For traditional educational organizations, it is easy to create high quality information content but difficult to disseminate them to the right audience. For Wikipedia, it is easy to disseminate information to the right audience, but difficult to create high quality information content. I argue that the power to disseminate information is the more scarce and more valuable asset than the creation or acquisition of the information to be shared.
Consider information, education, communication, and the concept of media. Consider as an example the act of sharing information related to health, because I like health information, but apply the analogy however you wish. Imagine that there is some entity which wishes to propagate some health message. I see two parts to what this entity must to do achieve its aim – it compiles its message, and then it arranges for the message to travel to its target.
Consider a common message, like “If a person tests positive for an HIV infection, then if they take certain antiviral drugs under certain conditions, then the count of virus in their body can be lessened and their health may be expected to change in certain ways.” HIV is a major public health concern, so I use that example as an issue with which people in every society should have some understanding.
Much work and expense are expended in compiling a message. For a health message to have value, ideally it should be derived from evidence-based medicine research, if one is biased to favor science. The entirety of the costs of research, the establishment of international networks of universities, medical schools, research foundations, commercial developers, government offices, and the whole of whatever is called medical infrastructure has to be created just to be able to make simple statements about evidence-based medicine. It was not so long ago that there was no scientific method, and when that was established there was no academic publishing to share the ideas, and publishing existed for some time before peer review decreased the power of arguments from authority, and randomized controlled trials came to be proposed as a tool for further greatly weakening biases. We still do not actually let all researchers have open access to scientific research but we are getting there, and it still surprises a lot of scientists and non-scientists alike to realize that the systematic review (the concept of combining the results of multiple research projects) is a new concept which came to be only because of cost decreases associated with electron publishing. Some other tools are being developed which are very cool, and open science will be very interesting when everyone can check the methods and results of everyone elses’ work and also remix and build upon human knowledge. Putting all this together to some minimal extent is a prerequisite for making science-based statements about health, and when these individual pieces are strengthened, the message becomes more scientific and for people who like the science that means the message has more value. So once the science is done and a message is created, like for example the one above, it needs other maintenance. It has to be updated along with new science, and it has to be translated not only among languages but also within any given language to be relevant to its target audience. Much investment goes into crafting health messages. The social and technical infrastructure built around establishing and publishing health information is a modern miracle into which massive amounts of money, professional lives, and human thought have been poured, but the sum of it all as it exists today is contained within isolated isolated media systems which are not sufficiently available so as to be found upon request. Once any message is created, it does no good if it is not transmitted to be available to the people who need it when the message is needed.
Wikipedia certainly does not solve the entirety of the dissemination problem but it has proven itself to be a successful platform for penetrating the zeitgeist. It makes health information available to people whom no one even expected would want health information, and it presents it in a way in which its audiences consume it in great amounts. The pageviews that Wikipedia get establish it as an equal in popularity to any other health communication channel, and although I lack complete data or the ability to interpret the significance of the data I have, I am comfortable in suggesting that Wikipedia might be the most popular source of health information in the world, and that it is likely to become even more popular and pervasive. If it is not the most popular source of health information, it is at least extremely popular overall and overwhelmingly utilized by certain large demographics of people who are in communities with access to Internet information.
The traditional health organizations spend some amount of money to produce the health information they disseminate, but actually this is only an afterthought to the production of the information for professionals who need it intimately for their current work. I think that everyone agrees that the professionals need their research, but the extent to which second-tier users of the information should have access to it is moderated by the cost it would take to craft it and deliver. By “second tier users”, I include consumers of medical textbooks, like medical students, who are reading educational materials as a path to becoming equipped to read actual published scientific articles. Right now, the model we have for distributing medical textbooks is to commercially create and publish them, then to sell them to individuals. I feel that this is done only because of historical precedent, and that this is not a sustainable model for delivering all the information in all medical textbooks to all medical students and other interested persons in the world in all languages and to continually update them as needed. When I think about the investments of all regional health education and communication organizations, and how often they independently produce health information content with a copyright on it based on other copyrighted work that they could have copied if it were without copyright restrictions, and then when I think about the costs of trying to disseminate this information through society packaged in copyright to preserve the old restrictive model of dissemination, I try to imagine what would be different about the funding model if dissemination were perceived as the more valuable asset and the quality of the message were perceived as the asset of lesser worth.
My guess is that if some organization were to expend perhaps 100 million USD to create or acquire copyright to fundamental textbooks for every branch of medicine and then apply free licenses to these, then Wikipedia and other public spaces on the Internet would host these and attract the community which would manage dissemination of all the information therein, and dissemination costs would drop dramatically just as Wikipedia itself has been able to deliver large amounts of health information to large audiences already. The alternative to this is persisting with current dissemination models, which still expend the same 100 million USD to create the market of health educational materials, only the rights to this material are kept in private hands plus added to this is the unfathomable international expensive of distributing it.