User:Niels Olson
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If you need to contact me, I recommend email: niels.olson at gmail.com.
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Hello, I'm a medical student at Tulane. Most of my contributions are for things we're supposed to learn about, but aren't in the books, and then I find they're also not in Wikipedia. From time to time I start new articles on rare diseases. These may start with as little as the Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM) citation. Admins, please do not delete them! They're rare diseases. How many patients are going to even know what OMIM is, let alone make heads or tails of OMIM records? There are long standing traditions to take care of information, drugs, etc, that are for rare diseases, because it's understood that it takes a long time for enough people to actually be affected to aggregate the information, though the prognoses are typically a young, horrible death. It's not like diabetes mellitus, where millions upon millions of people have it at any given moment. The people, especially parents and little kids, who have these diseases, I'm sure, would appreciate more information than less. These tiny starter articles shouldn't be deleted simply because they appeared in the stack of "new" articles.
I can only imagine the edits coming into Wikipedia must be like wheat from a grain elevator pouring into an infinitely huge pile. The admins have perched themselves at the tip of the growing pile, and they monitor, robotically or otherwise, every edit, especially every new article. However, the phenomenon of admins sitting atop the stack of new articles and swiping out anything that doesn't meet rather 'stupid' criteria is obviously very efficient. I say 'stupid' in the best sense, like the internet itself is robust because it's stupid. However, it strikes me as a crushing act of negligence when it comes to rare diseases. These are rare diseases, not rare stamps. And they're rare! There are 3.3 billion base pairs in the human genome, and about 3% of that is genes. Something like 30,000 genes. And we only know what about 25% of those genes do. The statistics for infectious diseases are similarly staggering. We got a long way to go, and we're in the long tail of the information, but this is where, bit by bit, we're learning about the genes and disease processes. It takes a long time to develop information about these diseases, and there's a lot of them. Probably more diseases than there are genes and microbes. It takes a really long time to develop information about all of them. And it takes a LOT of expertise to know anything about them. So the nature of the content creates an extraordinarily high barrier to entry to begin with, which makes it staggeringly difficult to develop content, let alone having to deal with admins who bite the newcomers. If you want to appreciate the barrier to entry, it's not far from Seth Finkelstein's problems with censorware. If you can appreciate his struggles, please, appreciate the people working on rare diseases. The wiki tradition is to not delete content, even from newbies. It's content. And this content has cost countless centuries of scientific education and an uncountable number of patients' lives. Bytes are cheap.
More about me and my narcisstic contributions to the Internet are available from my homepage.
