Negotiating distinctions between conventional and alternative medicine in the English- and French-language Wikipedias

随着17世纪和18世纪欧洲科学范式的出现，现代医学越来越多地与自然科学相结合。这一点在今天变得尤为明显，因为世界各地的专业医生在治疗患者时都被鼓励遵循“循证医学”的指导方针：医生接受培训，拒绝将主观直觉和个人经验作为做出正确决策的依据，而是被要求通过审查随机对照试验和经验性人群研究的已发表结果来寻找解决方案(所罗门2015)。与此同时，这种医学知识的生产和应用的科学方法试图使自己与现在被称为‘传统’、‘民间’、‘替代’或‘补充’医学(CAM)保持距离：CAM的批评者试图在传统医学的经验性客观性和可验证性与世界各地许多地方传统所固有的替代医学知识体系的未经检验和不可检验的‘江湖’之间保持明确的区别(Ramsey 1999)。这个项目表明，在线百科全书维基百科构成了在当代全球文化中定义、谈判和争论科学和非传统医学之间界限的最引人注目的环境之一。在冠状病毒大流行期间，很明显，世界各地的数百万互联网用户将维基百科的内容视为医疗信息的来源：仅在2020年3月，“冠状病毒疾病2019”页面的日平均浏览量就超过25万次。百科全书对医学主题的覆盖范围由一个专门的国际志愿编辑社区维持和扩大，他们中的许多人都是合格的卫生保健专业人员或医科学生(Beck 2013)。然而，维基百科并不要求投稿人拥有相关的资格或专业知识；相反，该平台允许任何访问该网站的访问者更改其内容。来自不同文化和政治背景的数以千计的互联网用户，其中一些是替代医学的实践者或倡导者，被聚集在一个单一的空间，并被要求就如何最好地代表当前医学知识的总和达成共识。该项目试图通过探索以下研究问题，对通过谈判达成共识的辩论发展新的见解：1)我们如何开发基于语料库的精辟方法和可视化工具，用来识别和跟踪重复出现在大量、不稳定和不同种类的真实在线数据中的话语模式和策略？2)有效性等概念是如何当维基百科用户讨论传统医学和替代疗法之间的区别时，安全和证据会被利用和质疑吗？3)这些争论在多大程度上以相似或不同的方式在英语和法语维基百科社区中展开？4)这些相似和不同之处可能告诉我们，世界不同地区的当地民众的文化、宗教、政治和意识形态敏感性和利益如何塑造了该网站与健康相关的内容的合作创作？通过这种分析，该项目试图为在线空间科学知识竞争的全球维度提供新的见解。通过在不同的受众中传播其研究结果，它希望提高科学界成员和普通公众对医学科学面临的挑战的性质、原因和影响的批判性认识。它还旨在促进对束缚科学、文化和政治的复杂联系的自我反思性考虑，以及对科学证据内在争议性的更微妙的理解。

Following the emergence of the scientific paradigm in Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries, modern medicine has increasingly aligned itself with the natural sciences. This has become especially evident today as professional medical practitioners throughout the world are encouraged to follow the guidelines of 'evidence-based medicine' when treating their patients: doctors are trained to reject subjective intuition and personal experience as grounds for proper decision making, and are asked instead to seek out solutions by reviewing the published findings of randomized controlled trials and empirical population-based studies (Solomon 2015). At the same time, this scientific approach to the production and application of medical knowledge seeks to distance itself from what is now termed 'traditional', 'folk', 'alternative' or 'complementary' medicine (CAM): critics of CAM attempt to maintain a firm distinction between the empirical objectivity and testability of conventional medicine, and the untested and untestable 'quackery' of alternative systems of medical knowledge indigenous to many local traditions around the world (Ramsey 1999).This project suggests that the online encyclopedia Wikipedia constitutes one of the most high-profile environments in which boundaries between scientific and non-conventional medicine are defined, negotiated and contested within contemporary global culture. During the coronavirus pandemic, it has become evident that many millions of internet users around the world look to Wikipedia's content as a source of medical information: in March 2020 alone, the 'Coronavirus Disease 2019' page received a daily average of over 250,000 views. The enyclopedia's coverage of medical topics is maintained and expanded by a dedicated international community of volunteer editors, many of whom are qualified health care professionals or medical students (Beck 2013). Wikipedia does not however require contributors to hold relevant qualifications or expertise; instead, the platform allows any visitor to the site to alter its content. Many thousands of internet users from a wide variety of cultural and political backgrounds, some of whom are practitioners or advocates of alternative medicine, are brought together in a single space and asked to achieve consensus on how best to represent the sum of current medical knowledge.This project seeks to develop novel insights into the debates through which this consensus is negotiated by exploring the following research questions:1) How might we develop incisive corpus-based methodologies and visualization tools with which to identify and trace discursive patterns and strategies that recur across large, unstable and heterogeneous collections of authentic online data?2) How are concepts such as efficacy, safety and evidence instrumentalised and contested when Wikipedians discuss distinctions between conventional medicine and alternative therapies?3) To what extent do these debates play out in similar or different ways in the English- and French-language Wikipedia communities?4) What might these similarities and differences tell us about how the cultural, religious, political and ideological sensitivities and interests of local populations in different parts of the world have shaped the collaborative creation of the site's health-related content?Through this analysis, the project seeks to contribute novel insight into the global dimensions of the contestation of scientific knowledge in online spaces. By disseminating its findings among diverse audiences, it hopes to raise critical awareness among members of both the scientific community and the general public regarding the nature, causes and implications of the challenges mounted against medical science. It further aims to promote self-reflexive consideration of the complex ties binding science, culture and politics, along with more nuanced understandings of the inherently contested nature of scientific evidence.