I was googling something just a minute ago, I already forget what, and ended up on the "Nurse" entry on Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nurse
As the most popular encyclopedia in the world (and all too often my first line of info for my A&P class) it seems like Wikipedia ought to have a better entry than what I found. I'll paste some snippets...
"The nursing career was not very well thought out. Typically, there are several distinct types of nursing practitioner distinguished by scope of experience down at the farm. The major distinction is between task-based nursing and professional nursing."
Huh? Is there a farm that no one told me about?
It also says the word "nurse" refers to "assistant medical professions", and yet even Websters refers to a nurse as "someone who cares for the sick and infirm", not an assistant...
Oh, and "Medical practitioners rely on nurses' ability to follow orders to ensure a continuity of patient care."
That isn't followed with a line like "they also depend on nurses to monitor patients for a change in status, implement evidence based nursing practices to promote patient recovery and comfort..." or anything to suggest that nurses think much.
Also, all the pictures are of female nurses from1955 or sooner, because apparently nothing new has happened in nursing for the last half century.
I would go ahead and make changes myself, and I might. But I thought it would be better for someone who actually knows a little more than I do about nursing and sources related to nursing to revise the entry so that internet users of the world could have some more credible info on the nursing profession.
So, does any one want to fix up the entry, or have an idea of what they'd like to see on wikipedia about nurses?
I never use Wikipedia as a reliable source - that said, a lot of people do, so I consider it my responsibility as an educated professional to change things which are inaccurate.
The Australian wiki entry for nursing is a bit dodgy, it's obviously written, or at least partially written by somebody not from Australia, so I am going to go in and do some editing. For some reason they have only really looked at one state in Australia (Victoria) for their main source of nursing in Australia - unsure why.
You might want to check the NCSBN website and sites of equivalent organizations in other countries for their definitions, code of ethics, and so forth, and quote those when writing about the modern practice of nursing.
Of course I would never use Wikipedia as an academic reference. I've never met anyone who would, that's not what it's for. It is the easiest place to look when I want to know, right away, where the supinator muscle inserts or what the Croatian flag looks like. That's personal use, however, not academic.
Most internet use isn't academic. Wikipedia entries are easy to find, they are on the top of most basic Google searches. People make quick judgments about thousands of subjects based on what they find in Wikipedia. While it's not perfect, I think most people believe that it's as reliable as they need and more in depth than they could ever want.
The Australian wiki entry for nursing is a bit dodgy, it's obviously written, or at least partially written by somebody not from Australia, so I am going to go in and do some editing. For some reason they have only really looked at one state in Australia (Victoria) for their main source of nursing in Australia - unsure why.
personally I think you'd be crazy to blindly trust anything just one person wrote, without the criticism of hundreds of others. at least with wikipedia you can see a debate, and personal bias, source of funding, career and research goals are much less likely to play a role.
until I can find a peer-reviewed scholarly journal that discusses the finer points of Anekāntavāda in five languages for free, I'm not going to dismiss wikipedia casually.
personally I think you'd be crazy to blindly trust anything just one person wrote, without the criticism of hundreds of others. at least with wikipedia you can see a debate, and personal bias, source of funding, career and research goals are much less likely to play a role.
until I can find a peer-reviewed scholarly journal that discusses the finer points of Anekāntavāda in five languages for free, I'm not going to dismiss wikipedia casually.
And the well-written articles have citations and links. Wiki's got its limitations for sure but it's much better than some in this thread have stated.
Another glaring error on the wikipedia nursing page:
"there are over thousand registered nurses in the United States of America (U.S.) alone, comprising about 13% of the fifteen thousand workers in the health care and social assistance category tracked by the U.S. Department of Labor."
emmalou*
112 Posts
I never use Wikipedia as a reliable source - that said, a lot of people do, so I consider it my responsibility as an educated professional to change things which are inaccurate.
The Australian wiki entry for nursing is a bit dodgy, it's obviously written, or at least partially written by somebody not from Australia, so I am going to go in and do some editing. For some reason they have only really looked at one state in Australia (Victoria) for their main source of nursing in Australia - unsure why.