User:Mike Serfas

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Contents

[edit] Welcome

[edit] My interest in Wikipedia

  • Wikipedia becomes more impressive all the time. Once it was a free alternative to commercial encyclopedias - now it surpasses them in its scope, depth, and currency. For any who have doubts about how truly comprehensive the collection has become, try editing the most obscure articles requested in WP:AR1 - as often as not you will find an entry under a different name that merely needs a redirect. In politics and current events, Wikipedia editors often succeed, where for decades American journalists have usually failed, to pull together all of the information available into a consistent, balanced, and understandable form that allows people to make informed decisions.
  • Since I often take interest in obscure topics, Wikipedia can work like a notepad for storing interesting information, but one where I can hope that my notes will continue to expand on themselves (in the hands of capable editors) - and at worst there's always the History.
  • The site is a field study in the art of dialectic, a social experiment in mass collaboration. The strengths and weaknesses of interactive writing are recorded for all to interpret; policies can be tested and their impact determined.
  • Editing the site is an opportunity to learn the tools and mores of a new kind of Internet communications protocol. Although Wikis look like other web sites, their public nature makes them truly a new type of forum, as fundamental as e-mail, Web, Usenet, and chat formats. I see great potential for Wikis in classroom exercises, the writing of large scientific articles with many authors, interactive fiction writing, and many other applications.

[edit] Editing style

  • The edits I've been making have usually been limited in scope, tidbits rather than articles. This reflects that often I go to Wikipedia during breaks from other writing, or to look up a particular topic from curiosity. Also, in many cases I've accessed from places where I don't have ready access to a library, so I can only elaborate so far based on public resources.
  • Often I start off wondering about some small point, so I look it up on Wikipedia. Amazingly often, even the most specialized or obscure information has been put up here already. But when it isn't I like to come back after I've found the answer and add it. (the actual composition of the mithridatium, for example)
  • The goal of Wikipedia should be to have fun and look into anything you're curious about, rather than to adopt one topic as a professional responsibility. Unless someone invents an honest way to make money by editing Wikipedia, anyway.
  • (Despite that, I've recently been playing with an article that began as a "worst case" example with the notion of bringing it to a high level of quality - we'll see how that goes)

[edit] Crusades

Wikipedia offers the chance to promote worthy causes in a very persuasive way. That sounds contrary to the Wikipedia policy of neutrality, but it isn't. As a rule, opinions don't belong in a Wikipedia article - but the impartial facts that made those opinions do. Besides, you don't change people's minds with your opinions.

  • I created Template:Ancient anaesthesia-footer and edited several of the articles referenced in order to help dispel the popular belief that anaesthesia is a new invention, and people just "bit the bullet" and suffered in the past. In reality, before 1500 B.C. Africans were writing medical texts (e.g. Ebers Papyrus) and shipping opium across the Mediterranean. There's much to be added - the template as written barely scratches the surface. My hope is that if people learn the wide range of effective anaesthetics available in the past, they will have less patience for the widespread lack of access to anaesthesia in poor countries today.

[edit] Interests

  • My primary focus is on biological and biochemical questions, though the great pleasure of Wikipedia is to wander widely.
  • A particular interest of late has been to put up information concerning the history of medicine with the thought of its use for bioprospecting. Just because Aulus Cornelius Celsus wrote about therapeutic use of celery seeds in the first century A.D. doesn't mean that there wasn't a patent recently awarded for it. Some ideas go nowhere: Celsus described an antidote for lead poisoning that might conceivably work, but I think it relies on a component of plant cell walls to sop up the lead, so it probably only has a chance if given immediately after someone swallows a large quantity of the poison. But there's a huge amount of experience implicit in the ancient literature, and any single sentence might be a lead to some (to us) undiscovered therapy. Consider that people on either side of the Atlantic independently discovered the anaesthetic use of Datura flowers, willow bark, and reportedly even beaver testicles.
  • Of course, nothing's more fun to look into than a riddle. Some additions:
    • By what coincidence does the recently identified drug cyclopamine make animals look like the Cyclops? The answer is not known, but what is known is that Hippocrates was among those prescribing "white hellebore", Veratrum album, not far from the time and place where the one-eyed Cyclops gained its fame.
    • How did the tragic debacle of the TGN1412 trial occur? The amount of monoclonal antibody administered was 1/500 that required to affect a monkey - but the antibody was raised against the human peptide and was likely far more effective against it.
    • Opium poppies have been under cultivation for at least the past 5600 years, and were used to manufacture the drug during most of that time. For at least the past 3500 or so, opium was used as an anaesthetic in surgery, and was powerful enough to cause unconsciousness or death. So why isn't there any good evidence that opium was addictive before around 1700 A.D.? Speculation: artificial selection in India sometime around 1500 A.D. might have increased the addictive morphinan content, and decreased other compounds found in wild poppies reported to oppose addiction. Incidentally, many sources say that ancient physicians used wild poppies with no narcotic content at all, and although they were weaker they were credited as effective painkillers - a finding deserving further investigation.