go in-depth.

While I'm intrigued with the whole project and welcome something, anything that raises the collapsed bar of objective news reporting, Wikinews makes me wonder . . . what other pressing needs might be addressed by the Wikimedia movement?

How about public health? Imagine WikiHealth or WikiMed, an open, collaborative health database written by everyone in the world? If millions of people could contribute articles on health and well-being, diseases, treatments, symptoms, remedies, and personal experience with what worked and what didn't with prescriptions, would the world be better off? Are you currently happy with the state of medical knowledge on the web? If you or someone you know is suffering from some condition, and you type the name of the condition into Google, are you satisfied you're getting good results? In an age where, at least in the U.S., doctors are less and less likely to give you the time of day let alone spend time with you going into detail about everything there is to know about a condition, wouldn't it be useful if there were an online resource with a strict NPOV (neutral point of view) containing in-depth encyclopedia information about health-related subjects?

WikiHealth. WikiMed. (Don't bother, the domains are taken -- maybe they're hope!) But you get the idea: a worldwide open collaborative compendium of practical health and medical knowledge. Isn't it time such a service existed?